Hist 199 Postwar Japan The SF/1955 System
What is the 1955 System?
(See Kingston, pp. 20-23; plus the Dower Article)
It refers to several things:
Specifically, to a conservative 1-party dominated political system in Japan that prevailed from 1955-2009. (And is now back on track again anyway....)
It had its origins in the Reverse Course during the Occupation dating from the cancelled General Strike in 1947.
The Reverse Course saw “War Criminals” who had once been purged from public life for all time become de-purged in 1950. For example, Hatoyama Ichirô, who succeeded Yoshida Shigeru as Prime Minister, was a former purgee who was actually Minister of Education during the Takigawa Incident in 1933—do you remember him from the student protest scenes in No Regrets?
This was also the case with Kishi Nobusuke, a technocrat administrator in Manchuria, who later became Vice Minister of Munitions in the Tôjô Cabinet 1943-44. How much more implicated in the war effort could he have been?
In fact, he was charged as a war criminal after the war and encarcerated in Sugamo Prison from 1945-46. This was the bitter irony: Kishi was heavily implicated in the prewar regime but there he was serving as PM during the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 that created the massive opposition movement known as Ampo!
You can see in the attitudes of women like Yoshitake [and later Kishino Junko] toward Kishi in Changing Lives how deeply troubled they were, and how they resented him for his wartime activities. BTW, the recent very conservative but long-serving PM, Abe Shinzô, who was shockingly assassinated during campaign speech in Nara in July 2022, was also Kishi’s grandson!
The Red Purge then ensued in late 1940s directed first against public sector employees and then the private sector, too, resulting in some 22,000 workers losing their jobs because of their supposed leftist orientation. This is why many in Kishino's and Yoshitake’s cohort began to feel that the original ideals of postwar democracy—about which they were enthused and energized—were being sacrificed. All this would come to a head in 1960 in the grassroots Ampo opposition to renewing the US-Japan Security Treaty.
1950 also saw the outbreak of the Korean War for which Japan became America’s forward base and Cold War ally.
Also undergirding everything was the September 8, 1951 San Francisco Treaty formally ending the occupation of Japan which became effective April 28, 1952. See Changing Lives, Ch. 3: 85-86 for more context and how 3 days later Bloody May Day occurred.
A second bi-lateral US-Japan Security Treaty was signed on April 28, 1952 which granted the US the right to maintain armed forces in military bases around Japan in return for the US guaranteeing Japan’s security.
Context for this:
--Japan was still under occupation when the treaties were signed;
--the USSR had tested its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949;
--on October 1, 1949, Mao declared the People’s Republic of China—"the Chinese people have stood up" he said;
--in February 1950 a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was signed;
--in October 1950, Chinese “volunteer” troops entered the Korean War against the US police action.
Viewed from the perspective of the separate peace, the San Francisco settlement thus laid the groundwork for an exclusionary system that detached Japan from its closest neighbors. Equally significant but less well remembered, the San Francisco settlement was a "separate peace." The omissions from the list of nations that signed the peace treaty was striking.
Neither Communist China nor the Chinese Nationalist regime that had fled to Taiwan were invited to the peace conference, despite the fact that China had borne the brunt of Japanese aggression and occupation beginning a full decade before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war.
Both South and North Korea were also excluded, although the Korean people had suffered grievously under Japanese colonial rule and oppressive wartime recruitment policies between 1910 and 1945.
The Soviet Union attended the peace conference but refused to sign the treaty on several grounds, including the exclusion of the PRC and Washington's transparent plans to integrate Japan militarily into its Cold War policies.
In the months following the peace conference, the United States tightened the screws on this divisive policy by informing a dismayed and reluctant Japanese government that Congress would not ratify the peace treaty unless Japan signed a parallel treaty with the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan, thus effectively recognizing that regime as the legitimate government of China. Failing this, the U.S. occupation of Japan would be perpetuated indefinitely.
Japan acquiesced to this ultimatum in the famous "Yoshida Letter," dated December 24, 1951 (from the Japanese prime minister Yoshida Shigeru to John Foster Dulles, the U.S. emissary in charge of the peace settlement). The ensuing peace treaty between Japan and the "Republic of China" ensconced in Taipei was signed on April 28, 1952--the same day the peace and security treaties signed in San Francisco came into effect.
Also excluded from the treaty was Okinawa’s independence or its return to Japanese control. It remained under US administration until 1972 and remains today a major source of friction because the presence of American bases there.
