himself in the eyes of the Americans by coura-
geously pressing for peace when the war was all
but lost; moreover, he blamed the military for
their adventurist readiness to go to war with the
West in 1941. In 1946 he recognised that Japan’s
recovery depended on being trusted again by the
US. This meant winning over MacArthur and
accepting the directives of his headquarters,
SCAP, when they could not safely be circum-
vented. He thus played a similar role to Adenauer
in West Germany. The escalation of the Cold War
in Asia, Washington’s loss of China as an ally and
the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 hastened
Japan’s rehabilitation.
Yoshida exploited with great skill the
American–Communist confrontation. MacArthur
had long been persuaded that his prescriptions
had turned Japan into a democracy. In June 1950
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles came to
Japan, to win the Japanese as allies in Asia. He
wanted the famous Article 9 of MacArthur’s con-
stitution to be set aside so that Japan could rearm.
Yoshida rejected rearmament, stressing all the
negative results it would have on the Japanese and
on Japan’s neighbours. Dulles was ‘flabber-
gasted’, but MacArthur sided with Yoshida. Japan
should build up its industrial potential and in that
way help the free world. Soon after the outbreak
of the war in Korea, American orders for arms
came pouring in and gave the Japanese economy
a much needed boost.
Eventually the Japanese, under American pres-
sure, did create a Self-Defence Force, initially of
only 75,000 men. It expanded to 165,000 by
1954 and 250,000 by 1980. The army, navy and
air force came to be equipped with the most
modern weapons, but in relation to Japan’s size
and wealth it was a small force. The Japanese
expended no more than 1.3 per cent of their
GNP on the military. The ‘saving’ as against the
expenditures of the Cold War countries was enor-
mous and was available for investment in indus-
try. But the Japanese elite was less niggardly in
building up a powerful paramilitary police force
of 250,000 to guarantee internal order.
The negotiations leading to the peace treaty
and the end of the American occupation were
long and arduous. Yoshida made as few conces-
sions as possible. Japan would not rearm heavily;
it would not itself participate in international dis-
putes; it would rely on the US and its nuclear
umbrella for security. Japan would be the reliable
but passive ally of the US, which it would provide
with bases, and it undertook to grant no bases to
other countries without American consent. The
Americans retained Okinawa for military use only,
and the Japanese had to give up all the conquests
they had made since 1895. Yoshida also had to
concede that, if requested by the Japanese gov-
ernment, the US would provide assistance ‘to put
down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in
Japan’. American rights inside Japan certainly
reminded the Japanese of the special rights that
foreigners had enjoyed in Japan until their aboli-
tion at the close of the nineteenth century. It was
humiliating. Nevertheless these terms, embodied
in the US–Japanese Security Treaty, were signed
in San Francisco on the same day, 8 September
1951, as the Treaty of Peace with the Allied
powers. Australia and New Zealand were reluc-
tant signatories, since they feared a Japanese mil-
itary revival, but they were reassured by a
defensive treaty, ANZUS, with the US; the
US–Pacific alliance structure was completed by
US treaties with the Philippines (1951), with
South Korea (1952) and with Taiwan (1954),
and by SEATO (1954). Thus Japan was tied to
the anti-communist containment policy of the US
and thereby limited in its ability to adopt an inde-
pendent foreign policy.
Japan had to follow the US lead in recognis-
ing Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan as representing
China, and it was thus prevented from normalis-
ing its relationship with the People’s Republic.
Not surprisingly the Soviet Union refused to sign
any peace treaty with Japan, and a Japanese–
Soviet agreement formally ending hostilities was
not reached until 1986 and territorial disputes
still stood in the way of a definitive peace treaty.
The US–Japanese Mutual Security Treaty of
1951 became a burning issue in Japanese politics.
The possibility that there might be nuclear
weapons on US warships became a particular
problem; the left identified this treaty as a form
of US hegemony, which also keeps the conser-
vatives in power. Public hostility to the treaty
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