Blame George Kennan for Abe's Bad History

George Kennan

By James Gibney Editorial writer at BloombergView and APP member

First published on Bloomberg View April 29, 2015

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s hawkish policies, historical revisionism, and heavy-handed efforts to manipulate domestic and foreign media have infuriated critics in Japan and its neighborhood. They might want to reserve some of that anger for U.S. super-diplomat George F. Kennan.

During the early years of the U.S. postwar occupation, an ungainly mix of idealistic New Deal reformers and right-wing satraps of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, launched a radical attempt to liberalize Japan's economy and society -- prosecuting war criminals, busting up industrial combines, imposing land reforms and nurturing a labor movement, among other changes. A new constitution largely drafted by U.S. lawyers and civil servants dramatically expanded citizen rights, giving Japanese women what the historian John Dower called “one of the strongest equal-rights provisions in modern constitutional law.” (Dower’s Pulitzer-winning “Embracing Defeat” covers the period brilliantly.) The constitution also formally committed Japan to pacifism under Article 9, in hopes of turning the country into what MacArthur, with typical bombast, called the “Switzerland of the Pacific.”

Kennan, however, saw MacArthur’s reforms as a recipe for strategic disaster. With China torn by civil war, Europe flattened and divided, and the Cold War taking hold, Kennan believed Japan needed to be built into “the cornerstone of a Pacific Security system.” Beginning in 1947-48, he and his allies in Washington engineered a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy. War crimes trials came to an abrupt end, public employees lost the right to strike and the U.S. began to nurture Japan’s businesses and export industries. Not only were conservative pre-war politicians and bureaucrats rehabilitated, but more than 20,000 leftist union members and other workers were fired in what came to be known as the “Red purges.”

One of the bigger beneficiaries of Kennan’s “reverse course” was Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who had co-signed the declaration of war against the U.S. in 1941 and overseen the conscription of hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese laborers as head of the Munitions Ministry. Dower called Kishi “brilliant and unscrupulous”; another historian of the U.S. occupation, Michael Schaller, dubbed him “America’s Favorite War Criminal.” In 1948, after spending three years in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison while being investigated as a Class A war criminal, Kishi was released along with 18 others for lack of evidence.

U.S. money helped Kishi become prime minister in 1957. According to Schaller, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Kishi and selected members of his relatively new Liberal Democratic Party. In return, Kishi shepherded a revision to the mutual security treaty between the U.S. and Japan that scrapped some elements unpopular with Japanese but secured the U.S. right to retain its bases in Japan and, in a secret protocol, the right to move nuclear weapons "through" Japan. (Protests over the treaty would go on to force Kishi’s resignation.)

Obama in Egypt Could Learn From MacArthur in Japan

The following essay by James Gibney, a member of  Bloomberg View's editorial board and an APP member, appeared on Bloomberg View on August 20, 2013.  Follow him on Twitter.

So far, President Barack Obama has yet to call the coup that ousted Egypt's President Mohamed Mursi a coup, or to cut off U.S. military aid to its increasingly autocratic and brutal regime. As Obama put it in his statement last Thursday, "Given the depths of our partnership with Egypt, our national security interest in this pivotal part of the world and our belief that engagement can support a transition back to a democratically elected civilian government, we've sustained our commitment to Egypt and its people." A murmured consensus says that the U.S. can't afford to sacrifice the advantages of its security relationship -- military overflight rights, priority for U.S Navy ships at the Suez Canal, intelligence cooperation and upholding peace with Israel -- in order to stand up for democratic principles.

There's a cautionary counterpoint to this realist catechism, and it comes from an episode frequently, and mistakenly, cited as an unqualified policy success: the U.S. occupation of Japan.

The short, happy version of the nearly seven-year occupation history is that a magnanimous U.S. occupying force led by supremo Douglas MacArthur thoroughly transformed a defeated Japan into a model democracy and staunch ally. The behavior of current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, however, is a reminder that there's more to the story. Abe's nationalist rhetoric, his unyielding prosecution of territorial quarrels and his penchant for revisionist history about the war flow in part from a fateful occupation-era U.S. choice.

It was called the "reverse course": Roughly two years after the occupation began in 1945, U.S. policy-makers concerned about the developing Cold War and the spread of communism in Asia dropped the emphasis on "demilitarization and democratization" in favor of building up Japan's economy, restoring its conservative political establishment and, eventually, rearming it. As numerous scholars have documented -- including John Dower in his Pulitzer Prize-winning occupation history "Embracing Defeat" -- the purging of war criminals and militarists gave way to the purging of leftists.

Beneficiaries included Abe's grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, one of 19 Class A war criminal suspects released as a result of the policy u-turn, who went on to become prime minister. Losers included outspoken left-leaning journalists, academics and trade unionists. With the onset of the Korean War, the U.S. largely abandoned efforts to reform Japan's corporate and financial structure in favor of bolstering the economy, not least its ability to supply U.S. forces in Korea. As Dower writes, "The political and ideological rationale behind the economic 'reverse course' ... was to ensure Japan's emergence as a strong anticommunist bastion, and this necessarily entailed support of the most conservative and corporatist elements in Japanese society -- and, as it happened, the continued American parenting of [Japan's] 'abnormal' market economy."

We all know how that worked out: Among other results, it birthed an export juggernaut operating behind a formidable wall of tariff and non-tariff barriers. The U.S. reliance on Japanese ministries to carry out occupation directives reinforced Japan's bureaucracies, and its support for Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (including slush money from the CIA) helped to entrench the LDP's stultifying one-party rule.

Of course, Japan's people and their leaders were hardly passive spectators in this process. And who's to say what modern Japan would look like if the U.S. had had the courage of its founders' convictions and persevered with its democratic reforms? My opinion is that the world would be a better place if it had. Certainly Abe's revisionist views of the war, with all their dangerous belligerence, would be less likely to take root. Now, in Egypt, the U.S. decision to sacrifice democracy on the altar of realism seems likely once again to yield an inferior result.