Year Zero

It meant so many things, America! To begin with, everything inaccessible; its jazz, cinema and literature had nourished our youth, but it had always been a great myth to us as well . . . America was also the country which had sent our deliverance; it was the future on the march; it was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images; the mere thought that they could be seen with one’s own eyes set one’s head whirling. I rejoiced, not only for Sartre’s sake, but also for my own, because I knew that one day I was sure to follow him down this new road.27

Then there was Boris Vian and his band of zazous, who had rebelled against the frowzy Pétainism of the war years by affecting an Anglo-American style, throwing wild parties, and reading clandestine copies of Hemingway and Faulkner. They were the French counterparts of the German Swingjugend, who, at far greater risk, showed their defiance of the Nazis by dancing to forbidden jazz music in private apartments. After the Spring of ’44, Vian and the zazous dressed in American surplus blue jeans and checked shirts, and played and listened to nothing but jazz, jazz, jazz.

Disillusion often follows exposure to the real thing. Sartre returned from the U.S., in Beauvoir’s account, “a little stunned by all he had seen.” He had liked the people all right, and was impressed by Roosevelt, but, in Beauvoir’s words, “apart from the economic system, segregation and racism, there were many things in the civilization of the Western Hemisphere that shocked him—the Americans’ conformism, their scale of values, their myths, their optimism, their avoidance of anything tragic . . .”28

It stands to reason that France was seen by many, especially in France itself, as the obvious cultural counterweight to America. Like the United States, the French Republic was born from a revolution with universalist aspirations; France as an enlightened civilization whose fruits could, and indeed should, grow with profit everywhere. Americans have a similar view of their own republic and its mission in the world. This was certainly true in 1945, when the U.S. was in a somewhat better position to preach, and sometimes impose its values, than France. It was different in the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon spread French universalism with brutal force, especially in the German lands. The German reaction then was the growth of a romantic nationalism, a defensive consciousness of blood and soil whose hideous perversion would lead to the Third Reich.

Reeducation American-style in 1945 was a gentler enterprise, despite an initial thirst to mete out punishment. Perhaps this was one reason why Germans, not without ambivalence and even resentment, took to the American century more readily than the French. Knowing what they themselves had done to the Slavic countries, let alone to the Jews, most Germans can only have been deeply relieved by the way they were treated by the Americans. Life in the Anglo-American zones was certainly to be preferred to the Soviet zone, or even, certainly in the beginning, to the much smaller French zone in the Rhineland along the French border. The main city under French occupation was the elegant spa town of Baden-Baden, now bereft of guests to take the waters. That France should have a zone at all was far from obvious. The United States had been against it, since France, despite General de Gaulle (whom Roosevelt had always distrusted) and his Free French forces, had hardly played a vital role in defeating Nazi Germany. Still, de Gaulle’s will, as usual, prevailed. The other problem with France was the desire among many of its citizens to wreak vengeance, and to extract as much loot from Germany as they could get away with.

This was especially true in the first year of occupation, during which the French, more even than the Americans or the British, behaved like conquerors. Troops were sometimes undisciplined. Natural resources, such as coal, were shipped to France. There were French plans, which came to nothing in the end, to annex parts of Germany, specifically the industrial Rhineland and Westphalia and the coal-rich Saarland. These schemes were abandoned because none of the other Allies supported them. There was opposition from some French generals too, who feared that such moves would provoke just the kind of German revanchism that had led to the war that had just ended.

But the French, as always inspired by their mission civilisatrice, were serious about culture, especially the export of French culture to civilize the Germans. And not just the Germans. Exhibitions of French art, concerts featuring French composers, and French cinema and literature were promoted in other Allied zones as well, to show, in the words of René Thimonnier, head of French cultural affairs, that “in the order of cultural values, France is still a great nation, indeed perhaps the greatest of all.”29

In terms of denazification, the French did pretty much what the Americans did: purge teachers and others with a Nazi past, ban books from libraries, and check the content in German papers and radio programs produced by reliable German journalists under French control. One of the people combing through contemporary German writing in Baden-Baden was the novelist Alfred D?blin, who had become a French citizen in the 1930s. He was struck by the wooliness of German prose produced immediately after the war, the tendency towards mysticism, the air of intellectual confusion. Germans, he surmised, “hadn’t read or learned very much.” The German soil, at first, “only sprouted grass and weeds.”30

Like the American officials of the Information Control Division, French officials did not think the Germans were quite ready in 1945 to be exposed to political ideas. Their view was that the press ought to concentrate instead on the problems of daily life and cultural affairs, on subjects such as “contemporary French ceramics” or “French painting.” The idea was to bring the Germans, who had been deprived of modern artistic developments outside the Third Reich, back into the civilized world. The center of the civilized world was, of course, Europe, and the cultural capital was, of course, Paris.

