Japan since 1945
The early postwar decades
Occupation
From 1945 to 1952 Japan was under Allied military occupation, headed by the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), a position held by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur until 1951. Although nominally directed by a multinational Far Eastern Commission in Washington, D.C., and an Allied Council in Tokyo—which included the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the Commonwealth countries—the occupation was almost entirely an American affair. While MacArthur developed a large General Headquarters in Tokyo to carry out occupation policy, supported by local “military government” teams, Japan, unlike Germany, was not governed directly by foreign troops. Instead, SCAP relied on the Japanese government and its organs, particularly the bureaucracy, to carry out its directives.
The occupation, like the Taika Reform of the 7th century and the Meiji Restoration 80 years earlier, represented a period of rapid social and institutional change that was based on the borrowing and incorporation of foreign models. General principles for the proposed governance of Japan had been spelled out in the Potsdam Declaration and elucidated in U.S. government policy statements drawn up and forwarded to MacArthur in August 1945. The essence of these policies was simple and straightforward: the demilitarization of Japan, so that it would not again become a danger to peace; democratization, meaning that, while no particular form of government would be forced upon the Japanese, efforts would be made to develop a political system under which individual rights would be guaranteed and protected; and the establishment of an economy that could adequately support a peaceful and democratic Japan.
MacArthur himself shared the vision of a demilitarized and democratic Japan and was well suited to the task at hand. An administrator of considerable skill, he possessed elements of leadership and charisma that appealed to the defeated Japanese. Brooking neither domestic nor foreign interference, MacArthur enthusiastically set about creating a new Japan. He encouraged an environment in which new forces could and did rise, and, where his reforms corresponded to trends already established in Japanese society, they played a vital role in Japan’s recovery as a free and independent nation.
In the early months of the occupation, SCAP acted swiftly to remove the principal supports of the militarist state. The armed forces were demobilized and millions of Japanese troops and civilians abroad repatriated. The empire was disbanded. State Shintō was disestablished, and nationalist organizations were abolished and their members removed from important posts. Japan’s armament industries were dismantled. The Home Ministry with its prewar powers over the police and local government was abolished; the police force was decentralized and its extensive power revoked. The Education Ministry’s sweeping powers over education were curtailed, and compulsory courses on ethics (shūshin) were eliminated. All individuals prominent in wartime organizations and politics, including commissioned officers of the armed services and all high executives of the principal industrial firms, were removed from their positions. An international tribunal was established to conduct war crimes trials, and seven men, including the wartime prime minister Tōjō, were convicted and hanged; another 16 were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Political reform
The most important reform carried out by the occupation was the establishment of a new constitution. In 1945 SCAP made it clear to Japanese government leaders that revision of the Meiji constitution should receive their highest priority. When Japanese efforts to write a new document proved inadequate, MacArthur’s government section prepared its own draft and presented it to the Japanese government as a basis for further deliberations. Endorsed by the emperor, this document was placed before the first postwar Diet in April 1946. It was formally promulgated on November 3 and went into effect on May 3, 1947.
The emphasis in the new constitution was clearly on the people rather than the throne. Sovereignty now lay with the people. A 31-article bill of rights followed, with Article 9 renouncing forever “war as a sovereign right of the nation” and pledging that “land, sea and air forces” would “never be maintained.” The emperor, no longer “sacred” or “inviolable,” was now described as the “symbol of the state and of the unity of the people.” The constitution called for a bicameral Diet, with the greatest power concentrated in the House of Representatives, members of which would now be elected by both men and women. The old peerage was dissolved, and the House of Peers was replaced by a House of Councillors. The Privy Council was abolished. The prime minister was to be chosen by the Diet from its members, and an independent judiciary was established with the right of judicial review.