For example, June 27, 1950, 2 days after the start of the Korean Conflict, the US dispatched the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to prevent the PRC from consolidating their victory and reclaiming Taiwan. For the next 20 years, the US continued to uphold a fiction by recognizing the government on Taiwan—the followers of Jiang Kaishek who fled the mainland in defeat—as the only legitimate government of the Chinese people.
US bases had many purposes but the main one was to support US combat operations outside of Japan: Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq, etc. During the Vietnam war, US bombers dropped twice the total US-UK tonnage of explosives in WWII in both European and Asian fronts on North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Beginning as part of the Reverse Course as early as 1947-48, the US began urging Japan to rearm as soon as possible, hence the National Police Reserves in July 1950 as noted by Yoshitake (60) [and later Kishino (109-110)] and eventually the Self Defense Forces were created in July 1954. Did rearming Japan and a Cold War Alliance with the US seem to be in harmony with Article Nine of the “Peace” Constitution of 1946?
The Final Piece = November 1955, Hatoyama, the head of the Democratic Party, and Yoshida, the head of the Liberal Party, agreed to consolidate their two political parties to create the “Liberal Democratic Party,” one that was neither liberal nor democratic, but supported and was supported by this Cold War alliance with the US. This LDP dominance remained in place in Japanese politics until an election defeat for the LDP in 2009 by the Democratic Party of Japan. But the LDP is back in power again so it is difficult to say that very much has changed.
Dower points to Eight problematic legacies stemming from the SF Treaty, the Reverse Course and the 1955 System: (1) Okinawa and the "two Japans"; (2) unresolved territorial issues; (3) U.S. bases in Japan; (4) rearmament; (5) "history issues"; (6) the "nuclear umbrella"; (7) containment of China and Japan's deflection from Asia; and (8) "subordinate independence."
Consider the "History Issues"
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The link between rearming Japan and decontaminating the nation's past becomes clear when we recall how little time elapsed between Japan's defeat and the inauguration of the San Francisco System. Yesterday's militaristic enemy was being rehabilitated as today's peace-loving ally-while at the same time, yesterday's World War II ally China was demonized as part of a "Red menace" that threatened world peace. Promoting rearmament dictated playing down Japan's transgressions and China's victimization-not only in Japan, but also in the United States and internationally.
This sanitization of imperial Japan's conduct began before the San Francisco conference. The U.S.-led war crimes trials conducted in Tokyo between mid 1946 and the end of 1948, for example, suppressed atrocities that would poison relations between Japan and its Chinese and Korean neighbors when exposed decades later. One of these crimes was the murderous medical experiments conducted on prisoners by the imperial army's "Unit 731" in Harbin. Another was the abduction of women, mostly Koreans, who were forced to provide sexual services as "comfort women" (ianfu) to the imperial forces. Once the Tokyo trials of high-ranking "Class A" defendants ended in November 1948, moreover, further investigation of war crimes and prosecution of accused high-level war criminals was terminated.
In an ideal world, the 1951 peace conference might have been an occasion for forthright historical summation and engagement with issues of war responsibility. Instead, the San Francisco settlement did not just exclude the two countries most deserving of apology and redress, China and Korea, but also became an occasion for spinning history and encouraging amnesia. In the favorite adjective of official Washington, the San Francisco treaty was to be a "generous" peace. When participating countries such as Britain and Canada recommended that the peace treaty include "some kind of war guilt clause," the Americans opposed this idea.
The separate peace did not just endorse exclusion over overall reconciliation and leave the deepest wounds of imperialism and war unaddressed. In Japan, the San Francisco settlement also paved the way for the return of politicians and bureaucrats who had been purged for militarist activities during the occupation and in some cases even arrested for war crimes. By 1957, the prime minister was a former accused (but never indicted) war criminal, Kishi Nobusuke; when the U.S.-Japan security treaty came up for revision and renewal in 1960, it was Kishi who rammed this through the Diet in the face of massive popular protests. (In the final month of 2012, in the midst of the intensifying Senkaku/Diaoyu crisis, Kishi's right-wing grandson Abe Shinzō assumed the premiership for a second time and immediately announced a renewed campaign to promote patriotism and challenge the alleged war crimes of his grandfather's generation.)
