Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

a routine paper prepared for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) in December 1944, which observed that “the Japanese civilization pattern seems to be most closely akin to the clinical picture of an obsessional neurosis.”

Insofar as future policy was concerned, the most interesting “practical upshot” of this diagnosis lay in the question the OWI investigator posed: “Which are the individuals and social groups who set the pattern of thoughts and attitudes likely to be imitated by the rest of Japan?”24 Practical responses to this familiar query took several forms. As suggested most famously by the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a member of the OWI intelligence team, the Japanese were said to behave in accordance with situational or particularistic ethics, as opposed to socalled universal values as in the Western tradition. The same person might be polite and generous under some circumstances, harsh and callous under others. What mattered was the social context and the individual’s prescribed role in each and every situation. In exceptional circumstances, where roles and constraints had not been defined, the individual had no core values, no clear subjectified self, to fall back on.

Such OWI analysts as Clyde Kluckhohn and Alexander Leighton, who went on to distinguished academic careers, argued that the emperor, the supreme authority in Japan, was fundamentally an empty vessel. Just as he had been followed as the embodiment of ultranationalism, so he would be followed if turned into a symbol of some sort of imperial democracy.

At the same time, the Japan experts increasingly came to be regarded as special pleaders for the conservative causes of their Japanese contacts and acquaintances, as men befuddled and bamboozled by too many elegant, silken prewar encounters with the privileged. In the State Department, such criticism of the “Japan crowd” arose primarily among those who had been more involved with China. Such individuals, the “China crowd,” were harsher in their critique of the civilian Japanese elites and more sanguine about the possibilities of cracking open the structures and institutions of ruling-class control to release democratic forces from below. They rejected, among other orthodoxies, the Japan crowd’s depiction of the zaibatsu leaders as “moderate” businessmen and argued that the existing economic system itself was one of the “roots of war” that had to be dug out and eliminated.

He was, in many ways, the most ethnocentric of men, given to extraordinary generalizations about the “Oriental” personality. “The general,” President Truman was informed by an envoy to Tokyo in mid-October of 1945, “stated that Oriental peoples suffer from an inferiority complex which leads them to ‘childish brutality’ when they conquer in war and to slavish dependence when they lose.”

The several thousand Americans trained in Japanese language and culture during the war in anticipation of being assigned to military-government duties often found themselves sent elsewhere than Japan. MacArthur and his staff did not want them. Of those who actually made it there, some were shunted off to Okinawa—an American version of exile to the gulag, where U.S. policy eschewed reform and focused instead on turning the war-savaged archipelago into an impregnable military base.

As the consummate GHQ insider Theodore Cohen put it, “they were firmly kept out of Tokyo.” Rather than utilize these neophyte Japan specialists, SCAP conducted an intensive “in-house” recruitment campaign to tap the numerous “lawyers, bankers, economists, industrial technicians,” and other professionals who willy-nilly happened to find themselves in Japan at war’s end.32

Whenever he thought of GHQ, the joke went, what ran through his mind was “Go Home Quickly.”2

In Japanese parlance, the conformism that Kobayashi worried about and non-Japanese observers ridiculed as the psychology of the “obedient herd” usually was framed in more benign terms. Particularly in rural areas, where most people still lived or had their roots, this was simply junpū bizoku, “good morals and manners.” A strong sense of hierarchy and proper place was integral to such consciousness, but this was hardly the whole of it. “Good morals and manners” also encompassed a cultural world of values, activities, and symbols that were familiar and comforting. The rising-sun flag and national anthem, both banned by GHQ, were associated with this world of “beautiful customs.” So were village festivals and portable shrines, folk dances, traditional weddings and funerals, lachrymose popular songs, tea ceremonies, the martial arts, filial piety, diligence and industriousness, respect for elders, a catalog of feminine virtues, a romanticized sense of tension between “duty” and “emotion” (giri and ninjō), considerations of appearance and “face,” esteem for harmony (wa), and so on. Sentimental as well as slavish attitudes toward the emperor were part of this popular consciousness. So also, in many instances, was a healthy skepticism toward overly Westernized or overly facile intellectuals.4

Professor Sodei Rinjirō, who has edited and analyzed a fascinating sample of this correspondence, observes that this was an unparalleled exchange between a vanquished people and their conquerors—involving, in the end, unsolicited communications from roughly three-quarters of 1 percent of the adult population.6

By contrast, the most formal and elaborate of the gifts to MacArthur was surely a brocade kimono and sash. The embroiderer had secluded himself in Kyoto’s Shimo Kamo Shrine in November 1946 and spent three years on his task, praying each day and ultimately working some 70 million stitches into his masterpiece.

