Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

As the story goes, Ogawa was on a business trip when he heard the broadcast. His eyes still moist with emotion, he boarded a train back to the capital and immediately began to consider how to get rich from the changed situation.

Accounts vary as to whether it took one day or three to complete the full draft of the little book. In any case, Nichi-Bei Kaiwa Techō (Japanese-English Conversation Manual) made its debut exactly one month after those tears came to Ogawa’s eyes. It was thirty-two pages long, and its initial printing of three hundred thousand copies disappeared almost immediately. By the end of 1945, 3.5 million copies had been sold. All over Japan, people prepared to meet their conquerors by turning to page 1 of this handy guide, which began: Thank you! Thank you, awfully! How do you do?

Thus, on encountering their first GI, Japanese could be ready to say phonetically: San kyu! San kyu ofuri! Hau dei (or, alternatively, Hau dei dou) The last, apparently, came from “Howdy” and “Howdy-do.”

Postwar readers, for instance, immediately turned in large numbers to the greatest of their modern writers, Natsume Sōseki, who died in 1916. Sōseki’s collected works, issued in several new editions, remained on the “top ten” lists through 1948. Much of his attractiveness during these uncertain years lay in the unflinching candor with which his fiction explored intimate personal relationships. Affairs of the heart constituted the essence of Sōseki’s many novels, including the revered Kokoro (Heart and Soul). The Sōseki boom seems to have reflected not so much nostalgia for a period in modern history before war and defeat, but a desire for a renewed engagement with the torments and solaces of the individual. In a famous lecture in 1914, Sōseki had already spoken strongly about the need to maintain a spirit of “individualism” vis-à-vis the state.

In Sōseki’s world, love always was placed on a higher plane than the demands of society, even when this meant social ostracism, personal torment, or self-destruction.

In addition to Van de Velde’s text on marital relations, the “top ten” publications of 1946 included three other foreign works in translation: Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausèe, Andre Gide’s Intervues Imaginaires (“Imaginary Interviews,” translated as Kakū Kaikenki), and Erich Maria Remarque’s Arc de Triomphe.

In addition to Sōseki, Japanese books at the top of the 1946 bestseller list included Sempū Nijūnen (The Twenty-Year Whirlwind), a journalistic account of Japan’s road to war and destruction; Nagai Kafū’s Udekurabe (Rivalry), a novel about competition in the geisha quarters that was written during the war but withheld from publication; the autobiography of Kawakami Hajime, a pioneer Marxist scholar and early member of the Japan Communist Party who passed away a few months after the war ended; Miki Kiyoshi’s Tetsugaku Noto (Philosophical Notes), consisting of previously published essays by a well-known philosopher who had died in prison; and the prison letters of the executed spy Ozaki Hotsumi.

Beyond any doubt, however, the greatest appeal of the published letters was the love directed to his wife and daughter—to the real, nuclear family, that is, as opposed to the “family state.”

Until the surrender, the state and its ideologues had dictated that the primary love a human should feel was patriotism or love of country, ultimately expressed through devotion to the emperor. To the very moment of surrender, official myths about parents and wives gladly sending sons and husbands off to war with patriotic fervor, and men happily giving their lives for the emperor, had prevailed. Only later did accounts slowly emerge of soldiers and sailors sobbing in their billets in the dark after receiving letters from home, and of dying men calling out their mother’s names, not the emperor’s, with their last breath.

Banshū Heiya (The Banshū Plain), a thinly disguised account of her activities in the wake of surrender, remains one of the most celebrated descriptions of the immediate postwar scene.

Several years later, a selection from the thousands of letters Miyamoto had written to her imprisoned husband was published to critical acclaim under the title Jūninen no Tegami (Twelve Years of Letters)—a feminist and humanist counterpart to the prison letters of Ozaki Hotsumi.43

The third was Nagai Takashi’s Kono Ko o Nokoshite (Leaving These Children), one of the first books permitted by occupation authorities about the atomic bombings. Nagai, a young scientist dying of radiation sickness in Nagasaki, mesmerized the country with his reflections on nuclear destruction and future redemption.

