Playing GI and prostitute, black marketeer and left-wing agitator were the nation's three most popular children's games in 1946, one report said a year after the start of the U.S.-dominated Allied Occupation.
Japan seemed to have been ready for the changing values the occupation
would bring. The same government that would later vehemently deny,
admit, then deny again, the forced prostitution of comfort
women
for its warriors, would set up for Allied troops within
three days of the Aug. 15, 1945, surrender the Recreation and
Amusement Association, the world's largest prostitution trust,
employing 1,360 hookers in Tokyo alone.
But young women selling their bodies to conquerors for a bar of soap
or a pair of nylons merely scratched the surface of the nation's
wholesale clearance of traditional morality in an effort to please the
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). But the nation's
astounding transformation from bitter enemy to fawning ally would
probably not have alarmed SCAP—the name given to both the
organizational body charged with carrying out the occupation and
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the demigod
who headed it—as it
was hardly a paragon of consistency, either.
The U.S. Army started the occupation pledging to demilitarize and
democratize
its feudalistic
foe. Through to 1947, it did
just that. Among its achievements—provision of widespread civil
liberties; introduction of universal suffrage; agricultural reform;
legalization of labor unions; dismantling of the zaibatsu business
conglomerations that fed the war effort and purges of militarists.
The occupation also gave the nation the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East, which punished those deemed guilty of
leading Japan into war. But arguably the greatest gift of the
occupation was the war-renouncing Constitution, upon which the
influence of MacArthur's General Headquarters was so great some
deemed the charter to be more SCAPanese
than Japanese, though
GHQ censors forbade anyone from saying so at the time.
SCAP changed spots as the cold war developed. The war- crimes trials
turned into a farcical scene of victor's justice.
The
defendants were effectively guilty before the start of their
trial—many facing charges that hadn't existed before the end
of the war. Moreover, Emperor Hirohito, the man in whose name the
nation had waged war, escaped indictment. Indeed, defendants did all
they could to protect the Emperor, who repaid their faith by having
dinner with Joseph Keenan, the trial's chief prosecutor, the day
the death sentences on seven of them were confirmed.
Purges proved to be flexible, too. Many accused Class-A war criminals arrested before 1947 had returned to public prominence by 1949. Among them, Nobusuke Kishi, who became Prime Minister in 1957; Yoshio Kodama, an ultranationalist who emerged as the postwar godfather of the yakuza; and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who later made his name as a philanthropist.
Fortunately for a Japan that had been ruled by a god
for eons,
when Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity on New Year's Day
1946, MacArthur swept in to take his place, remaining in supreme
control of the nation until firedby U.S. President Harry S. Truman in
April 1950. MacArthur was idolized across the nation, though he saw
little of it, rarely leaving his headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Life
Insurance Building. When MacArthur departed from Japan, there were
calls to make him an honorary citizen
and suggestions to erect
a massive statue in his likeness beside Tokyo Bay. The Tokyo
Metropolitan Government also issued the general with a letter of
gratitude. Soon after, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee,
MacArthur likened the Japanese to 12-year-olds. There was outcry
across the nation and the proposals to honor MacArthur, though not
dying, simply faded away.