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Those who venerated the Meiji charter naturally tended to present that document as if it were an expression of emperor-centered values that had been cherished for ages eternal. In actuality, it was less than sixty years old and represented a decision by a tiny elite to turn to Germany for a constitutional model for their emerging nation-state.
These steps were but prelude to Government Section’s most extraordinary week. On February 4, Whitney convened his staff and informed them, according to the secret minutes of the meeting, that “in the next week the Government Section will sit as a Constitutional Convention. General MacArthur has entrusted the Government Section with the historically significant task of drafting a new Constitution for the Japanese people.” It would be based on three principles that MacArthur had declared essential. As jotted down in a memo Whitney brought to the meeting, they were as follows:
I The Emperor is at the head of the State. His succession is dynastic. His duties and powers will be exercised in accordance with the Constitution and responsible to the basic will of the people as provided therein.
II War as a sovereign right of the nation is abolished. Japan renounces it as an instrumentality for settling its disputes and even for preserving its own security. It relies upon the higher ideals which are now stirring the world for its defense and its protection. No Japanese Army, Navy, or Air Force will ever be auth...
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III The feudal system of Japan will cease. No rights of peerage except those of the Imperial family will extend beyond the lives of those now existent. No patent of nobility will from this time forth embody within itself any National or ...
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No single event in the occupation better exemplified MacArthur’s grand style. His aides skillfully parsed the basic Allied and American documents to confirm his sweeping authority. He seized a decisive moment to interpret his instructions in a manner no one else had even dreamed of—for no other person in or close to a position of authority had ever suggested or even imagined that the Americans might write a constitution for Japan. The grandiloquent enunciation of principles—constitutional monarchy, absolute pacifism, abolition of feudalism—also was typical, as was the delegation of the mere
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The answer, as so often in these months, was to be found in considerations pertaining to the throne. MacArthur was galvanized into action because he believed such an initiative had become essential to protect the emperor. That is, he was motivated in great part by the same basic concern as the ultraconservatives against whom he took action. It was not mere happenstance that the status of the emperor appeared as the first of the supreme commander’s principles. This was his foremost consideration; the renunciation of war and the abolition of feudalism were secondary, being conditions that
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At this moment in early 1946, the general believed that the dynasty was seriously threatened from two directions: first, from the Japanese people, whose “republican” ideas as embodied in the Takano and Communist Party constitutional proposals would only grow stronger with the passage of time; and second, from outside Japan, where those in the victorious Allied camp who still harbored strong anti-emperor feelings might soon be in a position to dictate the terms of any constitutional revisions.
Thus, when the American draft was first presented, Whitney dwelled on this at length. “As you may or may not know,” he told Matsumoto and a few others, the Supreme Commander has been unyielding in his defense of your Emperor against increasing pressure from the outside to render him subject to war criminal investigation. He has thus defended the Emperor because he considered that that was the cause of right and justice, and will continue along that course to the extent of his ability. But, gentlemen, the Supreme Commander is not omnipotent.
Yoshida, who became prime minister in May, later took care to explain to his conservative compatriots that in the circumstances of defeat and occupation, constitutional revision was not an ideal issue of law, but a practical political matter of saving the country, preserving the throne, and hastening the day when the occupation would end.45
At no point, she recalled, did she ever feel that she was trying to teach the Japanese something by helping to write the constitution. Rather, she and everyone around her strongly believed they were helping to create the less oppressive society that most Japanese desired but could not obtain from their own leaders.
As part of their campaign to educate the public about the new constitution, occupation authorities issued a series of “before and after” posters that included these depictions of democratic principles such as
In a similar manner, MacArthur’s third principle, vaguely enjoining that “the feudal system of Japan will cease,” became the basis for detailed provisions guaranteeing representative government and a broad range of civil liberties and human rights. The section enumerating “rights and duties of the people” was, and remains, one of the most liberal guarantees of human rights in the world. Thanks largely to Beate Sirota, it even affirmed “the essential equality of the sexes”—a guarantee not explicitly found in the U.S. Constitution.