He thus wrote about the nuclear age from a unique perspective—as scientist, Christian, and victim—and the passion with which he spent his final years confronting the meaning of the atomic bombs led him to be called, in his own lifetime, “the saint of Nagasaki.” The pope paid tribute to Nagai. Helen Keller visited him at his sickbed, as did Emperor Hirohito. In 1950, The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a movie, and the theme song of the film proved immensely popular.

Nagai’s message bordered on the mystical. Essentially, he regarded the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the act of a Christian God meant to bring the world to its senses. That the second atomic bomb fell on a city with a long tradition of Christianity only reinforced his sense of divine intervention. In a typically apocalyptic passage, he asked: “Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole-burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all nations during World War II?”

In this milieu, war itself became the greatest “victimizer,” while the Japanese—personified by the saintly father /doctor/scientist dying in a nuclear-bombed city—emerged as the most exemplary victims of modern war.

In 1950, Japanese readers got their first unvarnished view of the Pacific War from the perspective of the American fighting man when the translation of Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead appeared and quickly became a bestseller.

Edited by progressive intellectuals and evocatively titled Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen! The Voices of the Ocean), this extraordinary exercise in transforming war words into peace words

Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe was like a two-way hinge on a door in time, opening onto the past, then swinging toward the future. “Wadatsumi no Koe” associations were formed by relatives of the war dead, and the book remained in print over the decades that followed. The entries, some seventy-five in all, had been selected with great care by a team of liberal and leftist scholars. They were literate, reflective, cultured—and extraordinarily moving, for one read them knowing that these young men would be cut down before fulfilling their obvious promise. Although they wrote under military censorship and accepted, sometimes even embraced, the mission of dying for their country, there was an underlying hunger for life, not death, in what they wrote. The overwhelming tone of the collection was a sense of wasted lives and tragic loss. Listen! was compiled as an antiwar statement, and its impact was greatly enhanced by the fact that it appeared at the same time as the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. decision to rearm Japan, and the rise of an anti-American “peace movement” in Japan.

Whatever the editors’ intentions may have been, Listen! perpetuated an image of sacrifice that came perilously close to the imagery the militarists had promoted. These were pure young men. Their deaths were noble. They could not be faulted, certainly not criticized, for having offered no resistance to militarism. It was their deaths, rather than the deaths of those they might have killed, that commanded attention and were truly tragic. Indeed, there were no non-Japanese victims in this hermetic vision of the war.

These bridges of language, so crucial to maintaining a sense of identity and purpose, were awesome indeed, for they carried an ambiguous traffic. People used them to escape the past and move on to new destinations. At the same time, there was always the possibility—even the temptation—of crossing back.

The fact that authoritarian, top-down exhortations to dramatically alter the status quo were not new does help explain—but only in part—why the American reformers succeeded as well as they did. General MacArthur, quintessential American that he was, easily became a stock figure in the political pageantry of Japan: the new sovereign, the blue-eyed shogun, the paternalistic military dictator, the grandiloquent but excruciatingly sincere Kabuki hero.

The supreme commander never actually saw the Japan over which he presided. From the moment he arrived in Tokyo, his travels were restricted to morning and afternoon commutes between his residence in the old U.S. embassy facilities and his nearby office at SCAP headquarters in the former Daiichi Insurance building. He never socialized with Japanese; and, according to one intimate observer, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, president of the largest university.”

Like Emperor Hirohito prior to 1946, MacArthur spoke in intimate, paternalistic terms about the sentiments and accomplishments of the tens of millions of Japanese under his aegis but never had the slightest meaningful contact with them, never observed first hand how they actually lived. The general thrived on veneration, believed that “the Oriental mind” was predisposed “to adulate a winner,” and assumed that democracy would take root only if people believed him when he said it should. And, indeed, the response of huge numbers of Japanese was that the supreme commander was great, and so was democracy.

