had been taken of the Chinese communists, if
it had been understood that the communists too
were nationalists and that relations between
Moscow and Beijing were full of ambiguities, then
a more realistic China policy might have emerged.
The restoration of a friendly China as a great
power – one of the Big Four – a China linked to
the West, had been an essential cornerstone of
Roosevelt’s cherished concept of an orderly and
peaceful post-war world. China, so he intended,
would help the US to maintain peace in Asia and
the Pacific and hold Japan in check. Inevitably,
Japan would one day recover and, against that day,
it was to be China’s role to prevent another round
of Japanese aggression. The Chinese people, in
contrast to the Japanese, were broadly perceived as
humane and civilised, worthy allies in the cause of
freedom. But during the ‘decisive years’ (1945–
50) quite a different post-war world in Asia took
shape. Communist China became the enemy, and
Japan the indispensable base in Asia of the free
world.
During the war Japanese behaviour was judged by
Allied governments and peoples to have been even
worse than that of the German National Socialists.
In one important respect, as far as the Western
Allied nations were concerned, the Americans, the
British and the Dutch, this was true: the Japanese
had treated captured prisoners of war with barbar-
ity, many thousands perishing from starvation and
overwork. In China, Japanese cruelty inflicted
horrors indiscriminately on civilians and soldiers
which had shocked the civilised world when the
China war began in 1937, at a time when the rest
of the world – except for Spain – was then still at
peace and still shockable. These anti-Japanese per-
ceptions were reinforced by long-held Western
attitudes of racial superiority. The Japanese
people, like the German people, would be made to
submit totally, and could not be trusted. Henry
Morgenthau’s treasury had drawn up a punitive
plan for the post-war treatment not only of
Germany but also of Japan. It was at first expected
that Japan would need to be occupied and the
Japanese ruled for a long time, not so much for
their own good, but to safeguard the world from
their aggressive and barbarous impulses.
Despite unconditional surrender, the trial of
war criminals and the purging of thousands from
positions of influence in Germany and Japan, the
history of the occupation in the two countries
nevertheless developed differently in one import-
ant respect. Although Japan was stripped of all its
overseas conquests acquired since its war with
China in 1894, the Japanese homeland was not
divided into separate Allied zones of occupation
but remained a whole nation. Above all, the entry
of the Soviet Union into the war only a few days
before Japan’s surrender and the fact that no
Soviet military forces set foot on the main islands
of Japan, meant that West–East disputes about
the post-war treatment of Japan were contained
on the purely diplomatic level. The Russians were
represented on the Far Eastern Commission in
Washington, and a Russian general was sent to
the impotent Allied Council in Tokyo, but all
real power remained in American hands, and
American troops supplied the bulk of the occu-
pation forces. In Tokyo that power was exercised
by one man, a war hero who was already a legend
in his lifetime, General Douglas MacArthur,
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers for
the Occupation and Control of Japan, SCAP for
short. MacArthur was pretty well able to do what
he wished. In the immediate post-war years the
problem regions of the world that commanded
the anxious attention of Washington, London
and Moscow were Europe and China. It was in
these regions that the well-publicised crises were
occurring, the European ones appearing even
more urgent and menacing than the cataclysmic
changes in China. Japan had seemingly become a
backwater. General MacArthur’s high-handedness
in settling occupation policies without paying
much attention to his superiors in Washington or
to the other Allied governments caused irritation,
but, as long as Japan did not become an added
problem, matters were left in his hands. It would
certainly have been hazardous to tangle with a
living legend, who, although he did not regard
himself as semi-divine, thus usurping the former
divinity of Emperor Hirohito, did see himself
as the benevolent guide of the Japanese people,
on whose shoulders the shaping of their destiny
had fallen. He was determined to break up the
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