Chapter 4
The First Wave of Reform
SCAP's initial campaign in 1945 dealt with the press and civil rights. In the first weeks of the occupation the press in both Japan and the United States gave SCAP a good deal of trouble. Guidance for the media— newspapers, magazines, and radio—designed to eliminate practices of the past and open the way to greater freedom of expression became urgent as news and views of all sorts began to appear in the newly unleashed press. "There shall be an absolute minimum of restrictions upon freedom of speech," was the positive note sounded by the first SCAP order of September 10, 1945, called the press code. At the same time, relying on general authority to censor communications and the press, SCAP prohibited "false or destructive criticism of the Allied powers, and rumors."[1] Censorship of Japanese newspapers, radio, magazines, and films was heavy in the early days and continued to the end of the occupation in 1952, though precensorship of most magazines was terminated in December 1947 and of newspapers in July 1948. In retrospect it is hard to escape the feeling that General MacArthur permitted far more censorship than seemed necessary for the security of his forces.[2] Criticism of SCAP censorship policy has been an enduring complaint by the Japanese.
The press in the United States gave vent to some unhappiness about events in Japan. The New York Times carried a think piece on September 14 arguing that "the enemy has succeeded in perpetuating the same traditions, customs, processes, habits and institutions that did so much to bring on this war." The Times was particularly disturbed by "our
acceptance of the emperor as sort of a 'junior partner' in the surrender and occupation." MacArthur countered the same day, noting the "impatience of the press based on an assumption of a so-called soft occupation policy in Japan" and asserting that "the surrender terms ... will not be applied in kid glove fashion."[3]
Also on September 14, the Associated Press carried a story of an interview with Prime Minister Higashikuni, who asked, "People of America, won't you forget Pearl Harbor? ... We people of Japan will forget the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb .... The war is ended. Let us now bury hate." This report touched off a barrage of criticism in the United States. Dean Acheson commented that "nothing could show more clearly than this statement the failure of the Japanese to understand the nature of their conduct or the mind of the American people.... Pearl Harbor is not a symbol of hate for Japan but a symbol of Japanese perfidy." Despite Acheson's lawyerlike distinction, the Japanese have often tended to equate Pearl Harbor with the atomic bomb and have sometimes added atrocities in Vietnam for good measure, trying to show that war horrors are not confined to one nation. It is remarkable that the reaction of the only people to have endured the atomic bomb remained as controlled and muted as it did during the occupation and afterward.[4]
MacArthur himself got into trouble. He issued a press statement on September 17 that because of "the smooth progress of the occupation," within six months not more than 200,000 men would be needed, "which will permit the complete demobilization of our citizen Pacific forces." Senior officials in Washington were worried at that time that demobilization of the armed forces was proceeding too rapidly, and they were annoyed by MacArthur's apparent' assertion of authority. Acheson issued a stinging comment to the press that "the occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy." MacArthur, who was not accustomed to hearing such firm talk from higher authority, in turn sent a cable to the War Department that was uncharacteristically apologetic, saying he thought he was "acting in complete conformity with the War Department's announced policy of demobilizing just as rapidly as conditions permitted."[5]
In a conversation with General Eichelberger a month later, MacArthur was bitter about the way he had been handled by Washington. He attributed this to Truman's fear that MacArthur might be a serious political rival. The general said he might have been dropped from his
position if the Soviets had not "come out against me," but "thanks to the Soviets I am on top. I would like to pin a medal on their a—"[6]
On October 4 General MacArthur issued one of the most powerful directives of the entire occupation, a "bill of rights" ordering the government to remove all restrictions on political, civil, and religious liberties; free all political prisoners.; abolish secret police organizations; permit unrestricted comment about the emperor and the government; and remove the minister of home affairs and all high police officials responsible for the enforcement of measures limiting freedom of thought, speech, religion, and assembly.[7] Japanese reactions were understandably cautious. Some welcomed the first of the basic reform directives as a long step toward freeing their society of nationalist shackles, while conservatives were shocked by its assault on the reactionary practices and habits of thought that had become embedded in their society.
The provision for freeing political prisoners jolted the Japanese most. As far back as 1887 Japan had instituted measures to punish persons expressing unorthodox political views. It had subsequently toughened the restrictions until the wide-ranging Peace Preservation Law of 1925, one of the most infamous laws on the books, made it a crime to advocate overthrow of kokutai , the mystical "national polity," by criticizing the emperor or calling for basic political change.[8] Thousands of suspected leftists had been imprisoned for attacking the government or criticizing the political system. Professors had been dismissed for supporting free speech or for describing the emperor institution as an "organ" of the state when people were being told the emperor was the incarnation of the state.
