SAYURI GUTHRIE-SHIMIZU
On August 14, 1945, still reeling from the aftershock of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government accepted the Allied powers’ Potsdam Declaration, and World War II came to an end in the Asia-Pacific. Stripped of all of its colonial possessions acquired since 1895, Japan faced, for the first time in its history, occupation by foreign troops and reconstitution of its government at the behest of external authorities. As the nominally Allied occupation of the vanquished empire began, US general Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), stood atop the Allied military command and administrative structure inJapan. At this moment, the post-World War II histories of the United States and Japan became inexorably entwined. The atomic blasts, which killed 40,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000 inhabitants and 70,000 of the 270,000 people in Nagasaki, ushered in the nuclear age and Japan’s quest for redemption in the postwar world where visions of the "American century" now reigned supreme. This symbiotic genesis foreshadowed the knotting of Japan’s antinuclear pacifism and the United States’ investment, both material and metaphorical, in a nuclear arsenal as the bedrock of international peace and security during the Cold War.
In this braided history, it was the United States’ self-assigned mission to remold Japan into a stable democracy conforming to the Western and capitalist rules of the game. But within months of the war’s end, the confrontation with the Soviet Union began to color American strategic thinking and foreign policymaking, and the task of refashioning Japan came under the added and accumulating weight of the developing Cold War between the two superpowers. Officials in Washington and the American proconsul inJapan became determined to minimize Soviet influence in occupied Japan. By early 1946, the effective exclusion fTom the Allied Council and the Far East Commission - the inter-Allied institutions overseeing the occupation - of Soviet, and to a lesser extent British, voices infused another source of rancor into the former
Grand Alliance. The implementation of occupation policies became in all vital respects an American enterprise, with a small contingent of British Commonwealth forces, mostly Australian, sharing peripheral military tasks.
In the early postwar years, American policies for Japan were contingent on other strategic imperatives the United States found in the smoldering debris of the now-defunct Empire of the Sun. The Chinese Civil War, which resumed in the immediate wake of Japan’s surrender, unfolded alongside early signs of American-Soviet geopolitical irreconcilability regarding Europe and the Middle East. Despite a yearlong mediation effort by the United States, the Communist-Nationalist split became irreversible by early 1947, and the Communist forces gradually emerged triumphant in the internecine military conflict. The flight of the Nationalist forces ofJiangJieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) to Taiwan and proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 introduced an additional layer of complication in American plans for postwar East Asia.352 The hot war in which the United States became mired on the Korean peninsula, another zone of contention recently liberated from Japanese colonial rule, compounded the task of reordering its strategic priorities in East Asia and destabilized its agenda for occupied Japan.353
The dissolution of Japan’s colonial empire and its democratic makeover proceeded alongside parallel historical developments in Asia. In the 1950s, the United States as a global hegemon found itselfamidst the gathering torrents of nationalism and the retreat of European colonialism in Asia. On this shifting political terrain, the United States began searching for a way to harness decolonization to American advantage and, perhaps, to that of its newly christened ally, Japan. But the challenge was not Americans’ alone. As the ranks of newly independent nations grew and anticolonialism became a rallying banner among them in the 1950s, Japan faced anew its historical challenge of defining its place in Asia and somehow reconciling it with the niche in the Western world it so coveted. This conundrum in the face of decolonizing Asia appeared all the more daunting in the early Cold War years because Moscow and Beijing, armed with revolutionary ideology and propagating alternative visions of social organization, appeared to hold an advantage in the competition for the hearts and minds of recently decolonized nations in Asia and elsewhere. From 1945 to 1960, it was under this composite overhang of the global superpower rivalry and the process of decolonization
19. General Douglas MacArthur of the United States and Emperor Hirohito of Japan meet in the US embassy in Tokyo, September 1945. Until the previous month, the Japanese regime had promoted the worship of the emperor as a god, and he had rarely been seen in public.
That the United States and Japan had to readjust their relationship and maximize their respective interests.
World History
