SEMINARS

Training and education in international affairs:
Japan, Palestine and the Middle East (1999)

Modern History of Japan

One of the most interesting aspects of the post-war period is the American-Japanese relationship. During the war, the Americans and the Japanese were bitter enemies, and the Americans, certainly, had never hated an enemy as much as they hated the Japanese, whom they considered less than human. In light of the fact that the Americans dropped the atomic bomb and destroyed all the cities of Japan, one would assume that this great hatred between the Japanese and Americans would have lasted for many generations, but the fact is, it evaporated incredibly quickly. Part of it can be explained with the fact that the Japanese are so good at changing and adapting, which means that they can easily change from a bitter enemy into a good friend. In other words, if you are going to war, you go to war, but if you are going to make peace, then you make peace. At the end of the war, the Japanese knew, even without being urged on by the Emperor, that surrendering and making peace with the Americans was the right thing to do in order to avoid an American conquest of every Japanese town and city.

The Japanese were also fortunate that their enemy was the United States, rather than, for example, the Soviet Union. Even though the Americans dropped the atomic bomb, they had no desire to annex Japan or to punish the Japanese, and the American Government was extremely lenient toward Japan after the war, even though American public opinion was strongly anti-Japanese and demanded punishment. The main reason was that the Cold War broke out immediately after World War II. The Soviets had succeeded in China and the Americans needed to show the Asian people that capitalism, not communism was the right system. Consequently, it was in their interest to rebuild Japan rather than destroy and punish it. Since Japan had surrendered unconditionally, the Americans could do whatever they wanted but there was an understanding that they would not destroy Japan or the Royal Family or even depose the Emperor, in whose name the Japanese had fought the war. The idea of 'forgiving and forgetting' vis-à-vis Hitler was unthinkable, but the United States needed the Emperor because through him they could do anything, whereas without him, there would have been an uprising against the Americans.

It is interesting to note that when all the Japanese political leaders who were responsible for the war were put on trial and executed, the vast majority of Japanese believed that they should have committed suicide when the war ended following the tradition of the Samurai. As far as they were concerned, it was shameful for them to be executed rather than kill themselves.

Because the Americans treated the Japanese well, the Japanese reciprocated by reacting in a positive way to the Americans. When the Americans had announced that they were going to occupy Japan, the Japanese, having never before been occupied, had no idea what would happen and were convinced that their own cruelty would result in the Americans taking revenge. Consequently, many Japanese families sent their womenfolk into hiding as they believed that they would all be raped and murdered once the American soldiers arrived, whereas what actually happened was that the Americans gave them food and treated them with nothing but respect. Having realized that the Americans were not nearly as bad as they had imagined, the Japanese fondness of the West and their desire to learn from the West reemerged.

The Americans were also mistaken about the true nature of the Japanese, so mistaken that General MacArthur thought that he would need millions of soldiers in every town and in every village, only to discover that the Japanese were perfectly willing to cooperate with the American occupation. Had the Japanese responded with force, there is no doubt that the Americans would have crushed them completely, being so much stronger, but as it was, they did not even put the Emperor on trial or call him as a witness, let alone execute him, which left the Japanese people with a very good impression about the Americans

. The first meeting between Emperor Hirohito (Emperor of Japan from 1926 until 1989) and MacArthur has become a famous story. MacArthur had refused to meet the Emperor in the palace, as this would have implied that the Emperor was more important than he was. What happened next was almost unbelievable: the Emperor took a couple of people and drove to the building in which the American general's office was situated where, upon hearing that MacArthur would not even condescend to meet him downstairs, he walked up the stairs to MacArthur's office. When the Emperor told MacArthur "I take responsibility for the war. You can do whatever you want," it really threw the general, who thought that he had come to plead for his life. MacArthur believed that the Japanese would now look down on the Emperor but he was wrong; the Japanese actually said that they admired the Emperor because for the sake of Japan, he had gone and lost prestige, so, in the end, the Emperor was saved, not only as an institution but also as a person .