The directive brought about the release of 439 political prisoners and ended the surveillance of 2,026 others; it forced the removal of 4,800 special thought police from their positions, as well as the home minister, Yamazaki Iwao, whose order to the press on September 29 not to publish any more photos of MacArthur and the emperor had been canceled by SCAP.[9]
Old-line Japanese thought the October 4 directive was "excessive." Moderate Japanese officials, like the "social bureaucrats" who handled labor and welfare issues, thought it was "foolish" for SCAP to liberate communist leaders. Yoshida proposed to MacArthur's chief of staff, General Richard K. Sutherland, on October 5 that in the future there should be better consultation before such important actions were taken. Yoshida complained a few days later to the president of the United
Press news service that the occupation was making it hard for the police to preserve order and respect for the law. One of Yoshida's subordinates in the Foreign Office, Sone Eki, commented in his memoirs that Yoshida wanted to play down the impact of the October 4 directive by applying it only to noncommunists, so that the Peace Preservation Law would stay in effect for communists. This Yoshida gambit failed.[10]
The release of sixteen prisoners from Fuchu prison in the outskirts of Tokyo on October 5, 1945, became one of the more publicized incidents of the occupation. Two SCAP officials, E. Herbert Norman, a Canadian diplomat attached to Civil Intelligence Section, and John K. Emmerson, a U.S. diplomat serving in POLAD, both prewar experts on Japanese politics, went to see the political prisoners in Fuchu and invited three of them to come to GHQ for a talk. Two of these prisoners, Tokuda and Shiga, later became leaders of the Japanese Communist Party. Norman and Emmerson were attacked by Americans and Japanese on and off for many years after this event on suspicion of having given support to the communist movement in Japan. Their previous records were given the minutest scrutiny, especially Norman's communist activity while a university student, and their later careers were profoundly affected.[11]
Economic reform proved to be the most complicated and intractable field of endeavor for the entire occupation. The disastrous economic situation was compounded by an ill-defined U.S. policy. Labor, the most volatile and dynamic element in postwar Japan, took full advantage of SCAP's early liberalism and then wanted to go farther and faster than SCAP would permit. In the field of business regulation SCAP moved slowly; it tried to get the big Japanese conglomerates to break themselves up but met pockets of resistance. Land reform, by contrast, was well planned and smoothly worked out with the Japanese; the program was rooted in fertile soil.
The Japanese economy was close to collapse at the end of 1945. Food was extremely scarce in the cities, industrial production was less than one-fifth of the wartime high, and the consumer price level was nine times the prewar standard of 1934-1936. Foreign trade, including imports of food and raw materials, was totally cut off. For many months unemployment was hard to keep track of. It may have reached as high as 13 million at the end of 1945 amid the flow of demobilized soldiers and refugees returning from the mainland; it fell to about 3 million later in 1946.[12]
The Japanese government and military leaders bore a heavy responsi-
bility for the catastrophic inflation that swamped the country for many months. At the end of the war military pay officers hastily disbursed all existing appropriations, paying out huge sums of money between August 15 and the arrival of the Americans at the end of the month. Military pensions were paid off for years ahead. A SCAP order in September 1945 to end these payments may have been too late to have any effect. Stockpiles of military equipment and precious metals worth several billion dollars were handed over to unscrupulous dealers, who either hoarded the goods or sold them on the black market at huge profits.[13]
The food shortage became alarming when the 1945 crop fell to two-thirds the normal level. The caloric intake for adults in the cities was for many months approximately one thousand calories, compared with a normal adult level of eighteen hundred. People living in the big cities were forced to buy on the black market and barter their personal possessions in order to survive. In October 1945 Japanese officials asked for more than 4 million tons of food from the United States. SCAP challenged Japanese statistics, and Yoshida ruefully admitted to MacArthur that the data given him by his experts were bad, adding that poor statistics were one reason Japan had lost the war. SCAP released some of its local stocks, but Japan did not receive food imports from the United States until 1946. Rumors spread in the press that 10 million persons might die of starvation, but the Japanese managed to scrape through. Although malnutrition was serious, it was difficult to establish whether anyone actually starved to death.[14]
Contagious disease was a threat. SCAP's Public Health and Welfare Section rose to this challenge, although such assistance was not mentioned in Allied policy. Massive campaigns against diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and tuberculosis achieved dramatic reductions in the incidence of these diseases. Agricultural land was sprayed with DDT. General MacArthur stated in his memoirs that 2 million lives were saved by these measures in the first two years of the occupation. He solemnly added, "With the dreadful loss of lives in the war fresh in my mind, these statistics brought much comfort to my soul."[15]
The economic results of the war were not all bad. Japan's militarist decade had witnessed several remarkable innovations in industry, some with long-term effects in strengthening productivity. Heavy industry developed rapidly, as did chemical production. The training of engineers and skilled workers intensified. Large firms became expert in subcontracting to small ones, thereby erecting the two-tier industrial system that is now entrenched in Japan. The seniority wage and lifetime em-
ployment systems in big companies expanded greatly in the period before and during World War II. Government "guidance" to business and industry, which was not far from control, became the general practice during the war period.[16]
MacArthur's main instructions from Washington in the economic area were to free the labor movement, break up the big industrial and banking combinations, and leave it to the Japanese to revive their economy. U.S. goals were not to try out social experiments but rather to broaden the ownership of productive assets in agriculture and industry and widen the distribution of economic benefits in the form of wages and consumer goods. To reach these goals SCAP decided it would be necessary to break up the prewar system, which confined ownership of enterprises to relatively few families and individuals, encouraged large industrial concentrations, and opposed efforts by workers and farmers to organize for better treatment.
