Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

SCAP’s censorship operation possessed an opaque quality that made it challenging to determine how far one could go without offending the new thought police. This came, in part, from the fact that CCD’s censors operated on the basis of secret “key logs” of prohibited discourse—checklists of forbidden subjects—that were never made available.

The classified key logs used as monthly checklists by CCD changed as political winds changed. Early on, they included some three score prohibited subjects. In June 1946, the “categories of deletions and suppressions” in CCD’s key log were, in full, as follows:

No criticism was permitted of the victorious Allied nations (including, initially, the Soviet Union), nor of SCAP or its policies, which meant that for over six years the supreme authority in the country remained beyond accountability. Sensitive social issues such as fraternization, prostitution involving the occupation forces, or mixed-blood children, to say nothing of GI crimes including rape, could not be discussed.

Even controversial but entirely reasonable statements about the global milieu in which Japan’s leaders embarked on war (the shock of the Great Depression, the breakdown of global capitalism, worldwide trends toward protectionism and autarchy, the models as well as pressures of European and American imperialism, Western racism, and the countervailing racial and anticolonial ideals of Pan-Asianism) could be deemed not merely incitements to unrest, but also transgressions of “truth,” not to speak of criticism of the occupation’s policies and of the victorious powers.

What now was “true,” of course, was the Allied version of the war, which the media had to endorse by acts of commission as well as omission. Publishers and broadcasters were required to present accounts of the war prepared within GHQ, especially by CI&E.

SCAP’s war-guilt campaign played an important role in the psychological demilitarization of the Japanese. The “Class A” Allied war-crimes tribunal, in particular, with its voluminous written evidence and oral testimony, revealed a secret history of intrigue and atrocity that could never have been so effectively exposed otherwise. These were critical educational undertakings, but as filtered through the censorship apparatus they taught the media and general public less positive lessons as well: that the makeup and conduct of the court were not to be questioned, for example, and that the accused were to be assumed guilty unless judged innocent.

It went without saying that the wartime rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and fighting a holy war against “Chinese bandits” and “devilish Anglo-Americans” was intolerable, as were the paeans to “Yamato race” superiority that commonly accompanied this rhetoric.

Writing about the atomic-bomb experience was not explicitly proscribed, and in the year or so following the surrender, especially in local publications in the Hiroshima area, a number of writers were able to publish prose and poetry on the subject. At the same time, however, survivors such as Nagai Takashi found their early writings suppressed, many bomb-related writings were severely cut, and the most moving English-language publication on the subject—John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a sparse portrait of six survivors that made a profound impression when published in The New Yorker in August 1946—though mentioned in the media, could not be published in translation until 1949.

Beyond this, overt censorship extended to scientific writings. Many reports concerning the effects of the blasts and ensuing radiation could not be made public until the closing months of the occupation. For over six years, Japanese scientists and doctors—and even some American scientists in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were conducting research on radiation effects—were denied access to data that might have assisted them in communicating to and helping atomic-bomb victims.

The visual record of nuclear destruction was even more thoroughly suppressed. Documentary footage filmed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki between August and December 1945 by a team of some thirty Japanese cameramen was confiscated by the Americans in February 1946 and sent to Washington, with orders that not a single copy was to remain in Japan.19 The first graphic representations of the human effects of the bombs did not appear until 1950, when the married artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi published a small book of drawings of scenes they had witnessed or heard about in Hiroshima (entitled Pika-don, a term specific to the atomic bombs that literally means “flash-bang”). That same year the Marukis were also permitted to exhibit a stark painting entitled Procession of Ghosts, which became the first of a series of powerful collaborative murals depicting atomic-bomb victims.