What happened next was that the Americans decided that they should change Japan from being a militaristic society so that it would not attack them again. Thus they said to the Emperor, "How about declaring that you are not God anymore?" "No problem," said the Emperor, and on 1 January 1946 he told his people, "My people, there has always been a myth that I am a God. I am a human being just like you." For the Americans it was a great achievement, but to be perfectly honest, few Japanese really cared because it was a title of respect; after all, there were eight million gods and one more or one less was not going to make any difference

. Next, MacArthur decided that the Japanese should become a democratic society, believing with good reason that generally, democratic countries do not fight each other. However, the Japanese did not want to change their constitution, so MacArthur said that if they did not change it, he would write them a new one - which he, or rather one of his staff, did in approximately one week. The Japanese then made it a sort of amendment to the previous constitution, and once it had been signed by the Emperor and approved by the Japanese Parliament, after the making of a few minor changes, it was established as the new constitution of Japan in 1946. It came into force in 1947 and is still the constitution of Japan today.

Although the new constitution was written by the Americans it is such an idealistic constitution that the Japanese fell in love with it straight away. Even today, they are very committed to it, the reason being that the previous constitution had said "I the Emperor of Japan bestow on you this constitution," whereas this one says that "the sovereignty of the constitution lays in the sovereignty of the people". It goes on to say that the Emperor is a symbol of the State, just like the flag, and has no real power whatsoever. So it is a very democratic constitution, all power to the parliament and total freedom of speech and of organization, etc.

The most important clause, however, is clause number nine, which says that Japan will never again go to war and will never have a military or develop a nuclear potential. Costa Rica is the only other country in the world whose constitution says that it should have no army. A few years after the constitution was signed, the Americans discovered that they had made a great mistake because they realized that it would be a good idea to have Japan, like Germany, become an ally of the United States. The problem was that when they came to the Japanese and said, "Now we are allies, there is the Cold War and the Soviet Union, so how about building a military?" the Japanese turned around and said, "No, our constitution does not allow us." "But it was us who wrote the constitution!" said the Americans, to which the Japanese replied, "No it was the Japanese people who wrote it." Even today the Japanese people believe that they wrote their own constitution.

When the Korean War broke out, the Americans were forced to move their army from Japan to Korea, and it was then that they put real pressure on Japan to build a military, partly because of their fear of communism, which by that time had become legal in Japan. The Japanese did, eventually, agree to build a military, but because the constitution was against the building of a military as such and could not be changed, the Japanese built something called the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Members of the SDF are not called soldiers but 'employees' of the SDF, and even though some Japanese said that it was unconstitutional, the courts did not abolish it, everyone having realized that Japan needed some kind of military. The United Nations Charter recognizes that every nation has the right to self-defense, but even so, Japan's military has remained small and never exceeded more than 250,000 members out of a total population of 120 million people. Moreover, all of its equipment is defensive, the sole purpose of the SDF being to block an invasion of Japan. Nevertheless, the military budget of Japan is the second largest in the world. One of the reasons is that because the army is not constitutional, meaning that there is no national service, the Government of Japan is obliged to pay members of the SDF extremely high salaries. In addition, Japan's military equipment, although it is defensive, is amongst the best and therefore most expensive in the world. Certainly the SDF stands in stark contrast to the army in Korea, where one million people out of a total population of 20 million are in the army, which has aircraft and tanks and even, perhaps, nuclear weapons.

Japanese 'soldiers' are like any other employees and can resign whenever they want. Worthy of note is the fact that they take off their uniforms the second they go home because they are ashamed of being associated in any way with anything military. In fact, what has happened is that the former most militaristic society in the world has actually become the most pacifistic society in the world, so pacifistic that in Japan, any war is considered as unjust. Opinion polls have revealed that were there to be an invasion of Japan by China, the vast majority of Japanese would choose to leave the country or be ruled by the Chinese rather than fight. Moreover, when the United Nations (UN) asked the Japanese to provide some military personnel for missions around the world, the Japanese public were against it, being afraid that this would lead to something else, such as Japan going on to conquer China, which is of course crazy but shows the extent to which the Japanese are against the military.