Some critics saw a contradiction in these policies. A leading British authority asserted, "Whatever the political and social merits of those measures, they certainly made no contribution to economic recovery. Most of them actually impeded it." A Japanese financial expert, Watanabe Takeshi, was more trenchant: these policies were "reforms that New Dealers wanted to realize in Japan but could not carry out in the United States." Conservative Japanese often grumbled about the "New Dealers" in SCAP.[17]
In the field of labor, legislation enacted well before World War II recognized a role for labor unions in dispute mediation; regulated the employment of women, children, and young workers; and set up a limited system of insurance and pensions for some employees. Government surveillance and interference in labor activities were frequent, as were disputes and violence. By the mid-1930s trade union membership was at its prewar peak, about 420,000, a small part of the labor force. In the late 1930s when government policy turned oppressive, left-wing unions were banned and their leaders were jailed. A "labor front" organized at that time and controlled by the government in effect destroyed the labor movement.[18]
Labor conditions right after the war were dreadful. Wages were abysmally low, with a wage base in early 1946 of only ¥213 a month; foreign exchange values were not very meaningful in the early period of the occupation, but this was probably the equivalent of a little less than $10. The labor movement started slowly, with only six unions consisting of 3,800 members formed by the fall of 1945. But the movement
soon took on momentum and responded more powerfully to the stimulus of reform than did any other group in Japan.[19] Early SCAP actions dissolved the government's wartime front organizations, banned the use of prison labor in projects competitive with the regular labor force, and tried to curb the labor-boss system, by which bosses recruited gangs of workers and extracted a substantial part of the laborers' pay for their own pockets.
Not long after the surrender labor troubles began. Korean and Taiwanese coal miners fled from their enforced servitude, causing coal production to plummet. The three big Tokyo newspapers became a battleground, with militant liberals trying to eject senior editors and managers accused of having actively supported the war effort. Asahi and Mainichi eliminated the nationalists without strife, but the struggle at Yomiuri went on for months in 1945 and 1946 before a settlement was finally reached. The Yomiuri battle was an early instance of "production control," an unusual Japanese phenomenon whereby the workers took over and operated a factory or business and then, after settlement had been reached, turned over the operation and any profits to management. Similar struggles took place at Toshiba Electric and Japan Steel Tube Company. Between January and June 1946, 255 such incidents involving 157,000 workers occurred. The government considered these takeovers illegal, and the Supreme Court of Japan eventually agreed. SCAP experts asserted that legality depended on the specific circumstances. Production control bore some resemblance to a revolutionary takeover of the means of production, but one authority said in March 1946, "The distance yet to be traveled to a revolutionary transformation of the capitalist system in Japan was great."[20]
On December 21 the Diet enacted the first important piece of labor legislation, the Labor Union Law, drafted after Prime Minister Shidehara met the supreme commander on October 11. The moderate "social bureaucrats" who had long pressed for more liberal treatment of the labor movement played a key role in drafting labor legislation during the occupation and in rolling some of it back later. The new law was based on both Japanese and U.S. practice, in particular the Wagner Act of 1935, and, of course, had SCAP approval. It not only legalized trade unions and the right of workers to organize and join trade unions but also encouraged collective bargaining and set out procedures under which workers had the right to strike. Provision was also made for public workers to organize and strike, an important and controversial matter in Japan, where the government operated railways, communica-
tions, and other activities that were conducted by the private sector in the United States. Commissions of labor, management, and "public interest" representatives were established on a national and prefectural level to oversee the execution of the law, the first of many pieces of such legislation setting up similar commissions to curb the power of the bureaucracy and the central government.[21]
The Labor Union Law was revolutionary for Japan in somewhat the same way the Wagner Act had been for the United States; both laws were catalysts for the emergence of more powerful and aggressive labor movements. In Japan the new law seemed to release the pent-up energy of the working groups. The number of unions and their members began to skyrocket. By the end of 1945 union membership had surpassed the prewar peak, and by the end of 1946 there were 17,266 unions with nearly 5 million members. Even the Tokyo geisha formed a union.[22]
Japanese unions were in effect company unions. Following their pre-surrender structure, they were enterprise unions formed by all the workers in one company, not craft or industrywide unions, as in the United States. In many cases white-collar workers joined the company union, and union leaders sometimes later became management officials. Enterprise unions often joined other enterprise unions in labor associations, but the core unit was the union in each plant.[23] True to Japanese social custom, the work force of a Japanese company was closely knit, forming groups not unlike military units and even lining up every morning to sing the company song.