Faubion Bowers, who served as an assistant military secretary to MacArthur, described this heady authority as involving, in practice, a policy of “demand, insist, enforce, ban, burn” (and a basic pattern of behavior that often, in his rich phrase, “became buffonic”).2 In the postoccupation period, when the Japanese bureaucracy itself proved adept at such “administrative guidance,” Americans would denounce this practice as yet another peculiarity of the Japanese state.

This extraordinary concentration of power at the center was complemented not only by the stationing of both civilian and military personnel throughout the country, but also by a hands-on manipulation of the educational system and everyday culture. The conquerors were keenly aware that meaningful democratization involved more than simply instigating legal and institutional reforms. It was also essential, as one of the initial planners of occupation policy put it, “to get at the individual Japanese and remold his ways of thinking and feeling” to enhance a deeper appreciation of freedom and democracy.

To ensure a single voice of “democracy” in the crucial medium of radio broadcasting, to give but one small example, occupation authorities chose to perpetuate the total monopolization of the airwaves by the national broadcasting station (named “NHK” at this time, in emulation of CBS and NBC). The fixation on top-down social engineering was so great that GHQ deliberately thwarted the development of rival commercial stations until 1951. Only through such tight control, the reformers believed, could the archetypal “Joe Nip” (their counterpart to “John Doe”) be molded into a good facsimile of an American-style democrat.

The ramifications of the viceroy role extended beyond policy making per se, for the huge army of occupation—including military officers and their dependents, civilian employees of SCAP and their dependents, and eventually close to a million ordinary GIs in toto—constituted a privileged caste, class, and race. They made up a “little America” in Japan, literally so in downtown Tokyo; and they practiced clear-cut segregation.

The conquerors also bestowed significant practical gifts upon their new subjects: penicillin, streptomycin, blood banks, and genuinely public libraries, for example, as well as tutoring in such technological practices as statistical quality control, which would be of immense value in the country’s eventual economic reconstruction.

Daily reminders of American superiority were unavoidable. The most redundant phrase in the defeated land, posted in public places and reiterated in a myriad public and private settings, was Shinchūgun no meirei ni yoru—By order of the Occupation Forces. Petty as well as grand activities were governed by directives from GHQ and encumbered by all the tedious paperwork and micromanagement this entailed. Numerous stores, theaters, hotels, buildings, trains, land areas, and recreational facilities like golf courses were designated “off limits” to Japanese. Ordinary SCAP officers and civilian officials who would have lived plain middle-class lives at home resided in upper-class houses requisitioned from their owners, hardly the most persuasive demonstration of respect for the rights and property of others. There, they might employ three, four, five, or even six servants, all paid for by the Japanese government (cook, “boy,” maid, gardener, nursemaid, and laundress was considered an ideal roster). Bowers, an irrepressible aficionado of Kabuki, managed to obtain two personal cooks, one for Western-style and the other for Japanese-style cuisine. “I and nearly all the Occupation people I knew,” he later mused, “were extremely conceited and extremely arrogant and used our power every inch of the way.”

American flags hung from the numerous large buildings the foreigners had taken over, whereas any display of the Japanese rising-sun flag (“the meatball” in GI slang) was severely restricted and singing of the national anthem prohibited; a man who improperly displayed the national flag in Yokohama in June 1948 was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment at hard labor.

In a daily vignette that perfectly symbolized the U.S.–Japan relationship, an American MP and a Japanese policeman directed traffic together at the busy Hibiya intersection—with the Japanese always giving his signals a moment after the MP’s. “We could walk from one end to the other” of Little America, the wife of an American colonel recalled, “without being out of sight of an American face or an American vehicle.” This gave the occupiers a sense of familiarity and security—and provided a stark contrast to the surrounding “mile upon mile of wasteland, heaped with ashes, charred wood and rusty metal,” where their subjects were attempting to reconstruct their lives.9 For some, the separation between these two worlds was unbridgable, and properly so. “To me,” a woman attached to the occupation as a civilian employee recalled with unbridled contempt, “the world beyond our brightly lighted Allied billets, offices and railroad coaches was largely peopled by warped and ugly creatures from some Oriental Nibelungenlied;