Despite its hasty preparation and foreign inspiration, the new constitution gained wide public support. Although the ruling conservatives desired to revise it after Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, and an official commission favoured changes in the constitution in 1964, no political group in postwar Japan has been able to secure the two-thirds majority needed to make revisions. While parts of the structure established by the document have been modified through administrative actions—including a reversal of the principle of decentralization in areas such as the police, the school system, and some spheres of local administration—and while Article 9 has been compromised by the decision to form a National Police Reserve that in 1954 became the Self-Defense Forces, the basic principles of the constitution have enjoyed support among all factions in Japanese politics. Executive leadership proved to be the chief asset of the new institutions, and, with the abolition of the competing forces that had hampered the premiers of the 1930s, Japan’s postwar prime ministers have found themselves firmly in charge of the administration and (with limited rearmament) the armed forces as well. Thus, responsible leadership gradually replaced the ambiguous claims of imperial rule of earlier days.
Economic and social changes
The occupation’s political democratization was reinforced by economic and social changes. SCAP was aware that political democracy in Japan required not only a weakening of the value structure of the hierarchic “family state,” which restricted the individual, but also a liberation of the Japanese people from the economic forces that reinforced such a state. With nearly half of Japan’s farmers subsisting as tenants, Americans saw little hope for democracy in Japan without significant changes in the ownership of land. Occupation authorities therefore set out to establish a program of land reform that was designed to convert tenants into owner-farmers. Through legislation a plan was devised whereby landlords, many of whom lived in the cities, were forced to divest themselves of a high proportion of their holdings to the government. This land was then sold to tenants on favourable terms. Given the fact that prices were set at wartime and postwar pre-inflation rates, landlords were essentially expropriated. Still, the reforms were implemented with great efficiency and in the end proved highly successful. Supported by favourable tax and price arrangements, the majority of Japan’s new owner-farmers gained control of their land, which on average consisted of about 2.5 acres (1 hectare) per farm. Benefited by agricultural subsidies and government-maintained high agricultural prices, the Japanese countryside experienced increased prosperity. Rural voters became not only the mainstay of the conservative Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) after its formation in 1955 (fulfilling the original American intent), but as one of Japan’s most powerful lobbies they often successfully resisted agricultural trade liberalization. In a reversal of the Taishō dilemma that sprang from low domestic consumption, land reform and agricultural price supports contributed significantly to Japan’s emergence as a consumer economy in the 1950s and ’60s.
Initial Allied plans had contemplated exacting heavy reparations from Japan, but the unsettled state of other Asian countries that were to have been recipients brought reconsideration. Except for Japanese assets overseas and a small number of war plants, reparations were largely limited to those worked out between Japan and its Asian victims after the Treaty of Peace with Japan was signed in 1951.
The dissolution of Japan’s great financial houses (zaibatsu) also was an early occupation priority, but it gave way under Cold War pressures. Although the zaibatsu originally were seen as the chief potential war makers, the need for an economically viable Japan changed this perspective to viewing them as essential for economic recovery. Thus, of 1,200 concerns marked for investigation and possible dissolution, fewer than 30 were broken up by SCAP, though the major units of the zaibatsu empires—holding companies—were dissolved and their securities made available for public purchase. New legislation sought to enforce fair trading and to guard against a return to monopolies. The war itself, new postwar tax policies, and the purges that removed many top executives further undercut the largest firms. By 1950 extensive changes, although far short of those initially proposed, had taken place in the industrial world. The large banks, however, were not broken up and proved to be the centres for a measure of reconsolidation in the years after the occupation ended.
Strengthening the influence of labour in Japan also was seen as important for the advancement of democracy. A new Ministry of Labour was established in 1947. Laws on trade unions and labour relations modeled on New Deal legislation in the United States were passed, and a strong union movement was initially encouraged. Leaders of this movement included a number of socialists and communists who had been released from prison by the occupation. But a proposed general strike in 1947 and the Cold War-induced shift toward rapid economic reconstruction, anti-inflationary policies, and a control of radicalism quickly resulted in a purge of left-wing labour leaders and an effort to bring labour under government control. In 1948 SCAP ordered the government to take steps to deprive government workers—including those in communications unions—of the right to strike. At the same time a new labour organization, the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sōhyō), was sponsored as a counterweight and gradual replacement for the Congress of Industrial Labour Unions of Japan (Sambetsu Kaigi), which had become dominated by the left. In the late 1950s Sōhyō, too, had become increasingly antigovernment and anti-American, its Marxist and socialist orientation finding a political voice in the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), of which it became the leading supporter.