Speaking a year later of the postwar growth of the labor movement, General MacArthur commented, "I do not think the history of labor throughout the last two thousand years has shown such an extraordinary, magnificent development in such a short space of time. They had gone far beyond my expectations and I was delighted."[24] Neither the general nor the chiefs of ESS knew much about labor. They both gave wide discretion to the heads of the labor division, who in the early days of the occupation gave free rein to moderate Japanese experts and were even willing to tolerate some communist influence within organized labor.[25]
Agricultural land reform, one of the more ambitious and draconian operations of the occupation, deeply influenced the status and income of almost half the population. With an area of 142,811 square milés, Japan is not quite as large as California. Only 17 percent of its land is arable. Its chief crop is rice, occupying more than half of the cultivated land. At the end of the war about 30 million Japanese, or 5.7 million
families, lived on farms; this was about 40 percent of the population. About 65 percent of the farmers were tenants in whole or in part, and they filled about 50 percent of the nation's 15 million acres of farmland. Farm plots averaged about 2.4 acres, sometimes scattered among several pieces of land. Half of the tenants rented less than 1.2 acres each. Nearly 1 million landlords were absentee owners, many of them living in villages near their land.[26]
Tenants turned over about 50 percent of their crops to the owner as rent. Out of the rest they had to procure housing, food, fertilizer, and equipment. They had little security of tenure because there were rarely written contracts and tenants could be dispossessed without compensation. Nevertheless, the paternalistic nature of Japanese society, which was particularly strong in rural areas, tended to alleviate the harsh features of the tenant system.
The countryside was a source of workers for the cities and recruits for the army. This heavy flow into industry impeded the growth of a strong trade union movement and served as a drag on wages. Supported by the nationalists, rural landlords had joined with urban industrialists before the war to obtain protective legislation from the Diet that would keep workers and tenant farmers in their place.[27]
Living conditions during the war had not been disadvantageous for farmers. They had food to eat, and their income was high because rice was in great demand. The government authorized payments of rent in money rather than in produce, a distinct advantage for the farmers. Although many tenants were given greater security in their holdings, the rapid rise in the value of agricultural land and products caused many landlords to try to dispossess their tenants and take over themselves.
Early U.S. policy papers did not call for action on land reform. A few experts in Washington explored the subject, notably Russian-born agronomist Wolf Ladejinsky, who joined SCAP in January 1946 and eventually became a leading authority on land reform in Asia. The State Department office in Tokyo sent the supreme commander a report based on the Washington research. MacArthur became interested and ordered a staff study, possibly because, as he said in his memoirs, "I felt that any man who farmed the land should, by law, be entitled to his crops, that there should be an end to sharecropping, and that even more fundamental, perhaps, was the need to make land itself available to the people."[28]
The Japanese had been moving ahead on their own. In response to increasing pressure for improvement of rural landholding conditions,
the Shidehara cabinet decided in 1945 to enable tenants to buy the land they tilled. This was another of Japan's "independent initiatives" toward democracy after the surrender. Late in the year the Diet passed legislation setting a limit of 12.25 acres on absentee ownership. Conservatives like Yoshida felt that this legislation went far enough because the improved status of farmers had markedly reduced any inequities. SCAP experts disagreed. On December 9 they ordered suspension of part of the law and indicated that 12.25 acres was too much for absentee owners to retain; SCAP requested a more comprehensive plan. Further action regarding land reform was then held up until a new government was formed after the general election of April 1946.[29]
Probably the best known of all occupation reforms was the breaking up of the zaibatsu, the large industrial and financial conglomerates, usually family controlled, that flourished during Japan's modern century. It was American policy to "favor a program for the dissolution of the large industrial and banking combinations" and encourage "a wide distribution of income and of ownership of the means of production and trade."[30] Great bureaucratic battles were fought over these general propositions.
