Remaking Japan, by Theodore Cohen

Muravchik, Joshua

T he transformation of Japan into 1 a thriving modern democracy was an extraordinary feat of social engineering. It was of course effected coercively, but the American occupation ended thirty-five...

...Pride and the human psyche ordain it...
...This step and a reckless purge of Communists, which Cohen says actually targeted fewer Communists than non-Communist radicals and labor militants, bought America considerable bad will among intellectuals, civil servants, and other sectors of Japanese society...
...They "were in a mood to question everything to which they had been loyal," says Cohen...
...As for MacArthur's political views, Cohen writes: "Far from being a convinced ideological rightist, the General was a political primitive with wide open spaces where his reactionary principles were supposed to be...
...But the larger fact is that anti-Americanism does not dominate Japanese life...
...and that to this day we provide for its defense, I suspect it was inevitable that anti-Americanism would be an active facet of Japanese life...
...MacArthur's politics were in fact shaped by an intense patriotism that entailed veneration of the revolutionary principles—liberty, democracy, equal rights—that constitute the American creed...
...In the heady days of the autumn of 1945, the word went around Headquarters, not entirely a joke, that the Supreme Commander had to be presented with one epochal achievement a week...
...As a result, when the occupation came, Cohen, though not yet twenty-eight years old, found himself one of America's few authorities on Japanese labor and was named as chief of the occupation's Labor Division...
...His book was published in Japanese in 1983, the year of his death, and only now comes to us in English...
...that we then remade it to a great extent in our own image...
...And America offered a powerful alternative, enhanced by the fact that "it had proved more successful" in battle and by the beneficence of the occupiers which stunned the Japanese (who themselves had exhibited nothing of the sort in the lands they occupied and who expected the worst from their conquerors...
...dened his slight tome with interesting but meandering disquisitions on the nature of time, an unwarranted intrusion of precious fantasy, and a vulgar bit of political satire...
...News and World Report...
...The occupation had another main T weapon, as well, although hardly a secret one: Douglas MacArthur...
...Cohen, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, stumbled into Japanese studies at City College in the 1930s...
...The liberation of the peasantry and the freedom of labor unions to bargain collectively created for the first time in Japan's history a domestic mass-consumer market in depth," he says...
...is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work...
...First came emergency food aid from the United States that averted starvation while the economy was restarted...
...it remains a dissent, a countercurrent...
...Cohen provides a nicely balanced portrait of MacArthur in Japan, a happy contrast to so much of the one-sided literature about the Supreme Commander, whether pro or con...
...army was turning to Japan to provide large quantities of all kinds of military support supplies...
...Gradually these stockpiles seeped into the postwar economy, an invisible but vital form of capital...
...Because Japan was his turf, MacArthur protected it, such as against demands that Japan's industrial plant be offered up in reparations to the Allies...
...It consisted of a land reform that made Japanese peasants the owners of their own plots and a labor reform that encouraged millions of workers to join unions...
...Though famously insular, the Japanese had twice before in their history given themselves to great spasms of cultural borrowing: from China in the seventh and eighth centuries and from Europe, notably Prussia, in the nineteenth...
...Yet Cohen also vividly illustrates how MacArthur's egotism sometimes worked to Japan's, and America's, interest...
...Thus when the occupation came, the Japanese had precedent for wholesale adoption of foreign ways...
...Cohen says: "Personal fraternization, demonstrating a freer and kindlier way of life . . . was the secret weapon of the early Occupation...
...Cohen aims to explain why the occupation succeeded so well, but the reader needn't accept all of Cohen's arguments to profit from the light he sheds on this most intriguing question...
...1988 the Japanese with minimum violence to their sense of right order...
...Within only a month, the visible effect was startling...
...Suddenly Japanese makers were besieged with orders for rush shipment, price secondary...
...Numerous officials who served in the occupation, from General MacArthur and his deputy General Courtney Whitney on down, have written accounts of it, but none that I have seen is as good as Theodore Cohen's...
...MacArthur secured aid in quantities that even exceeded Japan's needs, says Cohen, by warning Congress that anything less would require more troops to keep the peace...
...With the self-confidence and command of a monarch, MacArthur proceeded to impose that revolution on Japan...
...At the conclusion of MacArthur's deep stall, a share of Japan's machine tools had been disbursed to the allies...
...Joseph Grew, the State Department's regnant authority on Japan, told President Truman that "from the long-range point of view, the best we can hope for Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research...
...Like so many of his classmates of similar background (including his illustrious cousin, Daniel Bell), Cohen was a Marxist of sorts and therefore gravitated to labor studies...
...Especially painful to Cohen, Japanese labor turned neutralist or anti-American...
...And Japan remains a democratic model to the rest of Asia and an economic powerhouse...
...The result, he says, was "an incomplete alliance," for America a self-inflicted wound...
...Given that America smashed Japan in war, annihilating its cities and dropping two atomic bombs on it...
...But in truth, McEwan's asides and subplots are awkward and inappropriate interTHE CHILD IN TIME Ian McEwan/Houghton Mifflin/$16.95 John Podhoretz THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 45...
...Just how intriguing is underscored by the reminders Cohen gives us of the skepticism expressed at the time by experts that the occupation could in fact succeed in democratizing Japan...
...After only a year and a half, "MacArthur announced that the Occupation had no further major democratic reforms to propose," Nor was the occupation carried out flawlessly: Cohen argues that major mistakes were made, and he livens his account with anecdotes about minor foibles, such as the decision by some low-level official "to sponsor square dancing and billiards for the Japanese as obviously more democratic than geisha dances and kendo sword-fighting...
...Cohen identifies several sources of that recovery...
...policy, and we are in Theodore Cohen's debt for this fine account of it...
...MacArthur bestrode the land like a Colossus, and the Japanese called him `father,' " says Cohen...
...McEwan clearly intends these appurtenances to distinguish his novel, and critics like the Wall Street Journal's Richard Locke have taken the bait...
...He had an instinct for conducting himself in such a way that obedience was exacted from REMAKING JAPAN: THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION AS NEW DEAL Theodore Cohen, edited by Herbert Passin/The Free Press/$27.50 Joshua Muravchik 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY...
...This domestic market was essential to Japan's spectacular rise as an exporter, Cohen argues, by allowing Japanese manufacturers to develop and perfect their products before sending them abroad...
...Yet he could not have succeeded, argues Cohen, had the occupation's democratic reforms not been reinforced by rapid economic recovery...
...This suggests that the occupation succeeded in changing not merely structures but hearts and minds as well, an accomplishment all the more impressive because the Japanese are an insular people with a distinctive and highly developed culture that had not previously sustained democracy...
...Cohen describes with patent admiration the stratagems by which MacArthur sabotaged the entire program...
...But in Cohen's view, the key to the Japanese economic miracle and hence to the success of Japan's political transformation was a version of the New Deal that MacArthur imposed on Japan...
...Drawing an analogy to the two earlier periods, Cohen calls the occupation, and the Japanese response to it, Japan's "third turn...
...But telling this story simply and plainly wasn't enough for its author, who has burJohn Podhoretz is a contributing editor of U.S...
...Our alliance with Japan may be in some ways "incomplete"—especially in Japan's failure to shoulder the burdens T an McEwan's The Child in Time is 1 an affecting, carefully observed, and beautifully written novel about the abduction of a small child and the catastrophic impact of that monstrous action on the child's parents...
...A severe austerity program was forced on Japan over MacArthur's objections in 1949, designed to stem Japanese inflation and reduce the U.S...
...that we then provided it with a great deal of aid (something that seems so often to breed resentment...
...Given his pedigree as an anti-Stalinist radical at CCNY in the 1930s, I am willing to accept Cohen's word, as I would that of few others, that non-Communist radicals were mistaken for Communists in the later occupation purges, but I wonder if the causes and consequences of anti-Americanism among sectors of the Japanese populace aren't somewhat overdrawn in his account...
...of its own defense—but it remains strong...
...The total value," says Cohen, "was put at some $20 million, about 2 percent of what the Russians took out of Manchuria—in one-fifth the time...
...These are the fruits of a brilliantly effective U.S...
...It was of course effected coercively, but the American occupation ended thirty-five years ago and the institutions it implanted have endured and grown stronger...
...In the next few years, economic renewal was also fueled by war stockpiles that had been hidden by untold numbers of Japanese as defeat grew imminent to avoid confiscation by the victors...
...It lasted less than seven years, and the period of political reform was even shorter...
...Cohen criticizes MacArthur as self-promoting: Important Headquarters measures were . . . taken in the name of the Supreme Commander, not the United States, and were accompanied by thunderous press statements emphasizing the revolutionary and epochal features of each successive action...
...The occupation, however, was not entirely a success, in Cohen's view...
...Their shattering defeat left the Japanese especially receptive to change...
...Then in 1950 North Korea in-vaded South Korea, and, as Cohen tells it: "In a matter of days the U.S...
...He married .a Japanese and settled in Tokyo after the occupation, making a career as a businessman...
...Moreover, the mystery only deepens when one considers the brevity of the occupation...
...foreign aid burden...

Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2


 
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