There was a political point to this, apart from restoring French amour propre. Even though France was unable to annex the borderlands along the Rhine, something more important would soon happen there. Its rich supplies of coal and steel would be put under the control of a pan-European institution to the benefit of Germany, France, and the other members of the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in Paris in 1951. The French zone was the birthplace of what would later become the European Union. The initiative to share sovereignty had come from France. The man who officially proposed it was the French statesman Robert Schuman, born in Luxembourg of a French father and German mother. The chancellor of West Germany, who agreed to share sovereignty over one of Germany’s wealthiest areas, was the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer.

To say that Germany was lucky to be divided into Allied zones in 1945 would be cruel to those who had to endure communist dictatorship for four decades. But perhaps these divisions best suited the federal nature of Germany. The Allied occupiers were never able to centralize German education, or flatten regional differences in culture and politics. Whether Germans were really reeducated is doubtful. The greatest Allied achievement may have been to leave western Germany without animosity. Wishing to reeducate a former foe may be patronizing, but it is a more benign and much less dangerous policy than vengeance. Helping the old enemy to its feet may have been more than some Germans deserved, but it was better than squeezing the country dry. This time there would be no “stab in the back” legend, or armed bands of desperadoes wanting to avenge their nation’s defeat. What really shaped Germany’s future, however, had less to do with culture or education, justice, or even common decency, than with political circumstances, the Cold War, the need to build strong democracies in Europe, the opportunism of the German elites, American interests, and the utopian project designed, in the words of Robert Schuman, to “make war [in Europe] impossible” and “encourage world peace.”

In terms of military and political clout, the French occupation of the Rhineland may not have amounted to much, but it helped to knit one of the bloodiest fissures in Europe together again. A united Europe was not only a Franco-German, but also a Christian Democratic, dream. De Gaulle, with a great degree of skepticism, likened it to “resuming Charlemagne’s enterprise.”31 The social democrats in Germany had opposed it, as had the French communists. De Gaulle was against it, too, because he thought France was not strong enough yet to dominate the union. Perhaps the general was irritated because he wasn’t in power at the time. For in 1945, inspired by Jean Monnet, de Gaulle had actually spoken in favor of integrating the Ruhr and the Saarland into a European federation. (He was a little vague about whether Britain should be part of this.) Whatever the future of the currently troubled Union may bring, this dream of unity did more to bring Germany back into the fold of European nations than all the reeducation programs put together.

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ON DECEMBER 15, 1945, the Saturday Evening Post featured an article about the occupation of Japan with an extraordinary headline—extraordinary now, not then. It read: “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap.” Written by William L. Worden. Dateline: Tokyo, By Bomber Mail.

Above the dateline is a summary of Worden’s article: “While the Nipponese wait to be told what to think, and their slippery countrymen duck the job, the living example of the American soldier is proving effective.”

Later on in the piece, the reader is informed that “The average Japanese is a simple person not far removed from the savage—as evidenced in the war.”

But there is some hope, for, “The man who, at the moment, seems to be most effective in democratizing and civilizing the Japanese is the G.I., even as he was so effective in pacifying him.”

This image of the “Jap” as a savage was widespread during the war. After the A-bombs had killed around two hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman wrote to a friend that “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”32

What is remarkable about the occupation is how quickly such views disappeared. Which is not to say that the idea of reeducating the Japanese to become peaceful democrats was not viewed in some quarters with the greatest skepticism. Experts on Japanese culture and society in the State Department, collectively known as “the Japan hands,” were quick to point out the top-down collectivist nature of traditional Japanese life. The Japanese, they claimed, would never behave like individuals. They were used to obeying orders from people of superior rank. The emperor was revered as a sacred figure. His subjects, in the words of one Japan hand, were “inert and tradition bound.” The Japanese, according to the British representative in occupied Tokyo, were “as little fitted for self-government in a modern world as any African tribe, though much more dangerous.”33*

Pitted against the Japan hands, whose theories on the Japanese character were often based on what they heard from their elitist Japanese contacts, were the China hands, frequently people with left-wing sympathies, and New Dealers from the old Roosevelt administration. These were the officials whose opinions prevailed, at least in the first years of the occupation. The pivotal date was August 11, when Joseph Grew, doyen of the Japan hands and former ambassador to Tokyo, was replaced as undersecretary of state by Dean Acheson. Acheson stated in September that “the present social and economic system in Japan which makes for a will to war will be changed so that the will to war will not continue.”34

