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The British Model: Institutional Reform and Occupied Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
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They order these things differently in England. Such comment on the relevance of the British political and economic experience to postsurrender Japan has been overlooked by students ofthe occupation period. The explanation for this neglect appears to vary on national lines. Research interest into Britain's postwar foreign policy in east Asia has been limited until recently by the availability of government material, while American and later Japanese scholars following in their wake seem reluctant to recognize that in name and sometimes in reality the occupation was an allied venture, since this goes against the grain of American unilateralism. Where there has been note of allied contributions to the occupation the references have tended to be perfunctory. Two recent publications might be cited as representative of this trend among American historians. John Dower's voluminous work on Yoshida Shigeru has little on Yoshida's contacts with British occupation personnel despite frequent references to the premier's anglophilia. Justin Williams's version of the occupation is equally Americocentric. The author regards the Far Eastern Commission's role in Japan's enforced democratization as reactionary ‘because SCAP dealt with the real Japan and the FEC with an imaginary Japan. Long after SCAP became immersed in constructing the democratic Japan of the future, the FEC was still preoccupied with teaching a lesson to the Imperial Japan of old.’ As a challenging quotation useful for those setting examinations on the subject it may bear repetition but not a few British and Commonwealth diplomats might be forgiven for suggesting that the remark could be profitably reversed. The distance between the United States' image of Japan and the truth behind the rhetoric remained a persistent theme of despatches from the British mission in Tokyo (UKLIM) to the Foreign Office throughout this period.
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References
1 Dower, J. W., Empire and Aftermath (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Sir Esler Dening, the senior Foregin Office official responsible for handling occupation affairs, is honoured with one reference. Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the head of the British mission in Japan for most of the period, receives no mention despite his frequent meetings with MacArthur and Yoshida.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Williams, Justin, Japan's Political Revolution under MacArthur (Tokyo, 1979), p. 159.Google ScholarThis ignores, for example, the 16-point ‘Principles for Japanese Trade Unions’ approved by the FEC on 12 December 1946. Article 6, which was to have some bearing on later developments, stated that ‘trade unions should be allowed to take part in political activities and to support political parties’.Google Scholar For text see Ayusawa, Iwao F., A History of Labour in Modern Japan (Honolulu, 1966), pp. 243–5.Google Scholar
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10 UKLIM second quarterly report 1947, F10666/5729/23(FO371/63798).
11 Milward, R. S. (FORD), 25 January 1949, F366/1015/23(FO371/76178). Norman was held to do ‘less than justice to what little we know of the man. No one else dared to call the 1936 revolt a “mutiny”’.Google Scholar
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13 Gascoigne memorandum on Japanese constitution.
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Ibid.
21 Ibid.
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57 Ibid. The JCP won 9·7% of the total vote and 35 Diet seats.
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60 Hoover was described by UKLIM as ‘rigid, inclined to be doctrinaire’. UKLIM to FO, 3 September 1948, F13137/44/23(FO371/69823). Valery Burati was the only American trade unionist in SCAP GHQ after 1949. On Hoover see Cohen (see note 56), pp. 36–9.Google Scholar
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62 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, A Dangerous Place (Boston, 1978).Google Scholar
63 The censorship of publications by Harold Laski and the expulsion of the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge are examples of SCAP's sensitivity to alien influences in Japan.
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65 UKLIM 3rd Quartery Report on Japan 1948, F14865/6047/23(FO371/69924).Google Scholar