It was not until after the occupation, on the seventh anniversary of the bombings in August 1952, that the public was afforded a serious presentation of photographs from the two stricken cities. The residents of the only country to experience atomic warfare thus spent the early years of the nuclear age more ignorant of the effects of the bombs, and less free to publicly discuss and debate their implications, than people in other nations.21

In Allied eyes, the Japanese simply had reaped what they had sown. The terror bombing of Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was seen as an appropriate homecoming for the horrors Japan had visited on others throughout Asia and the Pacific. Early in 1949, when occupation authorities finally relaxed their restraints on the publication of intimate personal accounts of the effects of the atomic bombs, they conveyed this notion of righteous punishment literally. At General Willoughby’s insistence, the first printing of Nagai Takashi’s Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) had to include a lengthy American-prepared appendix about “The Sack of Manila” by Japanese forces in 1945. Such victor’s logic was obtuse. It easily could be taken as suggesting that Nagasaki and Manila were comparable atrocities—hardly what the Americans intended.

One of the most consequential censorship policies pertaining to the war involved nothing more than a change of nomenclature: the Japanese were forbidden to refer to their war in Asia as the Great East Asia War (Dai Tōa Sensō), the name they had given it. Instead, they were required to use the term “Pacific War” (Taiheiyō Sensō). This change, introduced by SCAP in mid-December 1945 as part of a broad directive aimed at eliminating religious and nationalistic indoctrination, amounted to an act of semantic imperialism with unexpected ramifications. Whereas the Japanese phrase, for all its jingoism, had clearly centered the war in China and Southeast Asia, the new term recentered it in the Pacific and gave unmistakable primacy to the conflict between Japan and the United States. There was nothing conspiratorial in this renaming of events. It merely reflected the reflexive ethnocentrism of the conquerors, who essentially had excluded Japan’s Asian antagonists from any meaningful role in the occupation and now eliminated them from the very language by which the war was to be identified. Quite the opposite of reminding the Japanese of their war guilt, such a maladroit rectification of names facilitated the process of forgetting what they had done to their Asian neighbors.

Two months later, in the March issue, the censors suppressed the graphic of another well-known cartoonist, Sugiura Yoshio, in which a cigarette-smoking, GI-servicing panpan prostitute stood beside a homeless man. The source of the streetwalker’s relative prosperity was not exactly disguised: she was wearing a kimono and haori jacket with a Stars-and-Stripes design. “Get a job,” she told the homeless man; on the wall behind her was a left-wing poster reading “Overthrow the Emperor System.”

Nor could the victors tolerate a clever graphic in another magazine, ridiculing the exclusion of the emperor from the impending war-crimes trials. Depicting a large MP shepherding Japan’s wartime leaders into custody, the cartoon carried the cynical caption, “Leaving the lord behind, everyone has gone.”

The more significant official restraint on satirizing authority involved the foreigner who actually reigned over the country. General MacArthur was as sacrosanct as the emperor had been before his descent from heaven. (A European who worked as a censor for CCD amused himself by privately redesignating the division SPCD as an acronym for Society for the Prevention of Criticism of Douglas.)

The left-wing monthly Kaizō offers a small case study in the types of statements about the victorious Allies and their world that could be deemed to be in violation of the Press Code. As Professor Furukawa Atsushi has documented, Kaizō was required to delete references to racial prejudices toward peoples of color among the Western Allies; mention of the surrender of Japanese troops to Kuomintang (Nationalist) rather than Communist forces in China; an allusion to the denial of voting rights to blacks in the United States; descriptions of the Soviet Union as “socialistic,” the United States and Great Britain as “capitalistic,” and China as “semicolonial”; mention of tension between the “democratic” U.S.S.R. and “reactionary imperialistic” United States; an expression of fear that Japan might become subordinated to international capital; a description of fascism as a manifestation of “capitalistic contradictions”; and criticism of capitalism in general (by, for example, well-known Marxist scholars such as Hani Gōrō).

In the occupation’s new historiography, “general criticism of Allies” even extended back to medieval and early modern times. Thus in August 1947, Kaizō was required to remove a passage from an essay entitled “Dante and Columbus” which stated that in the historical development of European nations such as Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Britain, there was a predominant tendency to acquire new lands as colonies.

