Aftermath of War

Americans and the Remaking of Japan

Howard B. Schonberger

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612770246
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

With the fighting in World War II over in mid-August 1945, more than one-half million American troops moved to occupy Japan. Much of the country was ruined, buried under the rubble and debris of saturation bombing and the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's rulers were stunned by defeat, and its people resigned to whatever the victors might impose upon them. Aftermath of War described the American transformation of Occupied Japan to be the greatest success story of United States policy in Asian. Howard Schonberger argues that this success came at a high price. Many of the popularity supported democratic reforms promoted by Americans in the early years of the Occupation were scuttled. Asian peoples developed a fear of the new Japan as a junior partner of the United States in opposing their legitimate revolutionary aspirations. Finally Japanese exports have triggered a dangerous xenophobic reaction in the United States in recent years. Schonberger recounts the rise of the new Japan through the eyes of eight Americans centrally engaged in events of the Occupation. Aftermath of War provides insights into the recent conflicts between the U.S. and Japan and recaptures the ideological debate within the United States over the future course of Japan. It implicitly suggests that Americans and Japanese seriously reconsider the post-surrender reform agenda rejected by official American policy after 1947.

1	JOSEPH C. GREW
	The Emperor of Japan and Planning the Occupation

No question caused greater difficulty for American policymakers responsible for winning the war against Japan and preparing for the Occupation than how to treat Emperor Hirohito. Some shared the predominant public view in the last months of the Pacific war that the emperor had approved the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and bore responsibility for a war of aggression against the United States. Adherents of this opinion argued that no modification of “unconditional surrender” terms permitting the retention of the imperial institution should be made; the throne was the foundation of power for militaristic and ultranationalistic groups directing the Japanese war effort. Furthermore, Hirohito himself should be tried as a war criminal. A Gallup poll taken in June 1945 indicated the depth of American support for severe treatment of the emperor. It showed that 33 percent of respondents favored hanging Hirohito, another 37 percent favored putting him on trial as a war criminal, imprisoning him for life, or exiling him, and only 7 percent thought the emperor should be left alone or used as a puppet under United Nations supervision.¹

Among the many high-placed critics of such public opinion, the most notable was Joseph Grew. A proponent of modifying “unconditional surrender” to permit the retention of the imperial institution and of using Hirohito’s authority for at least the first phase of the Occupation, Grew was the former U.S. ambassador to Japan and, during 1944–45, under secretary of state. He firmly advocated the monarchy be used to unify “liberal” elements in Japan willing to cooperate with the global postwar objectives of the United States. And Grew was a key participant in the development of plans for the Occupation of Japan, especially the treatment of the emperor.

The Making of a Diplomat

Born in 1880 into a wealthy and socially prominent Boston family, Joseph C. Grew attended Groton prep school and Harvard College. Shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1902, he decided on a career in the U.S. diplomatic service. Starting as a consular clerk in Cairo, the young diplomat and his new wife, daughter of a “Boston Brahmin,” jumped from post to post over the world until settling down for almost nine years in Berlin prior to American entry into World War I. His work as secretary to the U.S. Commission to the Paris Peace Conference attracted the favorable attention of President Woodrow Wilson’s advisor, Colonel Edward M. House, and others, and Grew was promoted to ministerial rank in 1920. Grew served as minister to Denmark and Switzerland and then as delegate to the Conference on Near Eastern Affairs in Lausanne during 1922 and 1923. Lausanne established Grew’s reputation as a skilful diplomat and he was chosen by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes as under secretary, theoretically the number two position in the department. But Hughes gave Grew trivial duties, as did his successor, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg. Grew became increasingly isolated from the policy-making circles of the department. His plans for developing a professional Foreign Service met with mounting congressional and public criticism, and in the spring of 1927 a humiliated under secretary welcomed his appointment as ambassador to Turkey, a post he proudly held for the next five years.²

With his appointment as ambassador to Japan in 1932 Grew moved into a storm of domestic and international conflict. The world depression profoundly shook each of the five major groups or cliques that formed the oligarchy ruling Japan since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The army and navy leaders, the top government bureaucrats, the leaders of the political parties, the Zaibatsu families who controlled the financial and industrial nexus, and the large landholders—all jockeyed to hold or increase power within the ruling coalition under the stress of economic disaster. But all were committed to strengthening the emperor system as the keystone to maintaining their rule over the Japanese people. Using every method of propaganda known, the oligarchy had created by the 1930s an emperor perceived as the personification of the whole nation. He was said to be descended from a supernatural being and therefore to be revered as a religious figure and unquestionably obeyed as the father of all Japanese.