General MacArthur, a deeply religious man, whose wartime theories about the “Oriental mind” as childlike and brutal were often remarkably crude, was convinced that he had been destined to reeducate the Japanese. His guides in this mission, he liked to say, were Washington, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ. Ideally, Japanese should be converted to the Christian faith. But in any case—and here MacArthur’s ideas concurred with those of Konrad Adenauer—renewal had to be spiritual as well as political, social, and economic. MacArthur, however, went further than anything conceived by the German Christian Democrat. His occupation of Japan, he said, would result in “a spiritual revolution . . . an unparalleled convulsion in the social history of the world.”35 Herbert Hoover, on a visit to Tokyo, rather oddly called MacArthur “the reincarnation of St. Paul.”36 Yet the American viceroy had no interest in exploring Japanese culture, or learning much about the place. He spent most of his evenings at home watching cowboy movies. His translator, Faubion Bowers, later recalled that during MacArthur’s five years in Japan, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, or president of the largest university.”37

Unlike Germany, Japan was not divided into Allied zones (the Soviets had wanted to claim the northern island of Hokkaido, but made no fuss when the U.S. said no). The Japanese occupation was an American show, and MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, had almost absolute authority, even though he reigned over an elected Japanese government, which did most of the actual governing. There are several possible reasons why the reeducational zeal in Japan was greater than in Germany. It may be that experiences in Germany set the stage for what followed in Japan. Efforts that were frustrated in Germany by the other Allies, or by German recalcitrance or regional differences, had more chance of success in Japan where the U.S. was almighty. But the main reason might be contained in SCAP’s idea of the Japanese as childlike savages, as simple souls ripe for conversion. They were not Christians, nor was their culture rooted in Western civilization. As far as the Japanese mind was concerned, this truly seemed like Year Zero.

Considering how vicious the fighting in the Pacific War and how brutal the wartime propaganda on both sides had been, the Japanese were surprisingly willing pupils. The way the Japanese paid tribute to MacArthur when he left Japan in 1951, after he had been dismissed by President Truman from his post for insubordination in the Korean War, would have been unthinkable in Germany. A law was enacted to make him an honorary Japanese citizen. Plans were drawn up to build a memorial to the Supreme Commander in Tokyo Bay. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese lined his route to the airport, many of them in tears, shouting their thanks at his limousine. One of the main Japanese newspapers exclaimed in an editorial: “Oh, General MacArthur—General, General, who saved Japan from confusion and starvation.”38

Here is a letter to SCAP from a Japanese lawyer with strong communist leanings: “For the future of the Japanese people, [the leaders of the Occupation] have brought the peaceful dawn of liberty, equality, and benevolence. They have ably assisted and conscientiously directed the Japanese in the building of a democratic nation . . . to show our gratitude for their accomplishments, we will hold a mass rally to welcome the occupation forces.”39 And this was written in November, just three months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One way of reading Japanese behavior is to see it as an example of Oriental flattery, insincere, self-serving, and fitting a long tradition of appeasing powerful rulers. There may have been an element of this, but it is far from the whole story. I am convinced that much of the gratitude was genuine. Compared to most German (non-Jewish) civilians, whose living conditions, fattened by the loot from conquered countries, were not so bad until the last stages of the war, Japanese had suffered more. Not only did most of their cities go up in flames, as was true in Germany too, but the Japanese had been living on hunger rations for several years. And the bullying by Japanese military authorities and security police forces was probably even more intrusive than in Germany. Unlike many Germans in 1945, who still thought fondly of the Führer, few Japanese had anything good to say about their military regime, which had brought them nothing but misery.

So when the Americans—so wealthy, and crisply turned out, so tall, and in the main so free and easy—settled in, they really were regarded as liberators, and many Japanese were ready to be taught how they might become more free and easy themselves. It wasn’t the first time in Japanese history that people decided to learn from a great outside power. China had been the model for many centuries, and Europe and the U.S. had been the examples to emulate since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Militant Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century was in some ways a reaction to an extraordinary run of Westernization, meaning economic liberalism, mass media, Hollywood movies, political parties, Marxism, individualism, baseball, jazz, and so forth. After the disaster of World War II, most Japanese were more than happy to return to modernity, which they associated with the Western world, and, after 1945, with America in particular.

Whether this could really be called reeducation is a moot point. But the new masters, and many of their pupils, clearly thought in those terms. Quite how to “remake” Japan was the question. Japan hands found the whole idea absurd, and the officials most eager to take Japan’s reeducation in hand knew very little about the country and its history. To them, there could be no equivalent of denazification, of stripping off a recent layer of toxic ideology from a mature civilization, since Japan was not deemed to have such a thing. Japanese culture itself was thought by reformers to be rotten to the core.