Postwar social legislation also provided relief from earlier restrictions. The civil code, which had supported the power of the male family head in the past, was rewritten to allow for equality between the sexes and joint inheritance rights. Women were given the right to vote and to sit in the Diet.
Educational reforms
Occupation authorities, convinced that democracy and equality were best inculcated through education, revised the Japanese educational system. A Fundamental Law of Education was passed in 1947, which guaranteed academic freedom, extended the length of compulsory education from six to nine years, and provided for coeducation. Americans were convinced that Japanese education had been too concerned with rote memorization and indoctrination and that what Japan needed was a curriculum that encouraged initiative and self-reliance. The prewar system of special channels that led to vocational training, higher technical schools, or universities was seen as essentially elitist, and the occupation therefore supported the standardization of grade levels so that completion of any level would allow entrance to the next. The American 6-3-3-4 structure of elementary, lower secondary, higher secondary, and undergraduate higher education was adopted. Entrance to high schools and universities came to depend on passing highly competitive examinations, which many Japanese young people still call “examination hell.” Other efforts to democratize education were made. To complement Japan’s prewar elite institutions, such as Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), the Americans sought to encourage the establishment of prefectural universities and junior colleges. By the 1960s college and university graduates numbered nearly four times their prewar counterparts, and there were some 565 universities and junior colleges.
Political trends
Politics under the occupation and new constitution experienced considerable flux, as many of Japan’s prewar leaders found themselves purged from public office and the two prewar parties, the Seiyūkai and Minseitō, restructured themselves as the Liberal and Progressive parties, respectively (the latter eventually becoming the Japan Democratic Party). On the left wing, the socialists and communists also reorganized their respective parties. Initial postwar elections included many political splinter groups. Faced with a lack of consensus, cabinets tended to be unstable and short-lived. This was true of the first Yoshida Shigeru cabinet (1946–47), which implemented most of the early SCAP reforms only to be replaced by an equally transitory cabinet headed by the Socialist Katayama Tetsu (1947–48). A similar fate confronted Ashida Hitoshi, who became prime minister for five months in 1948. Yoshida’s return to power in the fall of 1948 resulted in a more stable situation and ushered in the Yoshida era, which lasted until 1954. During those years, Japan capitalized on the economic benefits of close cooperation with the United States during the Korean War (1950–53), which laid the groundwork for national reconstruction and for the essential postwar U.S.-Japan relationship. In 1951 Yoshida achieved what he regarded as his greatest accomplishment—the restoration of national sovereignty—by taking Japan to the San Francisco peace conference. There, with the American negotiator John Foster Dulles and representatives of 47 nations, he hammered out the final details of the Treaty of Peace with Japan. The treaty was formally signed on September 8, 1951, and the occupation of Japan ended on April 28, 1952.
The era of rapid growth
From 1952 to 1973 Japan experienced accelerated economic growth and social change. By 1952 Japan had at last regained its prewar industrial output. Thereafter, the economy expanded at unprecedented rates. At the same time, economic development and industrialization supported the emergence of a mass consumer society. Large numbers of Japanese who had previously resided in villages became urbanized; Tokyo, whose population stood at about three million in 1945, reached some nine million by 1970. Initial close ties to the United States fostered by the Mutual Security Treaty gave way to occasional tensions over American policies toward Vietnam, China, and exchange rates. The first trade frictions, over Japanese textile exports, took place at that time. Meanwhile, foreign culture, as was the case in the 1920s, greatly influenced young urban dwellers, who in the postwar period broke with their own traditions and turned increasingly to Hollywood and American popular culture for alternatives. Japan’s new international image was projected and enhanced by events such as the highly successful 1964 Olympic Summer Games and the Ōsaka World Exposition of 1970.