Like the United States generally, MacArthur was perceived to be a dominant albeit magnanimous masculine figure by men as well as women. (Even the supposedly enlightened Asahi newspaper referred to him, in a rather Catholic manner, as “our father”).

To be taken seriously as an intellectual in these years, it was de rigueur to be an apostle of democratic revolution. This was a virtuoso turnabout for the intelligentsia, precious few of whom had opposed the war.

There was no counterpart to the principled resistance that a small but heroic number of intellectuals, leftists, church people, and military officers had mounted against National Socialism in Germany in the same period.

To many ordinary Japanese of the “good morals and manners” persuasion, the sudden postsurrender appearance of intellectuals, politicians, and a host of other public figures spouting paeans to democracy and demilitarization smacked of hypocrisy and opportunism. The “progressive intellectuals” naturally put a different spin on their new radicalism. In part they emphasized, not unreasonably, how this represented the resumption of a serious engagement with liberalism and Marxism that had been repressed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Beyond this, however, the commitment of many intellectuals to progressive and radical politics reflected what Maruyama later characterized as the formation of a “community of remorse.”

For both intellectual and psychological reasons, Marxism offered special attractions for the repentant community of intellectuals—even for those who, like Maruyama, drew eclectically from the European intellectual tradition and maintained their distance from the Communist Party. To most of the progressive men of letters, Marxism offered a theoretical (and “scientific”) framework that seemed to go far in helping to explain the recent disaster in terms of feudal remnants, capitalist contradictions, false consciousness, and ruling-class intrigues.

The war, as the Marxists saw it, had exposed the grossly incomplete nature of the Meiji “revolution,” whereas defeat and liberation by the Allied powers clearly accelerated the inevitable transition to a democratic—and ultimately socialist—society.

The embrace of one form or another of Marxism by individuals engaged in a wide range of activities was a dramatic feature of the early post-surrender scene, and it caught most American planners by surprise. They had failed to anticipate the radical fervor with which an entire stratum of privileged intellectuals would attempt to propel the American revolution beyond the boundaries of bourgeois democracy. Some of these intellectual campaigns for a more radical emancipation became mired in polemics, but many transcended formulaic Marxism to raise fundamental questions concerning the “modern self,” the “modern ego,” or the “establishment of a modern person” that were believed to be the basis of any genuine democratic revolution. Without such a clear sense of selfhood or “autonomous subjectivity,” it was argued with great passion, individuals could not be expected to stand against the state in defense of democratic values.

Multiple traumas of identity were embedded in this quest for a “modern self”: acknowledging personal failure; repudiating one’s own history and culture; looking for models in a Western world that itself had engaged in repression, imperialism, and war.

However remote their ivory towers may have seemed to be, the impact of the intellectuals was far reaching. Many of the most influential post-surrender economists, for example—including men of towering repute such as Arisawa and Ōuchi—worked within a Marxist or neo-Marxist framework. So did leading specialists on labor and industrial relations such as Ōkōchi Kazuo, a future president of Tokyo University.

The range and vigor of this response to defeat and democratic opportunities went far beyond anything the American or English “old Asia hands” had believed possible. Indeed, these experts had rarely been able to come up with anything more than a short list of geriatric “old liberals” who might be expected to respond positively to reform (and who usually, like Yoshida Shigeru, did not). They had no inkling of who constituted the intelligentsia, what their personal or scholarly backgrounds were, or how they might respond to defeat and liberation. In this regard, the nonexperts who introduced a more radical line to postsurrender policy came much closer to the mark with their more abstract and ideological assumptions about the “universal” appeal of democratic reform.

Nor did anyone really anticipate how swiftly intellectual discourse would percolate to a national audience through the mass media. Such “progressive” intellectual ferment exceeded American expectations and was alien to mainstream American intellectual activity, and occupation authorities responded accordingly. While the more radical reformers within GHQ cultivated and encouraged left-wing intellectuals, the vigilant anticommunists placed their names on blacklists and bided their time until Cold War emotions made it acceptable to move to discredit them.

Like MacArthur and GHQ, the Communist Party insisted on unquestioning obedience to its prescription of the correct path to the democratic revolution. Such discipline stifled internal criticism and turned many in the community of remorse into followers of a new source of dogma and authority.21

It is possible that American kindness, which regards only American-style democracy as democracy, may lead Japan into an unfortunate situation. We have suffered for a long time from fetters on speech and it would be distressing if American-style fetters were added the minute the old ones are removed.

A housewife’s letter expressed concern that woman suffrage was being imposed too quickly, before women could fully grasp its meaning.24

There was certainly a great deal to ridicule or lament in the haste with which so many people seemed to have become, almost overnight, admirers of the Americans and apostles of “peace” and “democracy.” Cynics played the conversion game crassly, and were easy targets for satire about repainting signs and changing coats. More troubling were responses to the victors that in one way or another seemed exceptionally naive, accommodating, or superficial. Even in nuclear-bombed Nagasaki, residents welcomed the first Americans with gifts (a doll in a glass case, given to the head of a scientific team investigating radiation effects), and shortly afterward joined local U.S. military personnel in sponsoring a “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauty contest.

Prewar leaders of the women’s movement met on August 25, 1945 to plan strategy. One month later, they petitioned the government to grant woman suffrage—well before General MacArthur made this part of his basic civil liberties directive. By the first week of November, the first nationwide women’s organization had been established.

When the first Diet election in which women were empowered to vote took place in April 1946, seventy-nine women entered as candidates, and thirty-nine were elected.30 The first spontaneous uprisings of male workers occurred in October among Korean and Chinese coal miners, a militancy soon emulated by Japanese miners.31 Upheavals also took place in the nation’s news rooms beginning in October, with high-level newspaper executives and editorial staff being pressured by employees to resign as a gesture of acceptance of their war responsibility. Major shakeups took place in some forty-four newspapers nationwide, including the Yomiuri, Asahi, and Mainichi.

When a neighborhood festival was resumed in Yokohama in the summer of 1946, for example, after a hiatus of five years due to the war, women for the first time ever were allowed to participate in carrying the mikoshi, or portable shrine. They thereby joined men at the center of the festivities and stepped within a Shinto circle that traditionally had excluded them for being physically and morally impure.

new American-style forums such as the paneru disukasshion (panel discussion)

The most sensational of all broadcast innovations was the introduction of a wildly popular “Amateur Hour” for vocalists. This program offered a remote promise of fame and fortune, but its initial spirit involved a simple, unprecedented, and remarkably good-natured egalitarianism. Before the surrender, it was unthinkable for ordinary people to be heard on the national airwaves. Now, contestants ranging from four-year-olds to the elderly flocked to present themselves to the nation.37

These innovations did not merely create an arena in which democracy might flourish but also involved the Japanese themselves in constructing such an arena. Virtually all basic reforms were implemented, if not instigated, by a huge cadre of Japanese bureaucrats, technocrats, and outside advisers; frequently their input was creative and constructive.

the shock of defeat had stimulated “the revaluation of all values,” even to the point of prompting a thoroughgoing iconoclastic feeling of “damn what you have adored and adore what you have damned.”

In Cohen’s lively telling of the story, the Labor Standards Law was a splendid example of middle-level initiatives in support of democratization. Essentially, Teramoto took advantage of the confusion of the postwar scene to persuade a wide range of industrialists, bureaucrats, and politicians that GHQ was demanding vigorous regulation of working conditions. Under this misleading cover, he and his small staff, almost entirely on their own, drafted a comprehensive code of protective legislation based not only on prewar provisions suspended by the militarists, but also on a close study of International Labor Organization conventions. GHQ knew nothing of the project until Teramoto appeared at Cohen’s door—but once the Labor Division gave this unexpected initiative its blessing, Teramoto was able to tell the interest groups on his side that they had little choice but to go along with these desires of the Americans. There were some touchy moments when it appeared the game might be exposed, but in the end the little team of secretive reformers had its way. The bill even included a provision for menstrual leave—which the American female chief of Cohen’s Wages and Working Conditions Branch deemed unprecedented, unnecessary, and frivolous. The provision stayed. Article One of the new law eloquently conveyed the sense of individual worth on which so many now agreed that any meaningful democratic revolution had to rest. It declared that “working conditions must meet the needs of a wor...

