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Here's what looks like an interesting paper on the real story behind America's postwar occupation of Japan. That occupation often gets flung in the faces of skeptics about nation-building:"Oh yeah? Well it worked in Japan!" Usually neither party to the argument knows much about the period. But Miwa (U Tokyo econ prof) and Ramseyer (Harvard Law prof) do. And they say it didn't work. Or, more specifically, it worked when the New Dealers running the occupation and their lackeys in the Japanese bureaucracy were forced out of the way by the Japanese voters, who were sick of the mess that crew had made of things. From the paper (spoiler alert!):
the story of the Occupation is firstly a tale of barely planned and badly executed American oversight hijacked by men (both Japanese and American) determined to impose on the country their private vision of the public good. It was a vision of government directives supplanting economic markets. It was a vision voters did not share. And it was a vision that failed. The story is secondly a tale of democracy working as it should. By 1947 Japanese citizens realized that this command-and-control approach did not work. They used their vote to retake the government. And they shut down the control apparatus. And the story is thirdly a tale of Washington leaders belatedly constraining the agency slack within their own Occupation. By reining in their New Deal bureaucrats in SCAP, the U.S. government gave Japanese voters the chance to implement the policies they wanted. They wanted a capitalist framework, and that framework became the foundation for the growth that followed.
Thus,"nation-building's" greatest success turns out to have been a self-help project. I guess none of this should be too surprising. You don't wrench liberal capitalist democracy into being through state policy unless less the preconditions are there already. If they're not, you may be in a hell of a mess.
Oh, and as a bonus, Soviet agent Harry Dexter White makes a cameo in the paper. Hat tip Peter Van Doren.
To the extent nation-bulding *did* work in Japan, it was because of the Emperor's acquiescence, and his role in mobilizing a basically authoritarian local culture into compliance with the conqueror. In other words, MacArthur relied on a preexisting framework of authority--quite a bit different from what the geniuses under Rumsfeld tried to do with their "de-Baathification" campaign.
William Marina -
6/2/2005
Harry White was influential in America's whole Far Eastern policy during and after the War.
With respect to Japan's economy, it was greatly aided by its contribution to the Korean War as the US spent lavishly there, also later by the Vietnam War.
The Japanese Cartels, old Zaibatsu, also were prominent in their Korean equivalents, the Chaebols. Both were, and are, subsidiaries of the American Empire. I visited a Mitsui research lab, huge water testing tanks, where the US Navy was developing fast cruisers, of which the Russsians had nothing even close.
When on the Fulbright I also visited a Korean Gold Star factory (then supposedly noted for cheap stuff, now the more prestigeous, LG) where women in masks placed Mitsubishi high-priced guts (made in Japan) into plastic VHS boxes labeled Gold Star. It was really a great buy. Of course, Korean cars also had Japanese made engines then.
Our Allies in Vietnam, the Koreans, contributed armed forces, which played a major role in our torture-terror tactcs there. The Koreans, for more than a millennia, had been the favored expert torturers of the Chinese Empire.
No need for incompetent, ill-trained Americans to operate a Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib! Where are the Koreans now that we really need them? Perhaps our Emperor, GeoII43, can work out a compromise with the North so that we get their expert thugs in exchange for economic help and less pressure on the Nuke question.
David Timothy Beito -
6/2/2005
What role did he play, as head the first head of the World Bank?
David Timothy Beito -
6/2/2005
Interestingly, the very first postwar election for the Japanese diet was in 1946 (less than a year after Hiroshima) and was held under the rules of the pre-war constitution (though I think it allowed women to vote for the first time).
The Socialists won a majority. Note, the contrast with Iraq, where elections for an actual parliament will not be held in October more than two years after the occupation began
William Marina -
6/2/2005
What Healy & the paper cited appear not to note is the role of the Cold War.
Japanese voters could have done little to change policy had not the US authorities realized the need for Japanese support, also German, in the emerging Cold War. Some figures from the old regimes were also rehabilitated. Thus, was renewed the old struggle between the socialists, mercantilists, corporatists, and free market folks for control over the direction of policy.
William Marina -
6/2/2005
One of the incredible acts of the post-1945 New Dealers in Japan includes the way in which they created an ultra Mercantilist cadre in Japan's Finance Ministry for the next 50 years+. Believing all businessmen (the Zaibatsu) bad, although a few had been assassinated early on for opposing the military, the New Dealers sought bureaucrats like themselves, who had ruled Manchukuo since the early 1930s. Like the left wing of the New Deal itself, these were followers of Hitler's Economic Minister, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, much influenced by JM Keynes.
These were the folks priased by such writers as Chalmers Johnson during all those years when he now admits to working closely with the CIA as a "spear carrier" for the Empire, perusing materials in Allan Dulles' library.
As a Fulbright Scholar in 1988 I had the opportunity to study Economic Development in Korea and Japan for the whole Summer. It was clear the development of both nations owed a great deal to the efforts of half a century by the Japanese.
For example, the Japanese military quickly made a truce with the guerrillas in Formosa (Taiwan) after 1895, while after 1898, we killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. As for the 1940s, Prof. Grant Goodman has written tellingly how, "The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines was a Success." If American Nation Building is so great, as described by sycophants like Max Boot, how come the Islands are now seen as "The Sick Man of Asia?"
Much of this had been explained to me by my teacher, Alfred Crofts, who grew up in China and served on MacArthur's Staff, including as the first Pres. of Seoul Univ. after the War. See Crofts & Buchanan, A History of the Far East.
American military historians continue to use the Army's figure of 200-220,000 Filipinos killed, rather than the over 500,000 compiled by the Anti-Imperialist League. Does anyone believe the Army's figures on Iraq today, as compared to the over 100,000 suggested by humanitarian groups, not counting the half-million children due to our policies in the 1990s, so lightly regarded by Madame Albright?
The US Army & its accompanying bureaucrats? Some Nation Builders!
Aeon J. Skoble -
6/2/2005
I don't see how this paper makes the point you seem to want it to make. If the Japanese were able to vote out the new dealers -- "democracy working as it should" -- that's _because_ of the occupation forcing them to adopt constituional government. When Japan is used as an example of "nation-building," e.g. in arguments about Iraq, the point isn't that the US made Japan into a laissez-faire capitalism machine. It's that the US made Japan abandon its quasi-feudal and explicitly fascist political structure and replace it with the kind of constitutional democracy in which it's possible for "voters" to "retake the government."
Sudha Shenoy -
6/2/2005
"Nation-building" suggests Japan in 1945 was a blank sheet of paper. On this pristine sheet, American occupiers drew the picture of post-1945 Japan. Is this really true? Did the Japanese have no history, no society, no economy, no literature, religions, art, etc.? Were they simply blanks waiting to become something?