Economic transformation
The Korean War marked the turn from economic depression to recovery for Japan. As the staging area for the United Nations forces on the Korean peninsula, Japan profited indirectly from the war, as valuable procurement orders for goods and services were assigned to Japanese suppliers. The Japanese economy at the return of independence in 1952 was in the process of growth and change. Sustained prosperity and high annual growth rates, which averaged 10 percent in 1955–60 and later climbed to more than 13 percent, changed all sectors of Japanese life. The countryside, where farmers had benefited from land reform, began to feel the effects of small-scale mechanization and a continuous migration to industrial centres. Agricultural yields rose as improved strains of crops and modern technology were introduced, as household appliances appeared in remote villages, and as the changing patterns of urban food consumption provided an expanded market for cash crops, fruits and vegetables, and meat products. Efforts to control population growth, which had begun with the legalization of abortion in 1948 and included a national campaign to encourage family planning, showed considerable success, as the population stabilized and thereafter grew slowly. Gains in economic output, therefore, were not offset by a rapidly expanding population, and steady industrial growth brought full employment and even labour shortages.
Two elements underscored rapid growth in the 1960s. The first was the development of a consumer economy, which was given a significant boost by Ikeda Hayato’s Income Doubling Plan of 1960. This plan reaffirmed the government’s responsibility for social welfare, vocational training, and education, while also redefining growth to include consumers as well as producers. The second was the new industrial policy that emerged out of the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) in 1959. Under these influences the structure of the Japanese economy changed to concentrate on high-quality and high-technology products designed for domestic and foreign consumption. The production of such products also emphasized Japan’s need for stable, economically advanced trading partners to replace the Asian markets to which inexpensive textiles had been sent earlier. Improvements in transportation—e.g., cargo-handling methods and bulk transport by large ore carriers and tankers—helped to remove the disadvantage of the greater distances over which Japan’s products had to be shipped. Most important, the large and growing domestic market was rendering invalid earlier generalizations about Japan’s need for cheap labour and captive Asian colonies to sustain its economy. The era of high growth continued until the “oil shock” of 1973: the embargo by OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Nations). In the interim, Japan’s output shifted with world currents, and its industrial expansion made it a world leader in shipbuilding, electronics, precision optical equipment, steel, automobiles, and high technology. In the 1960s Japanese exports expanded at an annual rate of more than 15 percent, and in 1965 Japan revealed the first signs that it had a trade surplus.
A number of factors greatly aided Japan’s economic resurgence during the 1950s and ’60s. One was the complete destruction of the nation’s industrial base by the war. This meant that Japan’s new factories, using the latest developments in technology, were often more efficient than those of their foreign competitors. The Japanese became enthusiastic followers of the American statistician W. Edward Deming’s ideas on quality control and soon began producing goods that were more reliable and contained fewer flaws than those of the United States and western Europe. At the same time, Japan was able to import, under license, advanced foreign technology at relatively low cost. With the addition of a youthful and well-educated workforce, a high domestic savings rate that provided ample capital, and an activist government and bureaucracy that provided guidance, support, and subsidies, the ingredients were in place for rapid and sustained economic growth.
Social change
Two major changes were visible in the social life of the Japanese from 1952 to 1973. The first was the significant decline in the birth rate that stabilized the Japanese population. The second was the population shift from the countryside to urban centres. In addition to birth control, such factors as a more highly educated populace, postponement of marriage in favour of education and employment, and a desire for greater independence in early adulthood contributed to changing fertility patterns—as did the increasing conviction among many couples that it was in their economic self-interest to have fewer children. But even with a stable population Japan remained one of the world’s most densely populated countries.