Censored “criticism of China” included references to the postsurrender use of Japanese troops in the Chinese civil war, abuse of Japanese repatriates, and characterization of the country as “emerging from a semi-colonial or colonial situation.” Discussion of the civil war itself was not taboo, but graphic descriptions of China’s chaotic upheaval could be regarded as exceeding the limits of propriety.45

An article on Reinhold Niebuhr’s book Children of Light, Children of Darkness in the November 1946 issue of Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Ideas) was heavily censored for criticizing Stalin’s despotism.

This mystique of the immaculate Allies contributed to the fashioning of a public world that was not merely unreal, but sometimes almost surreal. Isolated from the rest of the world, the defeated Japanese were supposed to ignore the collapse of the victorious wartime alliance, the breakup of national unity in China, the renewed struggles against Western imperialism and colonialism in Asia, the decisive emergence of Cold War tensions, and the beginnings of a nuclear arms race. They were placed, as it were, in a small time warp, where the World War II propaganda of the winning side had to be reiterated even as the erstwhile victors engaged in new struggles and polemics.

To Kurosawa, GHQ’s controls were trivial compared with those imposed by wartime censors, whom he regarded as idiots perverted by, among other things, emperor worship and repressed sexual fantasies. Kurosawa had made his directorial debut during the war, and all four of his wartime films—Sugata Sanshirō (the name of the film’s hero) and its sequel; Ichiban Utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful); and the incomplete Tora no O o Fumu Otokotachi (Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail)—were included among a total of 236 “feudal and militaristic” films that SCAP ordered destroyed in November 1945.49 This did not prevent Kurosawa from quickly emerging as the most influential cinematic innovator of the new Japan. Between 1946 and 1952 he produced eight films, beginning with the naively idealistic “democracy film” Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946), which was followed by a meandering tale of romance and mishap amid the ruins entitled Subarashiki Nichiyōbi (One Wonderful Sunday, 1947). As the occupation unfolded, Kurosawa continued to address contemporary themes, but the hope and idealism of his early films gave way to a darker vision. His prototypical protagonist became male rather than female (as had been the case in No Regrets for Our Youth as well as The Most Beautiful)—a generally humanistic individual who sometimes was cursed by the past and almost always found himself mired in a venal, duplicitous society. In film after film, this protagonist, invariably played by...

Frank Capra, the premier director of propaganda films for the U.S. military during the war.

By far the most memorable scene in Kamei’s documentary (one that Capra surely would have applauded) was a dissolve in which Emperor Hirohito was transformed before the viewer’s eyes from the nation’s rigid, uniformed commander into a benign, slightly stooping civilian figure, modestly garbed in necktie, overcoat, and soft felt hat.

the purpose of censorship was changing, moving slowly but inexorably from militaristic and ultranationalistic targets to left-wing ones.

Even after these excisions, Between War and Peace still emerged as one of the grittiest postsurrender films about Japan, a rarity in the way it conveyed a visceral sense of the misery, sleaziness, tensions, hopes, and passions of those years.

In ways that went beyond what had to be left on the cutting-room floor, even Beyond War and Peace, for all its ambition, ultimately failed to convey the political and social milieu of the time. For there were, quite simply, no Americans. There was no occupation. Alien authority was invisible. This was as it had to be.

the sound of an airplane was ordered silenced in one of his sound tracks. Since there were no Japanese planes at this time, such sound effects could only represent U.S. military aircraft—and, as such, were interpreted as signifying criticism of the occupation.56

Traditional theater was removed from preperformance censorship in mid-1947, beginning with Bunraku puppet theater in May, followed by Kabuki in June, and Noh in September.

Okinawa, under the draconian control of the United States, was shrouded in secrecy as the Americans built the strategically situated island into a major Cold War military base. Throughout the occupation, and indeed until 1955, no news reports or commentaries about Okinawa were published in the press, making the image of that virtually invisible prefecture as a penal colony seem perfectly reasonable.