For the Japanese, zaibatsu kaitai (trust-busting) was the epitome of New Deal activism, especially when the program applied not only to the relatively few family-dominated companies but to hundreds of other lesser business "concentrations." Yet the New Deal trust-busting program never had the toughness or wide scope of the SCAP campaign, which an authority has described as the "most ambitious anti-trust action in history."[31]
Some able and zealous economists in Washington thought the zaibatsu had been a powerful force behind Japan's will to war and thus had to be smashed. For example, an official report concluded in 1945 that "not only were the zaibatsu as responsible for Japan's militarism as the militarists themselves, but they profited immensely by it.... Unless the zaibatsu are broken up, the Japanese have little prospect of ever being able to govern themselves as free men.[32]
Paradoxically, when the top suspects were indicted a few months later for having plotted aggressive war, not a single zaibatsu representative was included. The American chief prosecutor decided that the evidence was inadequate to support a charge of war crimes against any of the business barons. (In Nazi Germany several were put on trial, including the financial wizard Hjalmar Schacht.) Some of the Allies were skeptical about trust-busting. In commenting on U.S. policy, an
official British staff paper remarked, "The principle has encountered formidable obstacles in its application in the United States, but the Americans are apparently determined to confer on their late enemies the benefits of an economic regime which they find difficulty realizing at home." Other skeptics argued on economic grounds that large concentrations were integral to Japan's economic development.[33]
The Japanese military had mistrusted the "old" zaibatsu as pro-Western and hostile to nationalist goals. A few zaibatsu leaders had been assassinated in the 1930s, including Baron Takuma Dan, the managing director of Mitsui Gomei, the central holding company of Mitsui. The military reportedly preferred to deal with the "new" zaibatsu, many of which had been established to promote armament production and the industrial development of Manchuria. By the time of the China Incident in 1937, when the Japanese Army invaded China, all the zaibatsu were cooperating with Japan's military leaders, often expanding their activities in military fields and acting as agents for the government. After Pearl Harbor cooperation was virtually total.
General MacArthur thought the zaibatsu were one of the pillars of Japanese feudalism that would have to be torn down by the occupation. In his memoirs he described the zaibatsu as "about ten Japanese families who practiced a kind of private socialism. They controlled 90 percent of all Japanese industry." In a scornful vein he once said the zaibatsu were like "the most effete New York clubmen."[34]
A good part of prewar Japanese industrial, commercial, and banking ownership was, in fact, in the hands of ten family groups. The four largest—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda—controlled more assets than the other zaibatsu combined. By the end of the war the ten controlled about 68 percent of Japan's machinery and equipment production, about 53 percent of the financial and insurance business, 50 percent of mining production, and 38 percent of chemical production. The zaibatsu were what are now called conglomerates, companies with strong positions in diverse industries. None of them had monopoly control in any important economic area, and they generally avoided serious competition with each other.[35] The top holding company of each zaibatsu group operated through a wide network of subsidiaries and affiliates by means of intercorporate stockholding, interlocking directorates, management agreements, and financing by the combine bank. To "break up" the zaibatsu involved dissolving the holding company at the top of the network and cutting the links that bound the principal companies in the group.[36] In effect, not only would the zaibatsu be
dissolved; the large economic concentrations they controlled would be divided up.
Official Japanese views about zaibatsu dissolution were guarded. In one of the few Japanese utterances on the matter, Yoshida, who had Mitsui connections, showed some temerity at a press conference on October 19: "Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and other old zaibatsu ... themselves suffered losses during the war.... The government obliged them to build ships and planes ... ignoring their losses.... Those who enjoyed great profit and worked hand in hand with the militarists were the new zaibatsu.... The old zaibatsu, having their interests in peacetime industries, rejoiced at the war's end." To correct possible misinterpretation, another ministry issued a statement three days later saying the government did not oppose zaibatsu reorganization.[37] Japanese officials other than the foreign minister were obviously following that sage advice often cited by Yoshida—Nagai mono ni wa makarero (Don't fight City Hall).
The first SCAP trust-busting action was to restrict transactions by the fifteen big holding companies. The head of the SCAP economic section, Colonel Raymond C. Kramer, a New York businessman and former textile manufacturer, then tried to persuade the big companies to submit their own plans for dissolution. Yasuda, the fourth biggest zaibatsu, came up with a plan on October 16, and SCAP cabled Washington recommending approval. In a few days the War Department told MacArthur to go ahead and accept the Yasuda plan on a tentative basis. Mitsubishi led a rear-guard action but finally gave in.