“There was always a crowd of Japanese outside the PX,” the colonel’s wife observed, “watching the customers come in and out, flattening their noses against the show windows, gazing in silent awe at the display of merchandise: the souvenirs, candy bars, cameras, milk shakes, shoes, wool sweaters, silk kimonos and guaranteed curios of the Orient.” Ragged onlookers watched in silence as the Americans staggered out with “meat in fifteen-pound hunks, rice in fifty-pound sacks, vegetables and fruit in mess-size tins.”

Individuals who did not speak a second language judged the intelligence of those they dealt with by their competence in English and joked about their pidgin-English mistakes. Americans accused of crimes against Japanese were tried by their own government, not in local courts, and their crimes went unreported in the press. Indeed, any criticism of the alien overlords whatsoever was forbidden. The mass media were not permitted to take issue with SCAP policy or speak negatively of any of the victorious Allied powers, nor were they allowed to mention that they were operating under such restraints.

After the occupation, mass-circulation magazines ran articles about rapes by American servicemen, and Japanese men resentfully recalled incidents of being randomly, almost whimsically, assaulted in public.13 The sexual opportunities enjoyed by men affiliated with the occupation forces, including foreign journalists—with their gifts of tinned goods, chocolates, nylon stockings, cigarettes, and liquor—humiliated and infuriated Japanese males. GIs regarded themselves as experts on “Babysan’s world” and, in a racial idiom they found amusing, joked that this gave them a unique “slant” on Japan. Some spoke with contempt of the “gook girls.” Mixed-blood children became one of the sad, unspoken stories of the occupation—seldom acknowledged by their foreign fathers and invariably ostracized by the Japanese.14

In numerous such ways, the contradictions of the democratic revolution from above were clear for all to see: while the victors preached democracy, they ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted an inviolate privileged caste. Their reformist agenda rested on the assumption that, virtually without exception, Western culture and its values were superior to those of “the Orient.” At the same time, almost every interaction between victor and vanquished was infused with intimations of white supremacism. For all its uniqueness of time, place, and circumstance—all its peculiarly “American” iconoclasm—the occupation was in this sense but a new manifestation of the old racial paternalism that historically accompanied the global expansion of the Western powers. Like their colonialist predecessors, the victors were imbued with a sense of manifest destiny. They spoke of being engaged in the mission of civilizing their subjects. They bore the burden (in their own eyes) of their race, creed, and culture. They swaggered, and were enviously free of self-doubt.

MacArthur’s command, after all, was a military bureaucracy, the very organizational antithesis of democratic checks and balances. The caste distinction between officers and enlisted men was hard and fast, and each individual’s “proper place” in the chain of command minutely prescribed. Women were excluded from authority in this governing apparatus. Blacks were segregated and relegated to low-ranking positions.

Contrary to the practice of direct military government adopted in defeated Germany, this occupation was conducted “indirectly”—that is, through existing organs of government. This entailed buttressing the influence of two of the most undemocratic institutions of the presurrender regime: the bureaucracy and the throne.

In the end, MacArthur’s imperious personal role as the supreme symbol of the new democratic nation would be transferred back to the emperor who had reigned through all the years of repression, war, and atrocity; and GHQ’s modus operandi as a “super-government” would be carried on, long after the conquerors departed, by the bureaucratic mandarins it had left in place.

The very notion of democratizing Japan represented a stunning revision of the propaganda Americans had imbibed during the war, when the media had routinely depicted all Japanese as children, savages, sadists, madmen, or robots. In the most pervasive metaphor of dehumanization, they were portrayed in word and picture as apes, “jaundiced baboons,” or, most often, plain “monkey-men.” There had been scant place in popular consciousness for “good Japanese,” as there usually had been for “good Germans.”

In On to Tokyo, an instructional film produced by the War Department after Germany had been defeated and the Nazi concentration camps exposed, General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, took care to emphasize that the “barbarism” of the Japanese “has even exceeded that of the Germans.”