The depression did not undermine the authority of the emperor system. It did prompt more intense government repression of dissenting groups and political parties. Extreme right-wing organizations gained large followings and influence, especially in the military. The day the Grews left Washington for the Orient, a band of young naval officers and army cadets assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Ki, the third prominent victim of nationalist agitation that year. In the aftermath, the war minister backed the demand of the army for an end to governments headed by leaders of the political parties and thus retracted a concession made by the oligarchy to popular unrest after World War I. When Grew took up his mission a nonparty regime headed by a retired admiral was in place and the military had clearly assumed a more important role in the ruling coalition.³

As Grew quickly discovered, the growing military involvement of Japan on the Asian mainland helped entrench the military cabinets of the 1930s. Military incidents in Manchuria in 1931 prompted a Japanese occupation of the area and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manzhouguo). This move, which shattered the agreements of the Western Powers and Japan for dealing with China reached at the Washington Conference of 1921 and 1922, was a predictable outcome of the expansionist foreign policy supported by the ruling oligarchy since 1890. Japanese leaders believed that, for Japan to successfully industrialize and become a great power, it was necessary to secure markets and raw materials from overseas. Manchuria, Northern China, and Korea played the most prominent role in the evolving plans for empire. Both the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 were fought to secure and protect Japan’s economic and security interests in the area. The withdrawal of European military power from China during World War I prompted greater Japanese expansion on the mainland. The Washington Conference agreements ended the immediate threat of war with the West but encouraged the rise of Chinese nationalism and the beginning of the unification of China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi). As the decade of the 1920s drew to a close, Japanese efforts to expand in northern China met stiff resistance from the Chinese. The depression intensified the oligarchy’s interest in the raw materials and markets of the Asian mainland and lit the fuse that exploded in the Manchurian incident.⁴ Defying Western demands to adhere to the Washington Conference treaties and the League of Nations, Japan had become an openly predatory nation in the eyes of most of the world when Grew arrived in Tokyo.

Sensitive to the vigorous protests and threats of military action by Secretary of State Henry Stimson and the policy of nonrecognition of Manzhouguo by President Herbert Hoover, a stream of high court officials, Foreign Office bureaucrats, and naval officers visited Grew within a few months of his arrival to express their strong misgivings about the Manchurian venture. Variously called by Grew the “thoughtful,” “liberal,” “moderate,” or “saner” Japanese, these men were the type Grew knew and understood. Almost all of them were from wealthy and socially prominent families, had studied in the West, spoke English, and shared a disposition for Western concepts of peace and order. Grew held out hope that they would be able to regain control over the militarists and put Japan back on the path taken during the 1920s.

Grew idealized the Japan of the 1920s, describing it with glowing simplicity in terms of constitutional party government and peaceful diplomacy. In so doing he ignored the fact that, even after passage of universal manhood suffrage in 1925, no party represented any significant proportion of peasants and workers. The oligarchy, including the “moderates,” carried out a program of active repression against the militant labor and tenant farmer unions as well as against socialist and anarchist organization. The gains of the two major parties were made through often corrupt collaboration with key bureaucrats, military leaders, and the Zaibatsu. Although the governments of the 1920s tolerated limited union organization and moderate leftist parties and passed some social legislation, Japan’s experiment with party government was far from a triumph of popular democracy. Similarly, Japanese diplomacy of the 1920s, while based on peaceful cooperation with the West, still remained committed to plans for empire in China as the highest priority. Those who Grew considered extremists differed from his moderate friends not so much in their diplomatic objectives as in their tactics and the timing of Japan’s expansionist moves.⁵