One of the earliest radio programs promoted by CI&E, doubly titled The Patriot’s Hour and Prisoners Speak Out, was designed to give political prisoners recently released from jail an opportunity to express their views on the evils of the past and the prospects for a new Japan. In December, however, the program was dropped after it became apparent that most of these individuals were Marxists and Communists. CCD began to prepare detailed internal surveys of Soviet influence and left-wing and Communist trends in the Japanese media before the end of 1946, although it was not until around mid-1947 that “Leftist Propaganda” appeared as an explicit category on the key logs.64

On April 30, 1948, the central Press, Pictorial and Broadcast division within CCD was ordered to conduct “100 percent surveillance” of the Communist media, largely for purposes of intelligence rather than direct control. Early in 1949, the conservative government, with SCAP’s concurrence, cut the rationed allotment of newsprint to official Communist publications from 86,000 to 20,000 pounds per month.67 The “Red purge” that the Yoshida government conducted with GHQ’s active cooperation beginning in late 1949 initially did not seriously affect the media, for it was carried out against radicalized employees in the public sector in the name of “retrenchment” or “rationalization” or comparable euphemisms. In the wake of the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, however, the Red purges spilled over into the private sector and, among many other fields of activity, swept through publishing and film making, as well as public radio.

Although the beginning of the Korean War was the trigger for a media purge of “ultra-leftists,” the gun had been cocked several weeks before the war began. On June 6, General MacArthur ordered that the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party be purged, and on the following day the purge was extended to seventeen top editors of Akahata, the official JCP newspaper.

Certainly to liberals and leftists who had chafed under wartime repression and had been surprised and gladdened by the vigor of the early postsurrender reforms, it was disheartening to discover the pleasure Americans took in exercising absolute authority—and dishearteningly familiar to observe the reflexive animosity they soon exhibited to those who disagreed with them.

From this perspective, one legacy of the revolution from above was continued socialization in the acceptance of authority—reinforcement of a collective fatalism vis-à-vis political and social power and of a sense that ordinary people were really unable to influence the course of events. For all their talk of democracy, the conquerors worked hard to engineer consensus; and on many critical issues, they made clear that the better part of political wisdom was silence and conformism. So well did they succeed in reinforcing this consciousness that after they left, and time passed, many non-Japanese including Americans came to regard such attitudes as peculiarly Japanese.

When World War II ended in Asia, the consuming sentiments of the victorious Allies were hatred and hope; and the tangle of these emotions was nowhere more apparent than in the war-crimes trials the victors conducted. The atrocities Japanese forces had committed in all theaters provoked a fierce desire for vengeance, and it was taken for granted that harsh punishment would be meted out to those found guilty of violating the established rules and conventions governing conduct in war.

With two exceptions—the hasty proceedings by U.S. military tribunals in the Philippines against generals Yamashita Tomoyuki and Homma Masaharu, both executed after being judged responsible for atrocities committed by troops under their commands—these local trials established no precedents, attracted no great attention, and left no lasting mark on popular memory outside Japan.

“international law was en route to banning war and rendering it a criminal offense.”

holding individual leaders personally responsible for egregious acts of state constituted a “milestone in legal development” that seemed crucial in the nuclear age.

In an opening statement that impressed many Japanese, Joseph Keenan, the American chief prosecutor, took care to emphasize that “civilization” was the ultimate plaintiff, and civilization itself might well be destroyed if these judicial undertakings did not succeed in preventing future wars.

Until 1945 many American and British officials envisioned enacting swift and summary justice against the “archcriminals” in the enemy camp. Secretary of State Cordell Hull once told his British and Soviet counterparts that, if he had his way, he “would take Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their arch accomplices and bring them before a drumhead court-martial. And at sunrise the following day there would occur an historic incident.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, thinking primarily of Germany, recommended that the Allies compile a list of top leaders who, on being captured and identified, should be executed immediately “by firing squads made up of soldiers of the United Nations.” As late as April 1945, only weeks before Germany’s capitulation, the British urged the Americans to approve “execution without trial” for top German leaders. Years later, some officials remained persuaded that this would have been the proper course in Japan as well.