As population growth slowed and the economy expanded, Japan faced a labour shortage that drew workers from agriculture, as well as from small and medium enterprises, to the new large-scale industries of the cities. The resulting shift in Japan’s population was dramatic. In the Meiji period the rural population of Japan stood at 85 percent of the national total; by 1945 it was approximately 50 percent, and by 1970 it had fallen to less than 20 percent. In the process, both village and urban life underwent significant changes. Factories were built in the countryside as industrialists tried to tap into the still-underemployed rural labour force. Agriculture itself became increasingly mechanized and commercialized. As sons, and even husbands, went off to the factories, women, children, and the elderly were often left to run the family farm. At the same time, the face of rural Japan changed, with hard-surfaced roads, concrete schools, factories, and sales outlets for automobiles and farm equipment replacing the once timeless thatched-roof houses. By 1970 the average farm household income had risen higher than its urban counterpart, providing considerable rural purchasing power. Television tied rural households to urban Japan and to the world beyond. Young men brought up on visions of urban life as projected by American television programs were eager to move to the cities after graduation from high school. Young women showed increasing reluctance to become farm wives, and in some instances villagers sought spouses for their sons in Southeast Asia. Rural solidarity suffered from such out-migration, and in many cases prewar village life ceased to be, as villages amalgamated into cities and struggled to develop new identities.
Cities also underwent rapid change. By 1972 one in every nine Japanese lived in Tokyo and one in four lived in the Tokyo-Ōsaka industrial corridor. As the national centre for government, finance, business, industry, education, and the arts, Tokyo became a magnet for many Japanese and the quintessential expression of Japanese urban life.
But while Tokyo and other large cities remained highly attractive, urban dwellers also faced serious problems, notably housing. Living space for most urban dwellers was infinitesimal when compared with Western societies. Although Japanese bristled when Westerners described them as living in “rabbit hutches,” apartments with 125 square feet (12 square metres) of living space—often with shared facilities—were common. Such apartments were often found in drab residential developments that pushed out at greater distances from the inner wards of major cities and required increased commuting times. The dream of owning one’s home, which most urban dwellers sought to keep alive, was already becoming increasingly elusive by the 1970s. In 1972 the price of land in or near Japan’s largest cities was some 25 times higher than it had been in 1955, far surpassing the rise in the average urban worker’s disposable income for the same period. While government and private industry were able to provide some low-cost housing, higher-priced housing in the form of high-rise condominiums, or “mansions,” proliferated, and for most Japanese urbanites housing remained the chief flaw in Japan’s postwar economic “miracle.”
If urban life retained a number of density-induced drawbacks—which in addition to housing included few parks and open spaces, limited sewage systems, and an overcrowded transportation network of trains, subways, and buses that often required “pushers” and “pullers” to get passengers on and off—it also had its compensations in a rising standard of living and the entertainments that money afforded in splendid department stores, shopping areas, movie houses, coffee shops, bars, nightclubs and restaurants. The impact of American culture was everywhere. Young urbanites, in particular, took with gusto to jazz and rock music, pinball machines, American soft drinks and fast foods, baseball, and the freer social relations that typified American dating patterns. American fashions of dress and grooming, often set by movie and rock stars, quickly found bands of faithful imitators. Indeed, almost every American fad from the hula hoop to hang gliding had its Japanese supporters.
Urban life also brought about changes in traditional Japanese family and gender relationships. The position of women improved, as many more now went to high schools and colleges. Most found urban employment until marriage. As arranged marriages declined and “love” matches increased, marriage customs also changed. Urban living promoted the ideal of the nuclear family, particularly as housing conditions made it difficult for the extended family to live together. Urban dwellers found themselves less dependent on the goodwill of their neighbours. There was also less need for the conformity that typified rural life—although for many recent arrivals the city-based company and factory effectively restructured village values to support an efficient workplace.
The majority of villagers actually made the transition from rural to urban life with less social stress than was the case in Europe and America. Juvenile delinquency showed some increase, but overall crime rates remained low. So-called “new” religions such as Sōka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), which strongly appealed to those feeling isolated or alienated, flourished in the 1950s and ’60s. Disparities between the newly rich and the older generation living on fixed incomes and between a freer, franker, and often more egotistic and brash mass culture that appealed to the young and traditional taste set by what once had been the aristocracy often accentuated how generations viewed the postwar situation. For many of the older generation, the new culture epitomized moral decay, which they attributed to the postwar system of education; to the young, the older generation seemed out of touch with the new realities that Japan faced. Such a generational split was further dramatized in the universities, where older professors were firmly in control but where young people struggled to find ways of expressing their own positions, which, typically, were often far more radical than those of their teachers.
Political developments
With the restoration of sovereignty, politicians who had been purged by the occupation were allowed to return to public life. This included a number of prewar rightists who had been active in the 1930s. But the ideological right found few adherents among the postwar generation, and without military or big-business support the right wing played a largely dormant role during the 1950s and ’60s. Occasionally disturbing incidents, such as the 1960 assassination of the socialist leader Asanuma Inajirō by a right-wing activist, revealed that the right was still able to intimidate; but rightists, for the most part, concentrated on campaigns to restore the use of the national flag, revive such national holidays as Foundation Day (February 11; succeeded in 1966), and restore state sponsorship for Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (where Japan’s war dead, notably those of World War II, are enshrined). The left fared considerably better. Communists who returned to Japan from foreign exile or who were released from domestic prisons played a vigorous role in the immediate postwar political arena. In 1949 the Japan Communist Party (JCP) elected 35 candidates to the lower house and garnered 10 percent of the vote. But by 1952 the Korean War (which had led SCAP to purge communists from public office), steady improvements in living conditions, and uncooperative Soviet attitudes in negotiations over the return of the Kuril Islands and over fishing treaties had seriously undermined public support for the communists, as did communist opposition to the imperial institution and extremist labour tactics. Still, Marxist, and later Maoist, ideas remained highly appealing to large numbers of Japanese intellectuals and college students, and the noncommunist left became a major voice for opposition in Japanese politics.
The year 1955 was highly significant in postwar politics. The right and left wings of the socialist movement, which had been divided since 1951 over the peace treaty, merged to form the Japan Socialist Party (JSP). Faced with this united opposition the conservative parties, the Liberals and the Democrats, joined to found the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). Japan thus entered a period of essentially two-party politics. The dominant LDP, which inherited Yoshida’s mantle, worked effectively to solidify the close ties he had created with bureaucrats, bankers, and the business community. As a result, ex-bureaucrats played significant roles in the LDP, often being elected to the Diet and becoming important cabinet members. Three of the next six prime ministers (all from the LDP) who succeeded Yoshida—Kishi Nobusuke, Ikeda Hayato, and Satō Eisaku—were ex-bureaucrats. These close government-business ties, which became essential to domestic economic growth, later were characterized as “Japan Incorporated” in the West.
Ideologically, the LDP combined a strong commitment to economic growth with the desire to return Japan to world prominence. The party depended on the financial support of business and banking, but its voter base remained in rural Japan. At the local level, LDP politicians established political networks that became the hallmarks of postwar politics and emphasized the role of personal “machine” politics over party platforms. But individual LDP Diet members realized that in order to provide patronage for their constituents they needed the support of party leaders with access to the bureaucracy. Factions therefore formed around such leaders, who vied with one another for the premiership and sought to have members of their faction appointed to important cabinet posts.
As the voice of the opposition, the JSP resisted rearmament, had a strong antinuclear stance, campaigned to rid Japan of the American bases and abrogate the Mutual Security Treaty, supported mainland China, and vigorously opposed all efforts to change the postwar constitution. The appeal of the JSP was directed both to urban intellectuals and to the working classes, and its financial support came largely from labour (Sōhyō). In contrast to the LDP’s focus on economic growth, big business, and agriculture, the JSP concentrated on urban issues, on those bypassed by prosperity, and on the mounting problems of pollution and environmental degradation that accompanied accelerated industrial growth. Socialist influence was weakened, however, when the more right-wing JSP members split off to form the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in 1959.
By the early 1970s urban issues also attracted the JCP, which started to substitute practical matters for ideology and won a number of mayoral elections. To the right of the communists and socialists appeared the Clean Government Party (Kōmeitō; later renamed the New Clean Government Party), which began in 1964 as the political arm of Sōka Gakkai but dissociated itself from the religion by 1970; like its opposition counterparts, it focused on the urban electorate. On occasion, as in 1960 with the Kishi government and the proposed renewal of the U.S-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the opposition could mount sufficient public support to bring down an LDP cabinet, but on the whole the era was one in which the LDP remained firmly in power.
Still, by the late 1960s and early ’70s there also were signs of a decline in LDP support. Dissatisfaction with the party’s handling of domestic labour issues, Japan’s involvement in the Vietnam War, demands for the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty, and extensive student uprisings on university campuses, combined with growing doubts about the effects of unbridled growth and the increasing dangers from pollution, all undercut the party’s popularity. In 1952 the LDP had garnered two-thirds of the Diet seats, but by 1972 it controlled only slightly more than half. The effects of the so-called “Nixon shocks” in 1971, which allowed the yen to rise against the dollar and restructured the U.S.-China (and hence the Japan-China) relationship, were compounded in 1973 by the OPEC oil crisis that threatened the underpinnings of Japan’s postwar prosperity and the LDP’s political hegemony.
International relations
The Japan that returned to the international community in 1952 was considerably reduced in territory and influence. The Republic of China (Taiwan), the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) all possessed military establishments far larger than what became Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Given the rise of the Cold War, international relations were not destined to be conducted on the pacifist lines envisioned by Article 9 of the constitution. The United States maintained its occupancy of Okinawa and the Ryukyus, while the Soviet Union occupied the entire Kuril chain and claimed southern Sakhalin. The Korean War increased the urgency for a peace treaty. Details for such a treaty were worked out by the United States and its noncommunist allies during the command of General Matthew B. Ridgway, who succeeded MacArthur as supreme commander in April 1951.
The San Francisco peace conference that convened in September 1951 thus ratified arrangements that had been worked out earlier. In the peace treaty that ensued, Japan recognized the independence of Korea and renounced all rights to Taiwan, the Pescadores, the Kurils, and southern Sakhalin and gave up the rights to the Pacific islands earlier mandated to it by the League of Nations. The Soviet Union attended the conference but refused to sign the treaty. This enabled Japan to retain hope for regaining four islands of the Kurils closest to Hokkaido—territory that Japan had gained through negotiations, not war. The peace treaty recognized Japan’s “right to individual and collective self-defense,” which it exercised through the United States–Japan Security Treaty (1951) by which U.S. forces remained in Japan until the Japanese secured their own defense. Japan agreed not to grant similar rights to a third power without U.S. approval. Americans promised to assist Japan’s Self-Defense Forces while U.S. military units (except air detachments and naval forces) were withdrawn to Okinawa.
The treaty made no arrangements for reparations to the victims of Japan’s Pacific war but provided that Japan should negotiate with the countries concerned. Consequently, effective resumption of relations with the countries of Asia came only after treaties covering reparations had been worked out with them. These were signed with Burma (now Myanmar) in 1954, the Philippines in 1956, and Indonesia in 1958. In 1956 Japan restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union but without a formal peace treaty. With the Soviet Union no longer blocking the way, Japan was admitted to the United Nations in late 1956 and subsequently became active in United Nations meetings and specialized agencies. It also became a contributing member of the Colombo Plan group of countries for economic development in South and Southeast Asia, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Japan spearheaded the creation of the Asian Development Bank in 1965–66.
At the time of the peace treaty, Prime Minister Yoshida wanted to delay committing Japan to either of the two Chinas, but the U.S. negotiator John Foster Dulles convinced him that the treaty would be opposed in the U.S. Senate unless assurances were given that Japan would recognize the Republic of China. Thus, Tokyo soon negotiated a peace treaty with that regime, but one that would not prejudice subsequent negotiations with Beijing. A lively trade developed with Taiwan, where Japan made considerable contributions to the economy.
Trade relationships with mainland China developed slowly in the absence of diplomatic ties. In 1953 an unofficial trade pact was signed between private Japanese groups and Chinese authorities. In addition, a semiofficial “memorandum” trade became increasingly important in the 1960s. The Chinese government made skillful use of trade for political purposes, in the hope of embarrassing or weakening Japan’s conservative governments, and intervals of ideological tension on the mainland—e.g., the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)—usually were reflected in a decline or cessation of trade with Japan. Nevertheless, Japan gradually became China’s most important trading partner.
U.S. overtures toward mainland China in 1971 led to a rapid reorientation of Japan’s China policy. Japanese government leaders indicated a willingness to compromise ties with Taiwan in favour of a closer relationship with Beijing. Beijing also revealed a new interest in formal relations with Japan, subject to Japan’s revocation of its treaty with Taiwan. In 1972, a year after mainland China was admitted to the UN, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei reached an agreement with Beijing on steps to normalize relations. Japan simultaneously severed its ties with Taiwan, replacing its embassy with a nonofficial office.
Japan’s post-occupation relationship with the United States was founded on the 1951 security treaty. Part of the understanding that lay behind this treaty was that Japan would have access to the U.S. market in exchange for the maintenance of American bases on Japanese soil. While the LDP saw advantages to maintaining such a quid pro quo relationship, which allowed Japan to dramatically expand its foreign trade while avoiding undue security costs, Japan’s opposition parties were less sanguine about a relationship that tied Japan directly into the increasingly hostile Cold War. Tensions therefore mounted as the renewal date of the treaty (scheduled for 1960) approached; both governments hoped to extend it for 10 years as the revised Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. The situation was complicated by domestic dislike of Kishi Nobusuke, who had become prime minister in 1957 after having earlier served in the Tōjō cabinet. Kishi had been named, though not tried, as a war criminal by the occupation. His staunch anticommunist stand, his open support of constitutional revision, and his undemocratic tactics made him suspect among many Japanese who felt they had been only marginally involved in the making of the original treaty and were anxious about the nation’s future. Added to this was the proposed visit to Japan by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower that was scheduled amid new tensions caused by the downing of a U.S. reconnaissance plane by the Soviet Union in May 1960. When the Kishi cabinet used its majority in the Diet to force through treaty revisions, opposition increased steadily. Gigantic public demonstrations, largely composed of students, shook Tokyo for days. In the end the treaty survived, but Eisenhower’s visit was canceled and Kishi resigned in July 1960.
The administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy caught the imagination of many Japanese, and Kennedy’s designation of the popular scholar Edwin O. Reischauer as ambassador further improved Japanese-American relations. But by the late 1960s the unpopularity of the Vietnam War threatened to disturb the relationship once more. Prime ministers Ikeda and Satō worked hard to remove the final reminders of war. In 1967, under Satō, the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands were restored to Japan; and in 1969, on the eve of renewed negotiations over treaty revisions, the United States agreed to return the Ryukyus in 1972, although bases were to be maintained on Okinawa under the terms of the security treaty. The treaty was renewed without incident in 1970, now changed to allow termination by either side with a year’s advanced notification. Thus, by 1972 the U.S.-Japan relationship had stabilized. While signs of change on the part of both countries could be found in their China policies, there was as yet little to indicate the mounting conflict over trade that subsequently emerged.