On November 4 the Japanese government produced a comprehensive plan for the dissolution of the four biggest holding companies. According to the plan, their securities would be transferred to a new holding company liquidation commission (HCLC), and their shareholders would be compensated by nonnegotiable government bonds. These actions took place in late 1945 and early 1946, with a fifth zaibatsu, Fuji Industrial, added to the SCAP chopping block. Other combines were to be dissolved later. SCAP issued a directive accepting the Japanese dissolution plan and on December 8 listed 18 holding companies and 326 subsidiaries as "restricted companies" that could not sell or transfer securities without approval.[38]
In December Colonel Kramer returned to the United States with at least two achievements to his credit. He had overcome the resistance of the old-guard conservatives, whose objection to the breakup campaign was stronger than that against any other American policy in the early
months of the occupation. And he had made probably the most prescient forecast uttered by any American official in Japan during the occupation when he told a presidential representative visiting Tokyo in October 1945 that in fifteen years Japan would have a far more important position in world trade than ever before and would be a very serious competitor to the United States and Great Britain.[39]
MacArthur often showed suspicion of "big business" and "Wall Street." He mistrusted outsiders and high-powered businessmen, at least those he did not know. When the top jobs on his staff came open, he preferred to pick someone he knew he could count on to be entirely his man regardless of professional skill. In this case MacArthur replaced Kramer with Major General William F. Marquat, a career coast artillery officer who had served with MacArthur on Bataan. Marquat's experience in economic affairs was modest indeed, but he had the redeeming virtues of being nice, witty, hard working, and a good manager.
Although the labor movement and agricultural land changes each affected millions of people, educational reform and the abolition of official support for the state religion, Shinto, reached into the lives of virtually everyone. Sweeping changes in these fields began early under the direction of CIE, which accomplished much with little controversy; in fact, many Japanese worked with CIE to advance the new ideas.
The Japanese have consistently attached great importance to education. The first six years of elementary school were free and compulsory, and literacy was almost universal. An excellent system of technical education, semmon gakko , provided an alternative to high school. Admission to state-supported schools that included the best universities was by examination. University fees were modest.
Nevertheless, the system had many defects. Girls were restricted to their own schools, including a few universities, with a limited curriculum after the period of compulsory education. Less than 1 percent of elementary school graduates went to university. A few elite schools at the top level dominated the system: attendance at Ichiko and Tokyo Teidai (the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University) was a guaranteed passport to success in later life.
The cancer of nationalism spread throughout the education system. Although the imperial rescript on education, issued in 1890, was fairly innocuous in its pietistic wording, it had been laid over with the ultra-nationalist commentary and cant of the Education Ministry. Retired military men, widely used as teachers and military instructors in the
schools, enforced and fed the cult of nationalism. Generals were made ministers of education; reactionaries controlled teaching appointments and the writing of textbooks. The purpose of education was to train students to become effective servants of the state.[40]
The school system was in chaos at the end of the war. Because most of the schools had been closed, 18 million students were idle. Four thousand schools had been destroyed in the war, about 10 percent of the total, and many more had been damaged. One of SCAP's early steps was to advise the Japanese to reopen their schools (in Germany schools were kept closed in the early months of the occupation).
General MacArthur had only skimpy guidance regarding education. The basic Washington directive provided that nationalist teachers and opponents of occupation goals be replaced, military training prohibited, and democratic principles used in teaching.[41] The first chief of CIE, Colonel Kermit R. Dyke, a former NBC executive who had MacArthur's confidence and a smooth manner with the Japanese, supervised a number of dedicated men including Harold Henderson, an authority on Japanese art and literature; Robert King Hall, an education specialist; and Kenneth Bunce, a former schoolteacher in Japan. As SCAP's religions expert, Bunce showed great finesse in handling the dashing advocates of differing religious viewpoints, among them General MacArthur. Dyke was replaced in May 1946 by Lieutenant Colonel Donald R. Nugent, a Marine reserve officer who had also taught school in Japan before the war. Nugent was a cautious chief who relied heavily on advice from experts, both American and Japanese, and worked earnestly to win Japanese support for SCAP reforms. In early dealings with officials of the Ministry of Education, CIE found them "technically unqualified to plan and initiate complete reforms."[42]
After trying to persuade the education minister, Maeda Tamon, an old-fashioned liberal who had lived in the United States, to take the lead in liberalizing the system, CIE issued several directives in late 1945 to eliminate all nationalist teachers, textbooks, and ideology; revise the history and geography texts; and ban the teaching of "moral education," or shushin . Even before the screening, 115,778 teachers and officials resigned from the schools. By April 1949, after a screening of some 700,000 persons, nearly 6,000 more had been removed or had voluntarily left education positions. The education purge was in many ways more sweeping than the political purge and was carried out almost entirely by Japanese.[43]
Under a revised method instituted by SCAP, textbooks were written
by individual scholars and published by commercial concerns, subject to review by the Ministry of Education and CIE experts. The Japanese were accustomed to considerable government interference in their education, and so the new way did not surprise them. The ministry has continued to exercise a supervisory role in the selection and content of textbooks. A few liberated spirits have tried in recent years to free the system of government interference but without great success. The early occupation period witnessed the rise of large and powerful teachers unions. One of these, known as Nikkyoso (Japan Teachers Union), became a militant and often radical force in Japanese education.