The attack on such advocacy of drumhead justice was led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Prompt justice based on fair legal procedures, Stimson argued, was “consistent with the advance of civilization” and would “have all the greater effect upon posterity.” Stimson made clear that he had in mind trials before military commissions, which would be empowered to expedite proceedings by making their own “bare bones” rules to avoid the legal technicalities that might arise in civilian courts or even in ordinary military courts martial. The secretary of war noted that apart from meeting the “judgment of history,” such trials would serve the educational and historical function of establishing a record of the enemy’s transgressions. In his memoirs, published shortly after the war, Stimson declared that aggression “is an offense so deep and so heinous that we cannot endure its repetition.”

There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world. . . . We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.

What the Potsdam Proclamation conveyed most clearly was the rage in the Allied camp over Japanese maltreatment of prisoners. Long after the war had ended, and notwithstanding the revelation of the enormity of Nazi atrocities, great numbers of Americans, British, and Australians continued to believe that the enemy in Asia had been even more heinous than the German one. A statistic that emerged in the course of the trials reinforced this impression. Whereas 4 percent of American and British servicemen taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians were calculated to have died in captivity, the incidence of death among American and British Commonwealth prisoners of the Japanese was estimated to have been 27 percent.4

Eventually, around fifty military tribunals were convened at various Asian locales—twelve by the Dutch, eleven by the British, ten by the Chinese, nine by the Australians, five by the Americans, and one each by the French and the Filipinos.5 Other trials were conducted by the Soviet Union and, much later, by the Communist regime that came to power in China. Most of the tribunals convened outside the Soviet Union and Communist-controlled China carried out their tasks between 1945 and 1949; the last concluded in 1951.

According to the most authoritative Japanese tabulation, a total of 5,700 individuals were indicted for “Class B” and “Class C” war crimes. Of this number, 984 initially were condemned to death; 475 received life sentences; 2,944 were given more limited prison terms; 1,018 were acquitted; and 279 were for one reason or another not sentenced or never brought to trial. Fifty of the death sentences were commuted on appeal, mostly by the French. Country by country (the Soviet Union excepted), the number of death sentences upheld was greatest in the trials conducted by the Dutch (236 death sentences) and British (223), followed by the Australians (153), Chinese (149), Americans (140), French (26), and Filipinos (17). The generally accepted number of those actually executed is 920.6

The Americans collectively tried forty-six officers and men of the former imperial navy—of whom forty-one were sentenced to death. Roughly three-quarters of the defendants in these “B/C” tribunals were accused of crimes against prisoners.

the Soviet Union conducted secret war-crimes proceedings against Japanese who had been captured in Manchuria, northern Korea, and Karafuto (southern Sakhalin). The proceedings of one of these trials, convened in Khabarovsk in December 1949 and involving twelve Japanese associated with “Unit 731” in Manchuria, which had conducted lethal medical experiments on some three thousand prisoners, was actually published in English in 1950.

After a long war that saw the death of several million Japanese servicemen and civilians, the fate of these few thousand accused war criminals in faraway places did not initially attract great attention within Japan. Although the revelation of widespread Japanese atrocities did make an impression on the general populace, many appear to have regarded these distant exercises in Allied justice as little more than another example of how, in war and in peace, individuals lower in the hierarchy of authority had to pay for the misdeeds of men with real power. When all was said and done, it was obvious that only a small number of high army and navy officers, few high bureaucrats, no captains of the war economy, and virtually none of the civilian ideologues in politics, academe, and the media who helped prime the pump of racial arrogance and fanatical militarism paid for the terrible crimes that men on the front committed.

The victors channeled their concern with ultimate responsibility into “Japan’s Nuremberg,” the showcase proceedings against top leaders in Tokyo.