Nevertheless, the need for a total makeover was no more apparent to the old Japanese elites in the imperial court and the bureaucracy than it was to the Japan hands. They would have been perfectly content to stay with small reforms, undertaken slowly. But for Colonel Charles Kades and other New Dealers around SCAP, these reforms wouldn’t go nearly far enough. In his words: “[The Japanese leaders] wanted to take a tree that was diseased and prune the branches . . . We felt it was necessary to, in order to get rid of the disease, take the root and branches off.”40

To purge Japan of its “feudal” culture, it was not enough to tear down Japanese rising sun flags (known as “meatballs” to the GIs), or ban the musical or visual celebrations of Japanese military prowess, or even abolish the Japanese armed forces, or indeed write a new constitution banning Japan’s sovereign right to wage war.

All these things were thought to be necessary, to be sure; preparations were already made in 1945 to write the pacifist constitution. (Quite who thought of this novelty first is unclear; some say it was Shidehara Kijiro, the Japanese prime minister in 1945, a longtime pacifist, who suggested it to MacArthur.) “Feudal” family laws were abolished and women’s rights guaranteed. This was upsetting to members of Japan’s governing elites, even men who were relatively liberal, such as the ex-foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru (“Shiggy” in the U.S. press), who wrote in his diary: “The occupation army is thinking along lines that are radically different from any mere compliance with the Potsdam Declaration . . . They propose a remodeling of Japan from top to bottom.”41

He was right; that is what the reformers set out to do. All Japanese customs and habits, thought to be “feudal,” had to be rooted out. American soldiers or civilians who spotted Japanese women breastfeeding in public tried to stop this practice at once. Wooden swords in traditional theater productions were confiscated. Kabuki plays featuring samurai heroes were banned. Earl Ernst, who later became a distinguished scholar of the Kabuki theater, walked into the Imperial Theater in Tokyo one night to halt a performance of Terakoya, a scene in a famous eighteenth-century play about a former samurai lord who is ordered to sacrifice his son. Out of loyalty to his lord, a former retainer kills his own son instead. This type of theatrical “barbarism” could not be tolerated. Instead, to edify the Japanese public, the theater company was required to stage a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Rather than being edified, however, the Japanese public was apparently rather nonplussed.

Nothing that could be remotely associated with “feudalism” was allowed. Even the depiction of Mount Fuji, a sacred spot in the ancient nature religion that is Shinto, was banned, in movies, artworks, and on the tiled walls of public bathhouses, where the Fuji was a popular adornment. Since the nineteenth century Shinto had indeed been transformed into a kind of state cult to promote emperor worship and the notion of the Japanese as a unique race, blessed with divine bloodlines, destined to rule the lesser breeds in Asia. Prohibiting the use of Shinto as a state religion was actually not a bad idea. The SCAP directive of 15 December stated:

The purpose of this directive is to separate religion from the state, to prevent misuse of religion for political ends, and to put all religions, faiths, and creeds upon exactly the same legal basis, entitled to exactly the same opportunities and protection.42

Ordering Emperor Hirohito to announce on the radio that he was a human being like everyone else did not seem like such a bad idea, either. What the emperor actually said was that his ties with the Japanese people were not “predicated on the false conception that the emperor is divine.” This satisfied the Americans. Most Japanese were hardly surprised by the statement, since they never doubted his humanity. But they saw him as a ruler descended from the Sun Goddess, something he never repudiated. In any case, few Japanese seem to have cared much one way or another. Only ultranationalists were upset, and have remained so ever since, arguing that Shinto should not be treated as any other religion, but as the essence of Japanese culture.

Some of the cultural reeducation was merely irritating, and usually not long-lived, such as the banning of Kabuki plays or swordfight movies. Some of it was so eccentric as to be amusing, like the American soldier in charge of a rural district who thought that teaching the Japanese square dancing would enhance their democratic spirit. But in some things the Americans could go too far, even for the relatively pliant Japanese. For example, the possibility of abolishing Chinese characters and romanizing the Japanese writing system was extensively studied, and then recommended by a U.S. education mission. Nothing came of it. The education system, on the other hand, unlike in Germany, was radically revised. Single-sex elite schools made way for a system of coeducational comprehensive schools, with three years of elementary school, three years of lower secondary, and three years of upper secondary school.