Coupled with the many years that elapsed before Japan established formal relations with South Korea and China, the return to power in the 1950s of a largely unrepentant old guard ensured that troublesome history issues would be passed on to later generations. Still, the joint communiqué that restored diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC in 1972 did state that "The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself." Twenty-six years later, in 1998, another Sino-Japanese declaration of friendship and cooperation similarly included a paragraph emphasizing the importance of "squarely facing the past and correctly understanding history," in which, for the first time, the Japanese government endorsed characterization of Japan's actions "during a certain period in the past" as "aggression."
The anomaly of the "history problem" that blights present-day relations between Japan on the one hand and Korea as well as China on the other is that uses and abuses of the recent past became hugely contentious only after diplomatic ties were belatedly established. Reconciliation and the cultivation of constructive relations went hand in hand with intensification, rather than dissolution, of strident nationalism on all sides. There have been many official Japanese apologies to China and Korea since the 1970s. These expressions of remorse, however, have been undercut with almost metronomic regularity by the whitewashing and outright denial by prominent politicians and influential individuals and organizations of imperial Japan's overseas aggression and oppression.
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The escalating Sino-Japanese clash over history issues unfolded in often jarringly tandem steps. Conclusion of a formal peace treaty between Japan and the PRC in 1978, for example, coincided with the secret enshrinement of fourteen Japanese convicted of Class A war crimes in Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the souls of those who fought on behalf of the emperor; they were entered in the shrine's register as "martyrs of Shōwa" (Shōwa junnansha). Visits to Yasukuni by politicians first precipitated intense domestic as well as international controversy when Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro and members of his cabinet visited the shrine in an official capacity on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1985-which, as it happened, was the same year the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall opened in China. As time passed, Chinese fixation on Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities grew exponentially at every level of expression, from museums to mass media to street protests-while conservative and right-wing denials of war crimes grew apace in Japan.
In part (but only part), "history" became more contested after Japan normalized relations with China and South Korea for a simple reason: interest in the recent past was rekindled on all sides, and historical resources became more accessible. The best scholarship on Japanese war crimes and war responsibility-concerning the Nanjing Massacre, criminal experiments of Unit 731, exploitation of non-Japanese ianfu, etc.-dates from the 1970s and after. This investigative work, much of it by Japanese scholars and journalists, was provocative by nature. It triggered patriotic rebuttals in Japan and rage outside Japan. It was tinder for nationalistic sentiments already on the rise on all sides-and grist, as well, for political leaders preoccupied primarily with domestic problems and audiences.
At the same time, it is hardly a coincidence that, in both Japan and China, burgeoning nationalism rode on the back of burgeoning economic growth. In Japan's case, the pride and hubris that accompanied the so-called economic miracle of the 1970s and 1980s spilled over into patriotic campaigns to erase the stigma of the "Tokyo war crimes trial view of history" (a favorite right-wing pejorative phrase). In China, the turn to capitalism introduced by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978 displaced prior fixation on Marxism and Maoism and left an ideological gap filled with a new nationalism focusing on victimization by foreign powers, Japan foremost among them. In the several decades following establishment of the PRC in 1949, Communist propaganda had much to say about the military threat posed by the United States and Japan, but relatively little to say about historical grievances against Japan. That changed abruptly after the brief period of amity and goodwill that accompanied reconciliation in the 1970s.
In both China and Japan, this convergence of history and nationalism has turned "memory" into propaganda and "history issues" into history wars that have no end in sight. Denunciation versus denial of Japanese war crimes has become a multi-directional and almost ritualistic cycle. In Japan, cleansing the past is integral to attempts to inflate a waning spirit of national pride. In China, manipulating history involves an even more convoluted domestic dynamic. Repetitious attacks on both Japan's war crimes and its alleged post-war failure to show genuine contrition do more than just pump up patriotic ardor. These attacks also provide a distraction from domestic problems and grievances. At the same time, lambasting historical sanitization by the Japanese diverts attention from the PRC's own top-down historical sanitization concerning crimes against the Chinese people inflicted after 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party itself.18
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On the Nuclear issue, we now know that in 1960 upon the US-Japan Security Treaty renewal, there were secret addenda or agreements signed by Kishi approving the introduction into Japan of nuclear weapons including intermediate and long-range missiles as well as the construction of bases for such weapons.” Kishi apparently told a Diet committee that he did not believe that the constitution prohibited japan from possessing nuclear weapons for defensive purposes! The so-called sacred “Three Non-Nuclear Principles”: no possession, no manufacturing, nor any presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, was more or less made a mockery of. Many US naval vessels carrying nuclear warheads came through naval bases in Japan such as at Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture, were off-loaded and then re-on-loaded in complete violation of these principles.