In any case, members of the Imperial Court had an especially strong influence on Grew. Count Kabayama Aisuke of the House of Peers linked Grew to a network of aristocrats including Imperial Household Minister Matsudaira Tsuneo, Prince Tokugawa Iyeseto, heir of the last of the Shoguns, Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s brother and an Oxford graduate, and Prince Konoye Fumimaro, a nobleman of extraordinary wealth who, as premier, became Grew’s hope at the end of the 1930s for avoiding a clash between Japan and the United States. Yoshida Shigeru, then ambassador to Italy, served as one of Grew’s most important liaisons to Japanese political circles in the 1930s. Yoshida and his father-in-law, Count Makino Nobuaki, sought to convince Grew that the forces of moderation, backed by the emperor himself, were on the upswing. Kabayama, Yoshida, Makino, Matsudaira, former foreign minister Baron Shidehara Kijuro, whose diplomacy of the previous decade rested on commitment to the Washington treaties, and a few others persuaded Grew of the “pendulum theory” of Japanese development. “Japanese history shows that the country has passed through periodical cycles of intense nationalism attended by anti-foreign sentiment, but these periods have always been followed by other periods of international conciliation and cooperation,” Grew maintained, “and there will be a similar outcome in the present situation.”⁶

Through his acquaintance with this small coterie of aristocrats and internationalists, Grew also derived his view of the emperor as the cornerstone of a great culture and civilization temporarily derailed by militarists and ultranationalists. According to this line of thinking, Japan’s actions in the 1930s did not stem from any structural flaws in the oligarchic state system, headed by the emperor, that was established in the Meiji Restoration. In fact, Grew shared the belief of Count Makino that the danger of both fascism and communism in Japan was not real as long as the emperor remained supreme. Even after the outbreak of war with China and in the Pacific, Grew held firmly to the view that the emperor was the key to a moderate and internationally peaceful Japan.

Though by 1934 Grew came to see Japanese expansionism in China as a fixed policy because the military “was firmly in the saddle and will continue to be there,” he remained hopeful that “painfully and by slow degrees” the moderates could regain control and restrain the militarists. He believed that American policy toward Japan should avoid recriminations and be conducted in a spirit of conciliation which would assist the Japanese moderates. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 did not alter Grew’s conviction that the United States should refrain from meddling in the conflict. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and most of the State Department agreed with Grew, but unlike him, sympathized with the plight of the Chinese and considered it futile to talk of improving relations with Japan until its violations of the peace structure in China ceased.⁷

Grew remained sympathetic to the Japanese position in China even after more than two years of war. He considered that “Japan in China has a good case and strong case if she knew how to present it, but her stupidity in publicity and progaganda is only exceeded by her stupidity in methods.” Grew had nothing but praise for Minister to China John V. A. MacMurray’s celebrated 1935 memorandum in which “Chinese intransigence” was contrasted with the patient efforts of Japan to preserve the Washington Treaty system before the Manchurian incident. “Japan in China has behaved like a bull in a china shop,” Grew wrote to a former ambassador to Japan in February 1940. “That means largely the military. They have injured if not ruined their own reasonably sound cause by their ruthless methods. Apart from breach of treaty commitments they have set out to bomb our American property out of existence and to crowd legitimate American business and trade out of China by monopolies, trade restrictions, and a hundred other methods of discriminating interference.”⁸

With the announcement in July 1939 of its intention to terminate the U.S.-Japan commercial treaty, the State Department embarked on a course of pressuring Japan to respect American interests in China. Grew was not even consulted, no doubt because of his repeated admonitions against any sanctions that were not backed by a willingness to go to war. In the aftermath of the unexpected Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of war in Europe, the Japanese sought to improve relations with the United States and avoid abrogation of the commercial treaty in January 1940. Grew saw his task as informing the Japanese people, especially the moderates, that they were deluding themselves if they believed there could be a Japanese-American rapprochement and a continuation of Japanese policies in China. Ever the optimist, Grew considered his efforts by February 1940 to have helped “liberal minded Japanese … to see where the tactics of the military are leading the country so far as relations with the United States were concerned …. A patient effort is developing to conciliate and play the game along saner lines. The extremists in the army have been taken out of controlling positions and have been replaced by officers of broader vision. … The bombings of American property and the indignities to American citizens have almost but not quite stopped.”⁹

