INSIDE GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy

Takemae, a professor of political science at Tokyo Keizai University, offers a superbly translated study of the legacy of the largely American postwar occupation of Japan up to the present day. General MacArthur, supreme commander in Japan from 1945 to 1951, strides likes a colossus across the pages and is credited for democratic reforms and his influence on the postwar constitution, yet faulted for cronyism and lack of oversight. Takemae points out how Americans have manipulated Japanese politics and public opinion over the decades. In the aftermath of the war, they obscured Hirohito's wartime guilt in order to capitalize on the Emperor's popularity and effect a peaceful transition. Beginning in 1948, American Cold War anticommunist fervor led Washington to essentially reverse the process of political liberalization in Japan, restoring purged politicians and businessmen—some of them released from war crimes sentences—to renewed and profitable careers. (Several even became prime ministers.) And yet Takemae credits the American occupation with laying the foundation for a modern, democratic Japan. He indicts myopic Japanese government and education policy-makers who refuse to acknowledge war crimes on their own side. There is still, he says, a "fault line that runs through the national psyche, using the [atomic] bombing and the dual humiliations of defeat and occupation to foster a backward-looking, narcissistic nationalism." Few books about contemporary Japan are as detailed, penetrating and compellingly objective as this overview of the postwar half-century. This is in a class with John Dowers's prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999). 10 maps and diagrams, 76 photos. (June)