It reflected an international vision that had captured attention less than two decades earlier, before the world plunged into catastrophic war, in the form of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or Pact of Paris, of 1928. Formally known as the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, the Kellogg-Briand Pact provided the most obvious model for the renunciation-of-war language in GHQ’s draft.
Japan had signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, and violation of its principles was emerging at that very time as a major charge to be leveled against defendants in the Tokyo war-crimes trials. In these circumstances, the Kellogg-Briand language of peace became, rhetorically and legally, a double-edged sword: used, in the new draft constitution, to protect the emperor even as it was being unsheathed to cut down his erstwhile officers and officials.
The Japan that the Americans reinvented in the Daiichi Building ballroom was not perceived as being a little replica of the United States, however, and Kades later insisted that the U.S. Constitution was not given much attention as the drafting committee cobbled together its new charter.59 This was, after all, to be a parliamentary government with a British-style cabinet system wrapped in an imperial dynasty. Nonetheless, the political idealism of American democracy, coupled with Allied pronouncements, left a distinctive imprint on the final product. This was especially true for the preamble,
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Were they being ethnocentric? Were they cultural imperialists? Their answer, after some debate, was: in the modern world it had become both appropriate and necessary to affirm that “laws of political morality are universal”—a phrase that eventually was incorporated into the preamble to the constitution. To the more specific question of whether it was wise and feasible to try to impose such liberal ideas upon Japan, the answer was that the government, not the people, was resisting such change. If the people did not like what the Americans were proposing, they could always change it later.62
It established not only political democracy but economic and social democracy as well, and could be characterized as a strong and sound middle-of-the-road document. As Whitney put the matter, “It constitutes a sharp swing from the extreme right in political thinking—yet yields nothing to the radical concept of the extreme left.”66
In a typically grand gesture, MacArthur made but a single change in the draft shown him (eliminating restrictions on amending the “bill of rights”). On February 11—serendiptously, the country’s National Foundation Day—he approved GHQ’s handiwork for presentation to the completely unsuspecting Japanese government.67
The Americans withdrew to the garden to leave their counterparts to read the English-language text. When Shirasu joined them outside, Whitney serenely observed, “We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine”—a comment that, in its harshness, provided a shocking reminder of who was the victor and who the vanquished. In his 1956 biography of MacArthur, Whitney recounted this episode with relish, adding that by a happy coincidence a B-29 flew overhead at precisely that moment.3 The general regarded his remark as an effective “psychological shaft” and had several more in his quiver.
What was at issue, they argued, was simply a matter of differing approaches. As Shirasu put it in a letter to Whitney, the American way was “straight and direct,” whereas their approach was “roundabout, twisted and narrow.” He even enclosed a sketch, representing the Japanese route between starting point and object as a meandering road through the mountains, while the Americans went directly to the same goal as if by airplane.
Unbelievably, even when faced with GHQ’s ultimatum, he continued to claim that the Japanese people needed a long, slow, careful political tutelage in the ways of democracy, and that his committee’s draft had to be understood in this light. “Metaphorically speaking,” he wrote Whitney, his draft was “a tablet sugar-coated for the benefit of the masses.” Anything more radical would shock the moderates, provoke the extremists, and precipitate internal upheaval.6
There was a touch of patriotic astrology associated with these various dates. As General Whitney was pleased to note, GHQ’s February 12 deadline for completing its draft had coincided with Abraham Lincoln’s birthday; the deadline given the cabinet for accepting the draft fell on George Washington’s birthday.
Subsequently, when Satō came to the women’s rights clauses Sirota had originally drafted, Kades adroitly and successfully suggested that since she had been nice to them earlier, the Japanese should now be nice to her. Through this friendly reciprocity, one of the strongest equal-rights provisions in modern constitutional law survived.
This was nowhere more apparent than in the concept of “the people,” which was central to the Americans’ notion of popular sovereignty, with all the evocative historical and cultural connotations of “We the People” that were embedded in the American experience. The Japanese had no comparable tradition of popular sovereignty. The Meiji Constitution spoke of “subjects” (shinmin) rather than “people” as such, and Matsumoto and his aides were faced with the question of what word to use to use for “people” in their adaptation. One possibility was jinmin, the term commonly used in translations of the
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“Accepting such a draft constitution is an extremely grave responsibility,” the prime minister said, “that in all probability will affect our children and grandchildren and later generations. When we announce this draft, some people will applaud and some will remain silent. But deep in their hearts they surely will hold resentment toward us. Looking at things from a broad perspective, however, in the present circumstances there is no other course to take.” Hearing this, cabinet members wept while the prime minister himself brushed away tears.23
“In order that our nation may fall in line with other nations in the march toward the attainment of the universal ideal of mankind,” Shidehara declared, “His Majesty with great decision has commanded that the existing Constitution be fundamentally revised so as to establish the foundation upon which a democratic and peaceful Japan is to be built.” The prime minister then proceeded to speak movingly of the passage of mankind from war to peace, cruelty to mercy, slavery to liberty, tyranny and confusion to order. In a suggestive turn of phrase, he intimated that the pacifistic nature of the
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On the other hand, acknowledging the draft constitution’s genesis in Government Section was taboo. Japanese officials were not permitted to mention the GHQ draft and the media were not allowed to speculate openly about it.
The task of preventing media discussion of the actual paternity of the new charter fell to GHQ’s Civil Censorship Detachment. “Criticism of SCAP Writing the Constitution” actually became a formal category of impermissible expression in the so-called key log that censors used as a guide, and it was explicitly stipulated that this proscribed any reference whatsoever to SCAP’s role.
The overworked censors could not catch everything, however, and even generally supportive publications managed to smuggle sardonic observations into their editorial comments. The Asahi, for example, described the government draft as “somewhat ill fitted, like a borrowed suit of clothes.” The Fiji Shimpō compared its initial response to someone who smelled the aroma of Japanese cooking coming from the kitchen and then discovered that Western dishes were being served. It was necessary to put away one’s chopsticks and take up fork and knife.
One of the most truly democratic aspects of the final constitution was also prompted by a grass-roots initiative and affected the very nature of the language in which formal and official texts would be written thereafter. Prior to this time, statutes and documents, including the constitution, had been written in bungotai, an archaic formal style that was more or less inaccessible to ordinary people. After mid-April, the text submitted by the government was written in colloquial Japanese (kōgotai). This was a change of enormous practical as well as symbolic meaning. It signified that the law,
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Where the Americans had intended to affirm that “all persons” are equal before the law, and included language in the GHQ draft that explicitly forbade discrimination on the basis of race or national origin, Satō and his colleagues erased these guarantees through linguistic subterfuge. By interpreting kokumin as referring to “all nationals,” which was indeed a logical construction of the term, the government succeeded in denying equal civil rights to the hundreds of thousands of resident ex-colonial subjects, including Taiwanese and especially Koreans. The blatantly racist nature of this
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The minutes of this elite body (slated to be abolished under the new constitution) recorded that Kanamori “interprets the keeping of arms as being allowed for the maintenance of international peace.”
Under the circumstances of continued occupation, moreover, the issue of self-defense was hardly a pressing concern—until June 1950, that is, when rearmament was initiated in the wake of the outbreak of war in Korea. Then the conservatives and the Americans alike found their loophole in the murky language of the Ashida amendment, and the opponents of remilitarization rallied around the ideals of disarmed neutrality that they believed to be firmly embedded in their “peace constitution.”
Cynics would say that this near-unanimous embrace of the conqueror’s principles merely confirmed what condescending American and British analysts had been arguing all along: that the Japanese had an “ingrained feudalistic tendency” to follow authority—that, as the State Department’s George Atcheson had put it at the beginning of 1946, this was the dawn of “the age of Japan’s imitation of things American—not only of American machines but also American ideas.”64
Many pragmatic conservative leaders also believed that, although at the moment they had little choice but to go along with the conquerors, at a later date it would be possible to undo much of what had been done. Adopting a democratic and pacifistic national charter would hasten the day the occupation was terminated; and once independence had been regained, the constitution could be revised.
On November 3, 1946, the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Meiji emperor’s birthday, Emperor Hirohito announced the promulgation of the new constitution; it was to go into effect six months later.
On December 5, in response to a question in the Diet, the government stated that the “gengo system” would be maintained, meaning that the years would continue to be numbered in accordance with the era name associated with the reigning emperor, coupled with the year of the emperor’s reign. By this way of counting, the constitution was promulgated in the year Shōwa 21. This was a consoling conservative victory and a brilliant everyday way of reiterating that, because of their emperor system, the Japanese were unique and operated in realms not shared by others. Every time any one looked at the
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On the very day the new constitution came into effect, the government issued 20 million copies of a pocket-size booklet entitled Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu (New Constitution, Bright Life). This astonishing number was supposed to ensure a booklet for every household in Japan. Atarashii Kempō, Akarui Seikatsu was only thirty pages long: a one-page send-off by Ashida Hitoshi (the chairman of the lower-house subcommittee on constitutional revision), a radiant thirteen-page introduction that included several illustrations, and the full text of the constitution itself. It was issued at the
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Ashida began his brief preface with a plain but moving statement: “The old Japan has been cast in the shadows, a new Japan has been born.” People would now respect each other on the basis of their human qualities. They would practice democracy. Relations with other countries would be conducted in the spirit of peace. The constitution’s bold declaration that “we will not do war any more” expressed a high ideal for humankind and was the only way for Japan to be reborn.
Emperor Hirohito’s intimate thoughts about the new constitution are unknown, but Colonel Kades and several members of his staff were royally thanked. Each received a small silver cup, embossed in gold with the sixteen-petal imperial chrysanthemum crest and engraved with a notation that this gift commemorated the introduction of the new constitution.75
In April 1946, GHQ was informed that an entertainer in Tokyo was singing subversive songs while accompanying himself on the violin. Investigators attended a performance and were shocked. They heard lyrics like: “Seducing Japanese women is easy, with chocolate and chewing gum.” More scandalous yet was this line: “Everybody is talking about democracy, but how can we have democracy with two emperors?” Democracy, Hirohito, and MacArthur lampooned, all in a single breath! The Americans banned the show.
Censorship was conducted through an elaborate apparatus within GHQ from September 1945 through September 1949, and continued to be imposed in altered forms until Japan regained its sovereignty.
A sprawling bureaucracy was created under the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) within the Civil Intelligence Section, and CCD’s censors were closely abetted by the “positive” propagandists for democracy within the Civil Intelligence and Education (CI&E) Section.
At its peak, CCD employed over six thousand individuals nationwide, the great majority of whom were English-speaking Japanese nationals who identified and then translated or summarized questionable material before passing it on to their superiors.
Over the course of their four-year regime, CCD’s examiners also spot-checked an astonishing 330 million pieces of mail and monitored some 800,000 private phone conversations.
Both Associated Press and United Press wire-service dispatches were sometimes vetted before being deemed safe for consumption in translation; syndicated columnists such as Walter Lippman encountered similar obstacles crossing the Pacific. The overall censorship operation eventually came to entail extensive checklists for taboo subjects, and in the best Orwellian manner these taboos included any public acknowledgment of the existence of censorship. Editors and publishers all received such confidential notifications as the following as soon as censorship was established:
Since censorship was never openly acknowledged to exist, its nominal termination with the dissolution of CCD in late 1949 also took place without public notice.
scores of prominent literary figures ranging from Dazai Osama (the author of The Setting Sun, whose suicide in 1948 caused a sensation) to the future Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari experienced the blue pencil.
The policy of censoring the existence of censorship itself cast a taint of hypocrisy on the Americans and compared poorly with the old system of the militarists and ultranationalists, who until the late 1930s had allowed excised portions of texts to be marked in publications with Xs and Os. At least prewar readers knew that something had been excised; they could even count the Xs and Os and try to guess what. It is not surprising, then, that some writers who experienced censorship under both systems were cynical in their appraisals of SCAP’s version of free expression. One evoked an old
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