The Japanese forgot about the war very quickly and became very pro-American, both with regard to learning from the Americans and with regard to American popular culture, which resulted in many English words entering the Japanese language. Even in the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, American soldiers going there were well received, even more warmly than in other places and even right after the war. This is rather strange, as the Americans did not behave very well in these cities; at one point they built a clinic in Hiroshima and many Japanese went there in search of treatment, only to discover that it was there conducting research on the effects of radiation. However, instead of hating the Americans, the Japanese treated the war like a game of sports; you played it, you lost, okay, no bad feelings. Every year in Nagasaki and Hiroshima there is a commemoration, but although there is a lot of talk about bombs and nuclear disarmament, no mention is made of who dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Japanese having long ago accepted the fact that they made and were punished for making a huge mistake. Today, if you go up to a Japanese and ask, "What do you associate with Hiroshima?" nine times out of ten the answer will be either "The car industry" or "Mazda," because Mazda cars are built in Hiroshima, and in some cases "Its baseball team"; only way down the list of associations comes the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Unlike the Japanese, the Americans have not displayed a willingness to forget. For example, 50 years after Pearl Harbor the Americans held a big ceremony, but when the Japanese asked to be invited, they were horrified. As far as the Japanese were concerned, this was a new era, one in which they were working alongside the Americans, and everyone should let bygones be bygones. In Japanese religion, there is none of this strong divide between what is good and what is wrong, between black and white, and the Japanese felt that during the war cruelty was part of the way one fights, whereas after the war you have to be friendly because you have made peace. One could even say that the Japanese regard what happened during the war as a natural disaster, such as the earthquake that destroyed Tokyo in 1923, when the number of people killed was approximately the same as the number killed in the war. The way the Japanese look at things, when there is an earthquake you do not blame anyone but reorganize, rebuild and then forget all about it. The lesson that Japan and the United States learnt from World War II was not the same. The lesson that the Americans learnt is that one should never appease an aggressor and that they had been wrong to appease Hitler before the war instead of confronting aggression, which was the whole rational behind the Cold War. In contrast, the Japanese learnt that it does not matter if you are right or wrong, war is bad, and if the Americans want to fight the Soviet Union, that is their choice, but Japan will not help them.

Having made a decision to refrain from ever becoming militarily involved in any future conflicts, the Japanese had to decide on what it was they should concentrate on as a nation. What they decided was that theirs should be an economic role and that all the military energy should be re-channeled into economic energy. Consequently, Japanese fighters became businessmen and in building their factories, the Japanese made use of this idea of doing something for the Emperor, but this time, the idea was not to fight, but to make money.

There was, however, a problem, namely democracy. The government in Japan was not nationalistic, but a moderate, conservative right wing. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled Japan since the end of the war is a conservative party and the socialists and communists were always the opposition. There were some extremes, a small group of right wingers and some left wingers and some violence, terror and assassinations by extreme right wingers, and there were also some terrorist attacks from small, terrorist student groups. However, all these groups were suppressed and when it came to the polls, the majority of Japanese always voted for the Conservatives. The old triangle had been composed of bureaucrats, military men and businessmen, whereas the new one was composed of bureaucrats, conservative politicians and businessmen, making it a much stronger triangle, simply because those involved had been to school together and knew each other well, so they helped each other a lot.

Even though the Americans wanted to see the economic recovery of Japan, unlike in Europe, where there was the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy, in Japan there was nothing. Some say that there was something racist in this, but the Americans did do some positive things for Japan, such as opening the American markets to Japanese goods, selling American technology to the Japanese, and accepting Japanese limitations on American goods to help Japanese industries to grow. The Japanese Government, which was strong and pro-business, also helped business in all sorts of ways, including by establishing a special ministry called the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), and the businessmen themselves displayed great skills and intelligence.

As well as the physical and organizational destruction, there had also been some ideological destruction. For instance, singing the national anthem or raising the flag was now frowned upon because it was associated with nationalism, and even today, although the government ordered schools to raise the flag, the teachers are against it. In other words, the Japanese showed a great move from ultra-nationalism to anti-nationalism. Today, the strongest movement against nationalism is the Teachers' Union.