Until new texts could be introduced, students were required to go through their schoolbooks with the guidance of their teachers and systematically excise with brush and ink all passages deemed to be militaristic, nationalistic, or in some manner undemocratic. This practice of “blackening over” (suminuru) actually was initiated by the government before the Americans even set foot in Japan.

The mutilated text struck him as “abnormal and even grotesque,” but the episode left him with a lasting awareness that received knowledge could be challenged and education itself could be a relative thing.

In this spirit, teachers and administrators were called on to engage in deep reflection on the shortcomings of society that had led to the war and to the country’s present sorry state.

Modernization since the Meiji period, the guide continued, had consisted primarily of borrowing material aspects of Western civilization while ignoring the basic spirit behind them. The Japanese had “learned how to use trains, ships, and electricity, but did not sufficiently develop the scientific spirit that produced them.” At the same time, war and defeat had come about because the people did not have proper respect for “human nature, personality, and individuality.” Failure to develop a rational, critical spirit had allowed militarism and ultranationalism to arise and, “in this sense, responsibility for the war must be borne by the entire populace, and the people must deeply apologize to the world for their crime.”

At one point, the agenda suggested that Japan was a nation but not really a society in that people were loyal to the state and knew how to behave as good family members but lacked a broader sense of public morality due to their weak sense of individuality.

A typical elementary-school text, Shōnen Shōjo no tame no Minshu Tokuhon (Democracy Reader for Boys and Girls), pointed out that in the contemporary world, democratic ideals extended beyond politics per se to economics and daily life. Freedom was to be cherished, young readers were told, but also was to be distinguished from selfishness. It had to be exercised with responsibility. Equality also was central to democracy, but should not be confused with sameness. Equality meant equal opportunity.

an acclaimed collection of student writings published in 1951 under the title Yamabiko Gakkō (Echo School). Edited by Muchaku Seikyō,

One pupil later recalled how impressed he had been when the newly arrived teacher first spoke about how “the sprout of democracy growing in Japan now is borrowed from America and not yet our local product.” Muchaku’s emphasis on writing compositions about daily life was part of his belief that the purpose of education was “to nurture energy for social change.”

The Americanization of the education system was revealed in the emergence of a new lexicon of borrowed terms. Karikyuramu, gaidansu, homūrūmu, hōmu purojekuto, cōsu obu sutadei, kurabu akutibiti—that is, “curriculum,” “guidance,” “home room,” “home project,” “course of study,” and “club activity”—all these bastardized, imported terms and concepts became part of everyday pedagogical vocabulary.47

Beginning in 1947, adult education programs were introduced that were explicitly designed to help grownups “learn the consciousness, habits, and lifestyles of a democratic people.”48 Beyond this, the very nature of the language as a whole was permanently altered by the introduction of hundreds of terms and phrases that helped define the ethos of the new world of defeat and democratization.

With their typical energy, publishers immediately proceeded to try to catalog the new conceptual influx by publishing annual books of popular shingo, or “new terms.”

The Americanization of popular culture was evident in Japanicized-English entries for such imports as the pinup, the jitterbug, boogie-woogie, and the whodunit (hūdanitto). A 1948 compilation included such essential borrowed English as alibi, “casting vote,” ecstasy, scandal, up-to-date, Achilles’ heel, and Amen—along with four suggestive slang words: baloney, corny, hot, and phony. “Dark horses” galloped without translation onto the linguistic terrain. “Hubba-hubba” became popular, albeit with the distinctive meaning of “hurry, hurry” rather than its original association with men ogling women.

Odd made-in-Japan English neologisms sometimes leaped from the page. Mane-moon, or “money-moon,” was one such creation, defined as “a honeymoon for those who married for money.” The borrowed English term “bestseller” was accompanied by sekkusu serā or “sex seller,” referring to an erotic book.

Now, hōkoku and a host of companion terms were buried without ceremony. In a grotesque observation that somehow escaped GHQ’s censors, the editors of a 1948 volume of contemporary words and phrases noted that these familiar expressions had been obliterated by the atomic bombs “along with the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Few people outside Japan were capable of imagining any behavior from the defeated enemy other than obsequiousness to their leaders. Judging from their own domestic experience, moreover, most Americans simply regarded genuinely radical politics as beyond the pale.

“May Day” itself (established by the International Socialist Congress of 1889 as an expression of worker solidarity) had been observed annually by Japanese workers from 1920 until banned by the government in 1936.