Abstract
If a revolution is a complex of sweeping, systematic political, economic, and social changes, then the policies implemented during America’s seven year Occupation of Japan (1945–52) were profoundly revolutionary. American policies transformed Japan politically from fascism into liberal democracy, and laid the foundation for Japan’s eventual development from a poverty-stricken industrially backward country into an economic superpower and middle class society.
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Notes
Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 52.
Theodore Cohen, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, ed. by Herbert Passin (New York: 1987) p. 34.
Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur: The Far East General (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. vii.
Shigeru Yoshida, The Yoshida Memoirs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961) pp. 49, 287.
For penetrating psychological studies, see Carol M. Petillo, Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1981);
Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, The MacArthur Controversy and American Foreign Policy (New York: 1965);
D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, 3 vols (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1970–85).
Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) pp. xiv–xv.
Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981) pp. 51, 49.
Dower , A War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) p. 305.
Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) pp. 283–4.
John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea, and the Far East (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1974) pp. 55–6.
Junnosuke Masumi, Postwar Politics in Japan, 1945–1955 (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California 1985) pp. 41–2.
Quoted in Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992) p. 73.
Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987) pp. 11–12.
Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962) pp. 207–8.
Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989).
R. John Pritchard and Sonia Magbanua Zaide, eds, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Complete Transcripts of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 21 vols (Garland Publishing, 1981) p. 1:390.
Richard Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971);
Arnold C. Brackman, The Other Nuremburg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1987).
Hans Baerwald, The Purge of Japanese Leaders Under the Occupation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959) pp. 92, 94.
Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982) p. 42.
Toshio Nishi, Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (Stanford: Hoover Institute Press, 1982) pp. 163–4.
Shigeto Tsuru, Essays on Japanese Economic Development (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shobo, 1958) p. 160.
Dick Nanto, “The United States Role in the Postwar Economic Recovery of Japan,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University (1977).
For an excellent account, see Ronald Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) pp. 23–53.
Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan, 1953–1955 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) p. 331.
See Thomas A. Bisson, Zaibatsu Dissolution in Japan (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976) pp. 24–5.
Edwin W. Pauley, Report on Japanese Reparations to the President of the United States, November 1945 to April 1946 (DOS publication, 3174, Far Eastern Series 25, Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1946) pp. 6–7.
Eleanor Hadley, Antitrust in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) pp. 163–5.
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© 1996 William R. Nester
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Nester, W.R. (1996). Demilitarization and Democratization, 1945–7. In: Power across the Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378759_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378759_6
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