In a way, the destruction that took place in Japan had some positive sides, because the fact that all the factories were destroyed meant that brand-new efficient ones had to be built in their place, making them the newest in the world. Also good for the Japanese was that the colonies were taken away from them, because from an economic point of view these colonies did not pay and it was better to get rid of them. But from where did Japan now get all its raw material? The answer to that is that the United States wanted to help Japan so it told all the other countries to sell the Japanese what they asked for, and with the American market now open, the Japanese economy was able to prosper.

With regard to the former Japanese soldiers, they were now busy with becoming good workers and were more than willing to sacrifice themselves for work because they knew that in the long run, their factories would become richer and their salaries would grow. This, however, required some long-range thinking, which was not easy because there were many strikes after the war. The communists and socialists had become very active and were accusing people of cooperating with the imperialist United States because even though Japan did not send soldiers to the Korean War, the war was helping the Japanese economy because all the civilian orders for cars etc. went to Japan. The Americans were actually very upset when the Japanese said that they would participate in the Cold War on an economic basis but would not be a part of the military struggle, although they realized that the Japanese Constitution would not allow them to do anything else. It was not just the legal restriction; the Japanese public opinion was very much against the war. Today, even if the Emperor of Japan were to go on the radio and tell the Japanese to go to war against China, the people of Japan would not follow him. He is still admired, but because of the new constitution of Japan and the new education system the vast majority of Japanese care very little about the Emperor and if he is mentioned at all in the newspapers, it is only in a couple of lines on page three or four.

There was, of course, a great danger inherent in this right-left confrontation, the fact that workers were striking and students, who were becoming increasingly radical, were accusing the government of trying to remilitarize Japan to appease the Americans. With regard to the latter, they were also demonstrating against the Security Pact because in 1952, America agreed to allow the Japanese to become independent again on condition that they sign a Security Pact with the United States, according to which the Americans would keep their bases in Japan and use them in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The peak of the student demonstrations was in 1960 when thousands of students marched and surrounded the Japanese Parliament, but even though the Prime Minister resigned, the new government that was formed continued with the security treaty.

Because the right wing, the conservatives and the employers all realized that too much confrontation in the workplace could pose a serious danger to stability and productivity, the employers decided that it would be wise to cooperate with the workforce and gain its confidence. The result of this was that although there continued to be national trade unions, negotiations took place in the factory, the general idea being that because employers and workers knew each other well, they were better qualified than an outsider to decide how much each could give up. The new cooperation was also based on security for the employee, which meant that once someone was accepted into a big company, it would perhaps lower salaries in the event of a crisis but never fire him. In other words, there was this kind of human connection, the idea that workers were part of an extended family rather than nothing but machines. From that point on, even the president of a company would wear the same uniform as the regular employees, and everyone would eat in the same cafeteria, use the same toilets etc., which sounds kind of petty but it was very symbolic. Even the salaries of the managers were kept at a reasonable level so that the workers would not feel that they were being exploited. Moreover, promotions were based on seniority, the sick were taken care of, and kindergartens were organized for the workers' children, so everyone was happy. In addition, profits were shared with the workers in the form of twice yearly bonuses, which might be small or large, depending on how business was going.

With regard to the idea of giving bonuses, it was extremely clever as workers, until today, tend to put them in banks rather than spend them, which is due in part to a long Japanese tradition of saving money and, particularly in the past, to concern regarding the future. It would have been easy for the Japanese to encourage foreign investors to come and invest in Japan, but they did not want to do that because they were afraid of foreign control, so lacking foreign investment, they took the money they needed from the people, but this time, not by taxing the farmers like during the 'restoration', but by using the savings of the workforce. When people put these lump sums of money in the bank once or twice a year, the banks were able to use this money to invest in the Japanese economy, and most of the owners of the shares in the new industries were banks rather than private shareholders.

One of the reasons why the banks invested was that they had more patience than private investors, who tend to want quick returns on their money. The banks could make long-term investments and if, in the first few years, a factory lost money, it was not a disaster because the investors had enough experience to know that eventually their investments would pay off. It is clear, therefore, that banks were very central to the economic development of Japan.