them from starvation. Yoshida was less concerned
with a democratic transformation than with
recovery, and he regarded with deepest misgiv-
ings MacArthur’s new labour laws favouring mil-
itant unionism in the early years of severe
shortages, as well as the upsurge of the left. The
bureaucracy he recreated and the businessmen
working closely with government bodies, which
from the earliest days were masterminding Japan’s
recovery, were the same men who had efficiently
overseen Japan’s mobilisation for war in the
1930s. Now they were mobilising Japan’s
resources for peace and subtly avoiding SCAP’s
directives, relating for example to the dismantling
of factories or to reparations, which would
impede the recovery. As in Western-occupied
Germany, managers, despite their early associa-
tions with the totalitarian regime, were the only
ones available to bring about the economic revival
on which, alone, a secure political structure offer-
ing individual rights and freedoms could be based
- a strange irony.
The year 1947 was one of major foreign policy
reassessments in the US after the failure to reach a
settlement with the Soviet Union. It was the year
when George Kennan was instructed by Secretary
of State Marshall to set up the Policy Planning
Department in the State Department, the year of
the Truman Doctrine, intended to stop Soviet
subversion in the eastern Mediterranean and
Turkey, and the year of the Marshall Plan,
designed to speed up the economic recovery of
free Europe and thereby block the Soviet Union
from spreading communism. In eastern Asia, too,
some new defensive line had to be considered.
The growing disillusionment with Nationalist
China led to thoughts, by the end of that year,
that US interests did not necessarily require an ally
on the mainland of Asia. American security in the
Pacific could be based on the islands of Japan and
the Philippines. Japan would have to be suffi-
ciently built up economically and militarily on
land, on the sea and in the air to be able to defend
itself. Since Japan was supposed to have no armed
forces at all a National Police Reserve was
recruited which eventually (after 1960) became
the well-equipped and formidable National
Defence Force with warships, an air force and
tanks some 250,000 strong. MacArthur’s call for a
peace treaty in 1947 and his suggestion that the
Japanese be left to themselves was shelved when
Russia and China rejected the initiative. Mean-
while the American occupation changed course.
Conservative supporters of the pre-1945 Japan,
purged in their hundreds of thousands, were qui-
etly allowed to regain their civic rights; the liberal
trade union laws were hedged about and this time
it was the communists and the radical left who
were purged. Having survived a period of political
uncertainty, the conservative Japanese politicians
gained a virtually permanent hold on power.
Japan’s rapid recovery should be attributed
principally to the hard work and skill of the
Japanese people. Nevertheless, the US during
MacArthur’s ‘viceroyalty’ had made, on balance,
an important, positive contribution. In allowing
the Japanese to retain their institutions in modi-
fied form, in ruling through the Japanese gov-
ernment with the full support of Emperor
Hirohito, in rebuilding Japanese self-esteem, in
providing humanitarian assistance and stimulating
necessary reforms, the occupation was relatively
benign. And this despite the injuries inflicted by
the Japanese on the US and its Allies during the
war. The US became not only Japan’s most
important export market, but also a model for the
consumer’s paradise which hard work would
allow the Japanese to enter. The bitterness of the
war years was expunged, and while American–
Japanese relations have not always run smoothly
since, a firm basis for the attachment of Japan to
the West had been laid during these years of over-
whelming American influence.The confrontation that built up between the US
and the Soviet Union reflected each side’s strong
ideological preconceptions. The West believed it
faced a relentless communist drive in Europe, Asia
and the oil-rich Middle East, while the Soviet
Union felt exposed to the hostility of the capital-
ist West. In Europe in 1945, neither the Soviet
Union nor the Western powers were certain
where the ‘frontier’ would finally run between
them. Only in conquered Germany was the divi-
sion becoming clear.