The U.S. program for demilitarizing Japan had one immediate effect on academic research. In November 1945 General MacArthur directed that two Japanese cyclotrons be destroyed in response to a Washington order that turned out to have been issued by mistake. Press stories in the United States made it appear that MacArthur had been responsible, an interpretation that he took pains in his memoirs to correct. In the aftermath of this strange episode, the Allied powers decided in 1947 that Japanese research in atomic energy, primitive as it was, should be prohibited. But the resulting damage to the principle of freedom of research was repaired in good part when a scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harry Kelly, was sent to serve on MacArthur's staff to oversee Japanese scientific activity; Kelly got to know Japanese scientists and was valuable in helping guide the peaceful development of Japanese science and in promoting cooperation with the United States.[44]
Undoubtedly the most significant force in education reform was the report of the U.S. education mission to Japan, made on March 31, 1946. The mission, requested by MacArthur two months before, arrived early in March to study "education for democracy in Japan." The twenty-seven-member group, headed by George D. Stoddard, soon to become president of the University of Illinois, spent three weeks in Japan meeting with a wide cross-section of people, including MacArthur and the emperor. The education minister, Abe Yoshishige, advised the mission in frank terms not "to use Japan as a kind of laboratory in a rash attempt to experiment."[45]
The mission's report was elevated in tone and general in approach.[46] It made several significant recommendations:
—Compulsory, free education should be coeducational and should include six years of primary school, three years of lower secondary
school, and, eventually, three years of upper secondary school. (This was the 6-3-3 system that would precede four years of higher education.)
—"Higher education should become an opportunity for the many, not a privilege of the few." Higher schools and technical schools should be liberalized to provide a general college training. Women should have free access to higher education.
—Teaching should rely not only on textbooks but also on cooperative give-and-take between teacher and student.
—Administration should be decentralized. The Education Ministry should be retained for professional guidance but its control function should be transferred to local elected agencies.
—"Some form of romaji, " the "roman alphabet," should be brought into common use so that "language would be a highway and not a barrier."
Action on the report was postponed until a new Diet was elected in April 1946.
Early in 1946 Nambara Shigeru, president of Tokyo Imperial University and the leading educator in Japan, became the head of the Japanese Education Reform Council, an influential body set up to advise the Education Ministry and CIE. A brilliant and dynamic man, and a Christian, he played a key role in liberalizing Japanese education between 1945 and 1952.
Religion was of great interest to General MacArthur, who clung to the hope that Japan might experience a religious reformation. U.S. policy was to encourage freedom of religious worship and prevent religion from being used by nationalists. This meant separation of religion from state control and from the nationalist trappings of state Shinto (kokka shinto ).General MacArthur went further by actively promoting Christianity in the early years of the occupation. At one point he advised. Washington that his policy was "to increase greatly Christian influence in Japan." President Truman, reading this in a briefing memorandum, penciled in the notation, "I approve."[47]
MacArthur reportedly told the American evangelist Billy Graham that the emperor had privately declared his "willingness to make Christianity the national religion," but the general had rejected the offer "because he felt it wrong to impose any religion on a people." The general evidently said similar things to other American Christians, but
Japanese sources do not throw any light on the surprising assertion attributed to the Tenno. [48]
Seeingvisiting churchmen and answering correspondence on religious matters took up a good bit of the general's time. An Episcopalian but not a churchgoer himself, he viewed the values of democracy and Christianity as complementary. At the same time, he saw little conflict between Christianity and the "Oriental faiths" and thought "each might well be strengthened by a better understanding of the other." Apparently with this in mind, he "asked for missionaries, and more missionaries." At war's end there were 900 Christian missionaries in Japan, whose presence reflected a considerable degree of Japanese religious toleration during the war, and near the end of the occupation there were 1,700. MacArthur also requested and received 10 million Bibles translated into Japanese.[49]
SCAP's first significant action based on the bill of rights directive of October 4 provided that freedom of religion be guaranteed to everyone. On December 15 another directive, based on Washington guidance, provided for the separation of religion from the state and placed all religions, including Christianity, on exactly the same legal footing. The directive cut off Shinto from all state support, but its purely religious functions were permitted to continue. This directive also prohibited official support of "the doctrine that the Emperor of Japan is superior to the heads of other states because of ancestry, descent or special origin." The directive banned, somewhat to the surprise of the Japanese, use of the term Greater East Asia War , the standard reference to Japan's wars from 1937, against China, through World War II. Thereafter, the Japanese substituted the "Pacific War" or even the "Fifteen Years' War," beginning with the Manchurian incident of 1931.[50]
The theological status of the emperor was clarified, at least for foreigners, by a revealing event on New Year's Day of 1946. On that day the emperor issued a "declaration of humanity," or ningen sengen , in which he declared that he was a human being. Possibly at the emperor's initiative, he and his advisers had begun in late 1945 to consider ways of dispelling the mythology and cult of the emperor.
In late November Harold Henderson of CIE suggested to a British acquaintance, R. H. Blyth, a tutor to the crown prince, that it would be appropriate if the emperor would renounce his divinity as American policy suggested. A few days later Blyth excitedly asked for suggestions about how the emperor might do this. Somewhat reluctantly Henderson dashed off a short paragraph to the effect that the ties between
the emperor and the people were not based on myths or the mistaken idea that the emperor was divine or that the Japanese people were superior to other races. Blyth took this paper back to the imperial household but returned it the next day, asking that the paper be burned. This was done on the spot. A day later Blyth returned with a longer text containing the Henderson paragraph. This draft was given to recently promoted Brigadier General Dyke, who reportedly showed it to MacArthur. Both men were said to be pleased.[51]
Prime Minister Shidehara and his aides revised the draft and translated it into English. Education Minister Maeda reworked the Japanese version, not in the stilted language of court documents but in the colloquial form requested by the emperor. The Tenno also asked that the announcement include the famous charter oath issued in 1868 by Emperor Meiji, which declared in vague and impressionistic phrasing that "all measures of government should be decided in accordance with public opinion."[52] By the end of December the rescript was finished. Yoshida sent an advance copy to MacArthur on December 30, and the rescript was issued the next day.[53] Its key sentences, almost identical to the Henderson draft, provided that "the ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world."
General MacArthur issued a statement, which appeared on January 1, 1946, at the same time as the rescript, saying the emperor's action "pleases me very much. By it he undertakes a leading part in the democratization of his people." Although the general said in his memoirs that the emperor's statement was made "without any suggestion or discussion" with him, MacArthur was kept informed about the rescript and saw a copy before it was issued.[54]
It surprised Americans that the emperor's announcement did not create a big stir in the Japanese press, which gave the announcement only routine play. One observer familiar with both societies explained that the Japanese had never thought of emperors as divine, only as unusual and elevated persons meriting special veneration.[55] The Japanese used the word kami (god) in regard to many things, including emperors and natural phenomena (like kamikaze , or "divine wind"), but the term had a broader and less theological meaning for Japanese than the word god had for people in the West.
To humanize the emperor even further, General MacArthur urged
him to travel around the country and be seen by the people. His subjects had rarely been permitted to look upon the Tenno, and they were intensely curious about him. By 1952 he had visited almost every region and prefecture. Only one untoward incident marred these trips: on November 21, 1951, students at Kyoto University surrounded his car and shouted questions and slogans critical of his wartime role and the policies of the government.[56]
A young U.S. naval officer played a part in the process of humanizing the emperor. Otis Cary, who had been born and brought up in Japan, met several times in late 1945 and early 1946 with Prince Takamatsu, the younger brother of the emperor. Having perfect command of Japanese and a deep understanding of the people, Cary pressed on the prince some ideas for bringing the emperor closer to his subjects, suggesting, for example, visits around the country and a public expression of sympathy with those suffering in the food crisis.[57] In the following weeks many of Cary's suggestions came to pass, although the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Japanese court makes it impossible to know exactly what inspired these actions. It is obvious, however, that the emperor was quite willing to act in ways that would meet with Allied approval.
The emperor showed another human touch at Christmastime in 1945. Through Yoshida the imperial family sent an ink-writing set to General MacArthur, a box of hina matsuri dolls (used for the Girls' Festival) to Mrs. MacArthur, and dolls and candy to their son, Arthur. The general's aide, Colonel L. E. Bunker, sent an effusive letter of thanks to Yoshida.[58]