Though Grew’s efforts were appreciated by the moderates, he did not reorient their thinking or shake their complacency. After all, such moderates as Prime Minister Konoye and Foreign Minister Hirota Koki had led the hardliners in Japan after the outbreak of war in China in 1937 in seeking a “fundamental solution of Sino-Japanese relations” through aggressive military campaigns. Leaders of Japanese business and industry, also moderates in Grew’s view, publicly supported after 1937 a military government for all of China. The emperor himself refused in 1938 to grant an audience to the Army General Staff which, at that point, opposed military and political activities in China.¹⁰ Yet in the spring of 1940 Grew was still inclined to believe that these same moderates had finally come to see the fallacy of Japan’s quest for autarky and welcomed encouragement from the United States.

Events quickly overwhelmed Grew’s controversial policy that he called—in answer to those who dubbed him an appeaser—“constructive conciliation.” Throughout the summer of 1940 Grew made repeated pleas to Japanese leaders not to join with Germany and Italy in an Axis alliance but to adjust relations with the United States. He got nowhere. In his famous “green-light” cable of 12 September 1940, sent two weeks before Japan formally joined the Tripartite Pact, Grew confessed the failure of his diplomacy. With his confidence lost in the independent strength of the moderates and in their policies Grew recommended the implementation of sanctions by the United States and preparation for war against Japan.¹¹

The formation of the Axis alliance and the creation of new authoritarian institutions by the second Konoye cabinet deepened Grew’s pessimism. Occasionally during 1941 Grew had recurrent hopes that an agreement might be reached which would take the two governments off their collision course. Grew favored taking up the Japanese initiative of August for a meeting somewhere in the Pacific between Premier Konoye and President Roosevelt. But by then Japanese armies had already occupied French Indochina and operational plans were hastened for an invasion of Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines. The Imperial Navy had begun preparations for an attack on Pearl Harbor. On the American side, Roosevelt responded to Japan’s southward advance by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States and embargoing oil. Though his prognosis was generally gloomy, Grew again and again urged the State Department not to insist on detailed commitments as a condition for the meeting of the two heads of state. Secretary of State Cordell Hull disagreed. On his advice, the president informed Japanese Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburo that Japan must first stop its military advances, withdraw troops from China, resolve problems of trade discrimination, and give a clearer statement of its position in regard to the European war. With that the Konoye cabinet resigned.¹² In short, the Japanese government sought both hegemony over China and Southeast Asia and friendly relations with the United States. When Roosevelt and Hull confronted the Japanese with a choice between those two objectives, the attack upon Pearl Harbor was the tragic answer.

For months Grew had warned Washington that time was running out and war was unavoidable without a relaxation in the American negotiating position. But the boldness and success of the attack on Pearl Harbor took him, like almost all Americans, by bitter surprise. He and his staff were interned in the American embassy from 8 December 1941 to 25 June 1942. Two months later, he arrived in New York and went directly to Washington to report to Secretary Hull. At age sixty-two, Grew viewed his career as coming to an end. His advice and the work of the embassy had been largely ignored. Little did he forsee that the next...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Joseph C. Grew: The Emperor of Japan and Planning the Occupation
• 2. Douglas MacArthur: The Peacemaker and the Presidency
• 3. T. A. Bisson: The Limits of Reform in Occupied Japan
• 4. James S. Killen: American Labor’s Cold War in Occupied Japan
• 5. Harry F. Kern: The Japan Lobby in American Diplomacy
• 6. William H. Draper, Jr.: The Eightieth Congress and the Origins of Japan’s “Reverse Course”
• 7. Joseph M. Dodge: The Integration of Japan into the World Economy
• 8. John Foster Dulles: American Bases, Rearmament, and the China Questions in the Making of the Japanese Peace Treaty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index