When I think back to the fact that freedom, which naturally should have been given by the people’s own government, could not be given, and instead has been bestowed for the first time by the military forces of a foreign country . . . I cannot escape feelings of shame. I am ashamed as someone who loves Japan, ashamed for Japan’s sake.46
The feeling is understandable, but such utterances are a bit misleading. One of the conceits of the Occupation, still often heard, is that the Americans built modern Japanese institutions from scratch, that “Westernization” began in 1945, and that the Japanese, thanks to benevolent U.S. guidance, jumped from “feudalism” to democracy in a year or two after their wartime defeat. In fact, democratic institutions, flawed and fragile as they may have been, were already in place by the 1920s. In Japan, as in the Western zones of Germany, after the war Western Allies created the conditions for those institutions to be restored on a firmer basis. This was not always automatic. Japanese politicians and bureaucrats often had to be forced to carry out democratic reforms which most people welcomed. What neither the Americans nor the Japanese could have anticipated, however, was that the one thing the Americans did concoct entirely by themselves would become both the cornerstone, and the burden, of the postwar Japanese identity.
Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, although it was written only in 1946, and thus outside the scope of this book, is still worth quoting, since it, more than anything else, expresses the idealism of 1945:
(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
In 1953, on a visit to Japan as Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon shocked the Japanese by declaring that Article 9 had been a mistake. There was no reason why the Japanese shouldn’t revise it. The United States wouldn’t object. Indeed, the United States wanted Japan to be a strong ally against communism. But most Japanese disagreed. They refused to change their constitution because they were proud of it. Pacifism had given a nation which had slaughtered millions of people in several terrible wars a new sense of moral purpose, even superiority. Japan would lead the world into a new era of peace. In Japanese eyes, it was the Americans, in Korea, Vietnam, and later in Iraq or Afghanistan, who ought to be condemned for refusing to relinquish the habit of war.
This, more or less, was the tone of public discourse in Japan for at least fifty years after the war. But pacifism came with a price. Idealism and reality soon diverged, and the Japanese, contrary to the words of their constitution, did rebuild their armed forces, disguised at first as police forces, and later as the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). Not only was this hypocritical, but it failed to address another problem, resented almost equally by Japanese on both the right and the left. Japan was still dependent on the U.S. for its security; pacifism was professed under the nuclear umbrella of its former conquerors. There never was the equivalent in East Asia of NATO, or a European Union, allowing Japan to build trust and find a new place among its neighbors.
Article 9, still clung to by most people, but fiercely resented by the nationalistic right, has also muddled Japanese attitudes towards their own history. So long as liberals and leftists defend the pacifist clause as an essential penance for wartime guilt, the right maintains that Japan was no more guilty than any other country at war. If the Rape of Nanking or the Manila Massacre are reasons to deprive the nation of a sovereign right, then there is every reason to minimize the importance of those “incidents.” This hopelessly polarized political dispute, masquerading as a historical debate, has poisoned Japan’s relations with the rest of Asia for decades. Apart from the one-sided dependence on the United States, this too has been part of the legacy of 1945, a year of many catastrophes that ended with such high hopes.