Without attempting to defend or excuse the Japanese for these horrors it should be emphasized that it is a mistake to think that all Japanese are predominantly the monkey-man type. It would be just as wrong to picture all Americans as constantly being engaged in mob-lynching, gangsterism and race rioting.

In the words of the military handbook, “The docile, meek little Japanese when put in uniform, ruthlessly trained and turned loose, has an opportunity for the first time in his life to express himself, and he may go completely berserk, indulging in outrageous orgies of terror and brutality.” When all was said and done, however, the despised “monkey-men” were not in fact all that different from other people:

Other materials directed to American audiences, especially troops assigned to occupation duty, similarly endeavored to convey the notion that the “little Japanese” were almost humans like themselves.

Our Job in Japan began with the observation that the Japanese were a people “trained to play follow-the-leader.” The problem the victors faced could be stated in a word: it was the Japanese brain, which could “make trouble” or “make sense.” Viewers were presented with a close-up of a Japanese man’s head in profile—and then watched as a literal representation of a spongelike brain filled his cranium and expanded until the head itself was obliterated and the brain, now gigantic, held the center of the screen, floating against a background of countless other tiny brains crowded together like so many beans in a box. “Our problem’s in the brain inside of the Japanese head,” the narrator intoned.

Throughout the film, that giant brain repeatedly materialized and receded, while the GI audience was informed of the terrible things it had been taught by the “warlords” and the “military gang.” Turning ancient Shinto beliefs into a weapon of modern indoctrination, the militarists had saturated that brain with “ancient nightmares” and “ancient hatreds,” with “bloody fairy tales and pagan superstitions,” with the “mumbo-jumbo” of a “murky past.” When the narrator made passing reference to “an old, backward, superstitious country,” the screen showed scenes of people burning incense outside a Buddhist temple.

In wartime propaganda films, it was standard practice to convey the utterly alien nature of the enemy by introducing jarring montages of the “most exotic” Japanese behavior—such as footage depicting seasonal festivals and traditional dances, in which distinctive garments were worn and the accompanying music was inevitably atonal and offensive to Western ears.

By being ourselves we can prove that what we like to call the American way, or democracy, or just plain old Golden Rule common sense, is a pretty good way to live. We can prove that most Americans don’t believe in pushing people around, even when we happen to be on top. We can prove that most Americans do believe in a fair break for everybody, regardless of race or creed or color [two black GIs flitted across the screen at this point, hitherto and hereafter invisible].

The most striking aspect of the film, apart from its eerie floating brains, however, was its fundamentally optimistic message. Neither blood, culture, nor history drove the Japanese to war, but rather socialization and indoctrination of recent vintage. When all was said and done, reeducation did not in fact seem to be such an insuperable task. The title of an article in the weekly Saturday Evening Post four months after surrender captured the new outlook succinctly: “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap.”20

Such views, which gained wide currency in the writings of journalists and academics who also enjoyed reputations for being Asia experts, reflected something more complex than just ethnocentric contempt for the “obedient herd” or “monstrous beehive” (another pet phrase) of Orientals. Many Western experts, diplomats in particular, had spent a good part of their careers ingratiating themselves in upper-class circles in Japan. When they spoke disdainfully of the capacity of ordinary Japanese to govern themselves, they were reflecting not only their own elitism but also the reverential monarchism and fearful contempt for “the masses” they had heard their Japanese counterparts express time and again.23

The wartime mobilization of behavioral scientists attracted an impressive contingent of American and British anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists into the general areas of intelligence analysis and psychological warfare. By the final year of the war, their work had led them to the conclusion that the Japanese national character was pendulumlike, capable of swinging from one extreme to another—and consequently capable of shifting from fanatical militarism to some form of qualified democracy. Numerous variations on this theme were offered in confidential intelligence reports, all essentially in one way or another imposing the findings of individual clinical psychology on the Japanese as a collectivity.