The town of Omi, in the middle of the country, not too far from Kyoto, could serve as the Japanese equivalent of Aachen. In the fall of 1945, a U.S. Army patrol decided to check on a primary school there. The sight of the American soldiers terrified the pupils so much that they started screaming. When asked whether they “liked Americans,” there was a vigorous shaking of heads. Schoolrooms were still decorated with wartime posters showing Japanese soldiers striking heroic poses. One of the teachers was a former army officer. A bloodstained sailor’s cap was found in a desk drawer. All this would not do at all, so the school principal was ordered to fire the ex-army officer and make sure all references to the war were removed.

Six months later, some of the same Americans returned to the scene in a jeep. This time, the children appeared to be less afraid. One of the officers began to whistle “Swanee River,” and to the American party’s intense satisfaction, the children sang the song with him in Japanese, followed by renderings of “Auld Lang Syne” and the “Maine Stein Song.” The party was equally pleased to note that the textbooks had been properly doctored; all “feudal” passages, referring to the war, to Japan’s warrior past, to the emperor, and so on, had been blacked out with India ink. The principal, full of goodwill, spoke in English. He promised that all the wartime posters would be put on a bonfire and several more teachers, three of whom had served in the army, dismissed.43

However relieved many Japanese may have been by the relatively benign behavior of the American victors, and however grateful for the democratic reforms forced on their political elites, there were also more complicated feelings about American-style reeducation. A fascinating letter to the Asahi newspaper from a junior high school student perfectly expressed a common reaction among young Japanese to the volte-face by their elders; one day they were taught to worship the emperor and support the holy war in Asia, and the next, by the very same teachers, to denounce Japanese feudalism and support demokurashii.

The student begins his letter by observing that many adults are worried how hard it will be to change young minds raised with militarism. In fact, he says, recent experience has made teenagers much more politically conscious. All they had ever known was that Japan was permanently at war. Peace was like “emerging from the dark into dazzling sunlight.” Everything they had been taught before was shown to be utterly wrong: “How could they ever trust their leaders, or indeed any adults again?” In fact, it was the adults, still often confused and ambivalent about the recent past, who should give cause for worry, for they clearly had more difficulty in freeing themselves from the spirit of militarism.44

His was the voice of one of the most politically active generations in Japan’s modern history. Most were on the left, and all were filled with distrust of the old Japanese establishment and felt deeply betrayed when the Cold War prompted the same Americans who had come to Japan as teachers of freedom, pacifism, and democracy to embrace that old establishment, many of whose members had the blood of the last war on their hands. Japanese much like the young letter writer to the Asahi would pour into the streets of Tokyo in 1960 when Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, the Albert Speer of wartime Japan, ratified a security treaty with the U.S. that would turn Japan into a perpetual base for U.S. military operations in Asia. They protested against Japan’s indirect—and highly lucrative—involvement in the Vietnam War, which seemed to echo earlier wars in Asia. The Japanese left, enraged by Japan’s role in U.S. “imperialism,” and the right, just as enraged by having to abide by an “American” pacifist constitution, had one thing in common. To either side, the U.S. occupation seemed never to have ended.

To some people postwar demokurashii had come a little too easily, as a kind of gift from the foreign conquerors. A well-known cartoon by Kato Etsuro showed an ecstatic Japanese crowd, some still in military caps, raising their hands to the skies, from which parachuted canisters drop like manna from heaven bearing the words “democratic revolution.”45 To receive something one ought to have fought for oneself was a little humiliating.

Some of the humiliation was intended, but it was not directly aimed at the common Japanese people. The most emblematic photograph of the Occupation, published in September 1945, was taken on the occasion of Emperor Hirohito’s official visit (more an audience, really) to General MacArthur at SCAP’s official residence. The emperor, forty-four years old, a mere stripling compared to the Supreme Commander, who was sixty-five, stands stiffly to attention in full morning dress. Next to him stands MacArthur, his superior authority made visible not just by his great height, but a studied casualness: the open-necked khaki shirt, hands comfortably lodged behind his hips.

The photo was printed in all the major newspapers, and the Japanese government, shocked by an image reeking of lèse-majesté, promptly forbade further publication. The following day, MacArthur revoked the ban and ordered new measures to guarantee press freedom. This did not mean that the Americans didn’t censor the news as actively as they did in Germany. They did. Mention of Hiroshima was prohibited, for example, as were negative reports about the United States, or any criticism of SCAP’s administration. (In 1946, a Japanese film titled The Japanese Tragedy was even banned for being too critical of the emperor’s wartime role, since MacArthur, after all, had absolved him from all blame.)

Still, democracy was not just an empty word. Some of the revolutionary change dropped in those parachuted canisters was real enough. But there was still that lingering sense of shame, poignantly articulated by Takami Jun, one of the most thoughtful and honest Japanese writers of his time. He wrote in his diary on September 30: