When, in March 1947, MacArthur called for an early peace with Japan and the withdrawal of US and Allied troops, he assumed there was no immediate danger of a Soviet attack on the island nation and that Japan’s security could be adequately guaranteed by the United Nations’ collective defense mechanism. But army strategic planners and some civilian policy planners valued bases in Japan and Okinawa, and killed the drive to end the occupation. Unsure about the Chinese Communist regime’s future orientation, US officials initially hoped that Mao Zedong, driven by a hybrid of Marxist ideology and Chinese nationalism, would become a Tito-like renegade force within international Communism. However, when Mao signed a military alliance with Moscow in February 1950 and when he intervened in the Korean War in the fall of that year, he removed uncertainties lingering in Washington about Beijing’s intentions and thereby rearranged the geopolitical and ideological configuration of East Asia. In this radically altered picture, Japan’s importance in American strategic thinking skyrocketed almost overnight. Upgraded from the status of a former enemy in need of reform, Japan was now a crucial
Rearguard base for US forces fighting in Korea under the UN banner. Given its industrial capacity, population, and geographical location, Japan’s credentials as the United States’ new partner in the containment of Communism in the Far East now appeared self-evident.
Among the benefits of this enhanced status was a renewed, and this time irresistible, call for a peace treaty, a lenient one at that. To ensure bipartisan congressional support, President Harry S. Truman - then being hounded by the nagging question, "Who lost China?" - appointed John Foster Dulles, a prominent Republican with proven expertise on foreign policy, to head the negotiations with Japan. Entering into negotiations in Tokyo, Dulles insisted on the retention ofAmerican bases in Japan, with no time limits or restrictions on their use, for the duration of the Korean War. By early 1951, the Japanese government, particularly Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, had already decided to entrust Japan’s postindependence security to the Americans and accepted the continued presence of US forces within its sovereign territory. Pro-American and wily, Yoshida knew the provision of bases to the United States was a price Japan had to pay for the restoration of sovereignty. He did not object to the idea that Japan’s future security and interests would be most efficiently safeguarded through cooperative relations with the Americans. And yet he still maneuvered to extract as lenient a peace as possible from the Allies by playing the "base" card with Washington.363
On September 8, 1951, Japan signed a peace treaty in San Francisco with forty-eight nations. No severe restrictions were placed on Japan’s economy or future political orientation. While Article ii stated that the Japanese government accepted the Military Tribunal for the Far East, there was no direct reference to Japan’s war responsibility. While Asian signatories worried about Japan’s resurgence as a military power, the treaty contained no provisions restricting Japan’s rearmament. Under American pressure, key belligerents renounced their claims to reparations. Southeast Asians, who refused to do so, were left to negotiate bilaterally with Japan at a separate venue.364
Besides its leniency, the San Francisco Peace Treaty was also notable for its truncated nature. In Japanese parlance of the day, it gave Japan only a "partial peace" (katamen kowa). Among those invited to the conference, Yugoslavia, India, and Burma refused to attend. The Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia participated but refused to sign the treaty. Representatives
Of China, the nation on which Japan inflicted the most extensive destruction and human suffering from the time of the Manchurian incident in 1931 until the end ofWorld War II, were not at the peace conference. This abnormality reflected a laboriously crafted compromise between Britain, which recognized the PRC inJanuary 1951, and the United States, determined to ostracize Beijing. Dulles flew to London in June to iron out British-American differences over China, and the result was an agreement with British foreign secretary Herbert Morrison that neither of the claimants to the governance of China would be invited to San Francisco.365
The San Francisco Peace Treaty was not without heavy cost for Japan, however. One price paid was a bilateral security agreement it had to sign with the United States concurrent with the peace treaty. Going into force with the ratification of the peace treaty in April 1952, the security accord gave the United States the continued and fundamentally unrestricted use of bases in Japan proper and total administrative control over Okinawa until "peace and security" were achieved in the Far East. Okinawa, the keystone of US military operations in Asia, thus remained detached from Japanese sovereignty. The security treaty also relegated postindependence Japan to the status of military dependant by giving the United States the right to intervene militarily in the event of internal disorder in Japan, and by depriving Japan of the right to provide bases to a third country without US consent. In negotiating the peace treaty, the Japanese government sought to avoid being locked into this kind of bilateral military bondage to the United States. Reflecting their belief in postwar multilateralism, Japanese officials initially preferred to place the nation’s security arrangements with the United States explicitly under the umbrella of the collective self-defense mechanism sanctioned by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. But Dulles rejected this option.366
From Tokyo’s standpoint, another problem of the San Francisco Peace Treaty was that the Soviet Union and the PRC remained outside its framework. The incomplete nature ofthe peace caused a deep division within Japan, a schism reflecting dueling visions of Japan’s place in the postwar world. Those Japanese who desired "a whole peace" (zenmen kowa), including the country’s two Communist neighbors, envisaged a Japan that was not a mere appendage to American Cold War policy. Spearheaded by leftist intellectuals, oppositional journalists, and the Socialist and Communist Parties, this political
Coalition argued that Japan could safeguard its security through diplomatic neutrality and the unarmed pacifism that, they believed, was required by Article IX of the postwar constitution. Their ideological rivals - those who accepted a partial peace with the United States and its allies - either resigned themselves to, or actively sought, a Cold War alliance with Washington. For them, the best guarantee of Japan’s security was a continued US military presence inJapan and Okinawa, perhaps coupled with Japan’s own incremental rearmament, with or without a constitutional revision in the future.
The San Francisco Peace Treaty and the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty thus catalyzed an ideological debate inside Japan and shaped party alignments for most of the Cold War. The peace achieved only with the non-Communist world and the quasi-military dependency Japan accepted vis-a-vis the United States placed foreign-policy questions front and center of postoccupation Japan’s political debate. In this ideologically charged political environment, the United States and its Cold War dictates came to play an inordinately far-reaching and symbolic part.367
The ideological nature of the national debate over the peace treaty was most salient with regard to China. The Dulles-Morrison agreement left unresolved the question of an independent Japan’s diplomatic relations with China, the problem over which Yoshida and Dulles had fiercely dueled. Desiring to restore Japanese trade with the vast Chinese mainland market, Yoshida sought to leave open the possibility of establishing governmental ties with the Communist regime. Yoshida’s ideological pragmatism regarding China reflected his belief in the likelihood of a future PRC-Soviet estrangement. Until his semi-forced political retirement at the end of 1954, Yoshida preached indefatigably to American officials that Japan’s capitalist penetration of the China market would help reorient the PRC and hasten a split between Moscow and Beijing. But Yoshida’s nascent two-Chinas policy did not persuade Dulles. To keep the China lobby in the United States from derailing Senate ratification of the peace treaty, Dulles pressed Yoshida to sign a separate peace accord with Jiang’s Republic of China in Taiwan. The choice Japan was forced to make regarding China in exchange for regaining its national sovereignty illustrated the narrow parameters within which Japan was able to conduct its relations with the rest of Asia during this phase of the Cold War.
World History
