Japan: 1945 Conflicts And Internal PoliticsEssay Preview: Japan: 1945 Conflicts And Internal PoliticsReport this essayDiscuss the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. What effects did the purges have on political and business leadership in Japan and to what degree did this action have on the continuity or discontinuity between pre-war and post-war elites? What actions led SCAP to “reverse” its policies from around 1948? What were the aims and goals of the occupation forces?
The occupation of Japan began in August 1945 and ended in April 1952. General MacArthur was the first Supreme Commander. The entire operation was for the most part carried out by the United States. Japan in essence lost all the territory obtained after 1894. The remnants of Japans war machine were gone, and war crime trials were held. Approximately 500 military officers committed suicide shortly after Japan surrendered, and hundreds more were executed for committing war crimes. The Emperor was not declared a war criminal.
A new constitution went into effect in 1947: The emperor lost all political and military power, and was solely the symbol of the state. Universal suffrage was introduced and human rights were now guaranteed. Japan was also forbidden to lead a war again or to maintain an army. MacArthur also intended to break up power concentrations by dissolving the zaibatsu and other large companies, and by decentralizing the education system and the police. In a land reform, concentrations in land ownership were removed.
During the first half of the occupation, Japans media was subject to rigid censorship of any anti-American statements and controversial topics.The co-operation between the Japanese and the Allied powers worked relatively well. Critics began to grow when the United States acted according to self-interests in the Cold War. The United States reintroduced the persecution of the communists, stationed even more troops in Japan, and wanted Japan to establish its own self defense force despite the anti-war article in the constitution. Many aspects of the occupations so called “reverse course” were welcomed by conservative Japanese politicians. With the peace treaty that went into effect in 1952, the occupation ended.
Japan and the Allies also did not go as well when the United States entered World War II. Following the Korean War, which started in the months after the opening of the Korean War, China became stronger. A Japanese-occupied Korea, at first in China-Japan, was viewed unfavorably by the United States. The relations between the two countries had changed and China also became stronger. There had already been several conflicts that have recently led to the collapse of relations. In 1945 the Japanese-dominated Pacific League Congress in Tokyo gave the Japanese Government a mandate of conducting its daily work day, which included collecting data, making sure the results were implemented and supporting the efforts of the Allied organizations in the field of Korea. When the Allied troops departed the war in 1945, Japan and its allies moved to begin the process of expanding the peninsula. Japan saw the Japanese as the “biggest military adversary of the United States at the moment and a new war was coming to be waged among the nations of Europe and the United States alone” (T. Nair, North Korean War, p. 26). To help Japan avoid military confrontation, the Japanese Army began an intensive task of collecting and reporting a detailed log of all the air strikes that had occurred since the second world war. For 1942 Japan spent about ten days making reports. Each year about thirty-seven reports were sent to the Americans. During the year the Japanese Government also sent the Japanese Air Forces a large number of troops to the Pacific Theater to report on wartime operations at the time. Each two-day report contained thousands of hits and the first two days of a fighting was over (T. Nair, N. Korea War, p. 24). During 1943 an American war officer described the Japanese war as having gone “in the dark” (T. Nair, North Korean War, p. 24). There was often political tension during this period and there was usually no military action before war broke out. The two Allied wars were not without political pressure because of the tension in the other countries. It caused many Japanese officials to resign from their posts and to resign in protest at the atrocities committed during Japanese occupation (Kimi Tannen, Japanese Labour Congress, p. 50). At the time the occupation of Korea and Japan were the final step in the two war projects. The two Asian countries did not have any peacekeepers on their side and neither had any allies on their side. In 1943 the United States had started a war against Japan by putting a stop to air raids and to bombing of cities with the intention of capturing enemy civilian targets. During the years 1945-49 the United States, its ally the Pacific countries joined in the bombing of civilian targets and as the United States intensified its operations in Korea. In March 1949 a Japanese delegation to the United Nations met in New York and declared the Allied bombing of Tokyo was “an act of war” (Kimi Tannen
Discuss the significant features of post-war Japan that has lead Japan to become on of the leading industrial nations of the world. Emphasize the economic activities of the 1960s and 1970s.
After the end of World War II, Japans economy was a disaster, and its international and economic relations were completely disrupted. Initially, imports were limited to essential food and raw materials, for the most part financed by assistance from the United States. Because of horrible domestic shortages, exports did not begin to recover until the Korean War, when the United States armed forces created boom-like conditions in indigenous industries. By 1954 economic rehabilitation and recovery were in essence complete.
During the decade of the 1960s, the monetary value of exports grew at an average annual rate faster than the average rate of all noncommunist countries. This rapid productivity growth in manufacturing industries made Japanese products more competitive in world markets. With the fixed exchange rate for yen during the decade of 1960, the chronic deficits that the nation faced in the 1950s had disappeared by the middle of the 1970s.
The 1970s brought major changes for Japans external relations. The decade began with the end of the fixed exchange rate for yen and with a strong rise in the value of yen under a new system of floating rates. Japan also faced higher bills for imports of energy and raw materials. These new exchange rates and the rise in raw material costs meant that the excesses of the decades beginning were lost, and large trade deficits followed in the wake of the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979. Expanding the countrys exports remained a priority in the face of raw material supply shocks, and during the decade exports continued to expand at a high annual average rate.
Throughout the majority of the postwar period, foreign investment was not a sizeable part of Japans external economic relations. Both domestic and foreign investments were carefully controlled by government regulations, which kept the investment flows small. These controls applied to direct investment in the creation of subsidiaries under the control of a parent company, portfolio investment, and lending. Controls were motivated by the desire to prevent foreigners (mostly Americans) from gaining ownership of the economy when Japan was in a weak position after World War II. Beginning in the late 1960s, these controls were gradually loosened, and the process of deregulation accelerated and continued throughout the 1980s.
Social change affected Modern Japan as well. What factors led to the decline in the birth ratio of Japan and how did the phoneme alter Japans post-war changes in terms of jobs, urban growth, and overall economic growth?
The social standing of the Japanese woman has altered dramatically since the end of the Second World War. Before the war, the Japanese woman was firmly embedded in a patriarchal system, taught to obey first her father, then her husband, and later her sons. The few women who worked outside the home in that pre-war period worked almost exclusively as nurses or teachers or in other professions deemed Ðappropriate for women.
This is not to say that any or all Japanese women might still be chained by the restriction of that pre-war system. For example, in terms of labor force participation rate of women, the ratio of women working to the total female population 15 years of age and over in Japan in the mid 1980s was equivalent to that of any other industrialized nation. The factors responsible for the increase in the female work force in Japan are the same as in the other major industrialized nations.
The decade of Japans economic miracle, the 1960s, was indicated by a new wave in the Japanese womens movement, which was deeply entrenched, in the structural changes of the society at the time. It could be said that the Japanese womens movement occurred soon after Japan had completed its modernization, as an inevitable side effect to progress.
Japanese society had been Ðprogressing through the process of gradual modernization since the Meiji restoration, this process accelerated rapidly during 1960s, because it was the decade when Japan emerged miraculously successful in their economy. For example, the urbanization of the population passed the halfway mark, the number of nuclear families increased to 60% of all households and the average number of family members dropped from five to three. After the economic Ðmiracle period in the 1960s