The Faces of Japan: Neutralism and 'Re-insularization'

...In one way this has been greatly to the advantage of the West no less than of the Japanese themselves...

...When the Japanese, on the other hand, surrendered in the same year, all their holdings on the mainland of Asia had to be given up and they were put back into their own home islands, where only a century previously they had lived in complete seclusion from the outside world...

...When students dance for joy in the Tokyo streets at their "victory over American imperialism...

...The young men of Zengakuren may repudiate the militarism of General Hideki Tojo and the policies of expansion which led to a disastrous war, but in their souls they are with the young men of the last generation who flew to the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...represented by the forced cancellation of President Eisenhower's visit, they can feel that they are somehow, though beneath new ideological banners, reversing the verdict of the Pacific war, which for most of them is a childhood memory of patriotic emotions, falling bombs and burning cities, followed by the cataclysmic news of national surrender and the arrival of the Americans as an army of occupation...

...These demonstrations became sufficiently serious to compel the Kishi Cabinet to cancel the invitation to President Eisenhower to pay a state visit to Japan, and subsequently to resign...

...Antony's College, Oxford...

...It may be hoped that the Socialist leaders, who are for the most part genuine democrats at heart, will perceive in time that the tactics in which they have been indulging the past two years cannot strengthen Japanese democracy, but only produce a situation in which men of violence of one or the other political extreme would gain control of the state...

...In their zeal for eliminating the authoritarian regime which had governed Japan before the war and for providing safeguards for the newly established democracy, the American reformers got written into the "MacArthur Constitution" and its attendant legislation curbs on the powers of the police more drastic than exist in any Western democracy...

...This is perhaps the strongest factor in Japanese neutralism, for any alliance or entanglement which drags them back into the affairs of the Asian continent seems to them now an intolerable violation of their postwar privacy, and it is particularly resented that it should be the Americans—the destroyers of their former overseas empire—who are apparently involving them again in the risks and liabilities of an international arena from which they thought they had finally retired...

...direct experience of the Soviet reality has been confined to those Japanese who, as soldiers or civilians, were captured by the Russians in Manchuria in 1945, and it has never reached the Japanese homeland...

...A bill to increase the powers of the police was introduced into the Diet in 1958, but had to be withdrawn after a campaign of strikes and street demonstrations similar to that which forced the cancellation of the Eisenhower visit...

...This "re-insularization" of the Japanese, combined with the elimination of their naval power and loss of all their former possessions in the South Seas, has inevitably produced in them a sense of detachment and aloofness from world affairs...

...But they did not prevent ratification of the Security Pact nor did they at any time come within sight of a revolutionary seizure of power...

...The Faces of Japan—Two Articles NEUTRALISM AND 'RE-INSULARIZATION' By G. F. Hudson When the Germans were defeated in 1945, they were not driven out of Europe, but remained a nation in the middle of the Continent, with neighbors across land frontiers to the west and east of them...

...in world affairs by the fact that Japan, unlike Germany, was occupied by American, but not by Russian, forces after the war...

...only if they directly resort to armed violence are the police permitted to resist them...

...The popular national mood of contemporary Japan, which is insular, introverted and isolationist, is reinforced in its trend toward neutralism G. F. Hudson, who served in the British Foreign Office from 1939-46, is Director of Far Eastern Studies at St...

...As long as the present laws remain in force and are observed by the police, further attempts to coerce the Government by organized street demonstrations can occur at any time...

...Since the Russians took no part in the occupation of Japan —they refused to be subordinate to General Douglas MacArthur's command and he threatened to resign if they were not—they had no opportunity to set up a Japanese Communist government in their occupation zone corresponding to the Ulbricht regime in East Germany, and Japan escaped the fate of partition into two separate states...

...It is only natural, therefore, that insofar as the antipathies of the war and occupation periods persist in Japan, their target continues to be the United States rather than the Soviet Union...

...But there are signs that the general public is getting tired of political dictation by rioting students, and at the next general election the Liberal Democratic party may succeed in obtaining a mandate from the electors for a revision of the Constitution to strengthen the authority of the state against political disorder...

...The dimensions they assumed were largely a consequence of the restriction of police powers in postwar Japan, which, ironically enough in relation to the current situation, was originally the work of the American occupation authority...

...Failing this, the extra-parliamentary actions of the left are likely sooner or later to meet with counter-actions from the right which will be much more violent and could lead to a complete breakdown of democracy in Japan...

...This weakness of the Japanese state authority has become so manifest in the course of the recent disturbances that their effect may well be to strengthen the hand of those conservatives who have long been agitating for a revision of the Constitution on the ground that, as it stands at present, it enables a riotous minority to make orderly government impossible...

...What has been peculiar to Japan over the past year has been the campaign of large-scale street demonstrations in Tokyo which culminated in sieges of the Diet and the Prime Minister's residence by organized masses of students and trade unionists...

...The Japanese police may not interfere with political meetings or processions even if they hold up all traffic in the principal streets of a big city and block entry to buildings...

...But this also had the consequence that the Russians have not impressed themselves deeply on the Japanese mind as potential invaders or oppressors...