Highlights
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2024-11-13 10:03 Yoshikuni Igarashi, one of the world’s leading authorities on post war Japan. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced to the Japanese people that the Japanese government had agreed to the Allies terms laid out in the Potsdam Declaration.
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2024-11-12 21:18 How did the authoritarian Japanese state transition into a democracy?
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2024-11-12 21:18 How did the Japanese respond to the experience of defeat, occupation and then restoration of independence in the decade after World War II and much more.
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2024-11-12 21:14 Professor Igarashi is professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is also affiliated with the Asian Studies program there. His research focuses on Japanese cultural history during the interwar and post World War II periods. And I want to note among his many publications, his three monographs. His first book, Bodies of Narratives of War and Post war Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2000.
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2024-11-12 21:14 His second book was called Homecomings the Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers with Columbia University Press in 2016.
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2024-11-12 21:14 Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Made of Visuality, which really deals with the transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on mass consumerism.
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2024-11-12 21:15 So where I’d like to start, given the fact so much happens with this decade, is right at the end of the Second World War, Yoshi, and that is with the famous speech that Emperor Hirohito gives on August 15, 1945,
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2024-11-12 21:15 And what I’d like to ask here is that after eight years of war, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact here in the US that Japan had been at war long before Pearl harbor, had been at war in China since July of 1937, that after these eight years of war, what do you think we can say about how much support the Japanese state still enjoyed from its people at that time?
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2024-11-12 21:15 For example, toward end of the war, particularly late 1944, 1945, Japanese industries suffered from high absentee rate absenteeism. So there are various reasons for this. But the perhaps big reason was people just did not believe in the cause of the war and they just decided not to show up at their work. So that numbers at some industries, some factories, as high as or higher than 50%, and those are not numbers that can sustain industry.
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2024-11-12 21:16 But on one level, yes, they are determined to fight, but another level or other levels, they are beginning to see this is not sustainable.
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2024-11-12 21:19 US and Japan used to be two of the most hated enemies, mutually hated enemies in the Pacific up until the last minute. But comes the end of the war, several weeks after the war, or several months, I should say, two nations became the closest allies in the Pacific, and that’s to think about it a very, very strange situation.
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2024-11-12 21:19 So MacArthur’s account is this basically Emperor Hiroshito was there to sacrifice himself, reclaiming all responsibilities of war.
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2024-11-12 21:20 He doesn’t care whatever happens to him, but he’s there to assume all the responsibilities. This is very heroic, heroic tale MacArthur told people around him as well as he talked about this in his memoirs later on. But reality was not at all like that. The historians tell us that most likely what Hiroshito said at the moment was much simpler. Well, I tried my best, but we came, had come down to the wall.
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2024-11-12 21:20 I reread the situation. So that’s the nature of what he said. Quite different from what MacArthur told other people.
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2024-11-13 10:03 Hiroshito needed Makasa’s authority to protect himself from the impending trials, war crimes trials. So he needed to make sure that Makasa is on his side.
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2024-11-12 21:21 Makasa needed Hiroshito to make sure that his occupation policies would go smoothly. And also he needed to reinforce his reestablish his authority in relation to other nations, allied nations. So he needed the authority, cultural authority, as well as cooperation from the Emperor.
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2024-11-12 21:21 And how that mutual need plays out is something we certainly want to follow up on. And with that, I think we get into something about the nature of American occupation policy.
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2024-11-12 21:12 MacArthur and the Truman administration organized much of their plans for the occupation of Japan around two basic principles, democratization and demilitarization.
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2024-11-12 21:22 And about how Japanese political leaders responded to this transformation of their country’s institutions. Sure, yes, this process was very far reaching and by and large very successful. And I should emphasize, underscore the fact that this success is also supported by Japanese participants, Japanese bureaucrats, politicians and Japanese people. So yes, Americans were sort of an impetus, brought this sort of energy as far as plans, but they were carried out by Japanese and also embraced by Japanese.
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2024-11-12 22:22 Land reform is the one good example that this was already going on during the wartime period. So when Americans came into Japan, Japanese bureaucrats were ready to work on land reforms and they presented their own plans without any nudge.
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2024-11-12 22:29 And what made difficult for returnees is this returnees, especially soldiers, you know, 3.7 million soldiers came back from overseas after the end of the war. They represented something that Japanese society did not want to see in the post war period.
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2024-11-12 22:31 Official number is supposed to be 540,000, but I believe the number was bigger. That large number of Japanese, mostly men, some women, were kept by Soviet Union because Soviet Union needed a labor force to rebuild the nation. And so they were kept at the labor Camps spread out throughout the Soviet union. There’s about 2,000 labor camps. They are spread out and they are put to work one, two years.
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2024-11-12 23:39 And I think a lot of our audience would be very Curious about what happened to the power of the Emperor and the once all powerful Japanese military.
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2024-11-13 08:34 But going back to the constitution, Constitution that Japan sort of adopted in 1946 and made it in effect 1947 was very democratic, perhaps more democratic than American constitution in some ways. For example it has the article about the academic freedom.
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2024-11-13 08:37 I think the general reaction to the tribunals was very positive or some sense of acquiescence.
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2024-11-13 08:38 For example, example, a good example is Nanji massacre. And that event was not covered by Japanese media and contemporaneously in 1937, 38.
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2024-11-13 08:41 And how do you think on this issue, how Japan really fit into American strategic thinking, which after 1947 really becomes based around the notion of containing communism, keeping it from spreading? Yes, 47 was a turning point in occupation policies.
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2024-11-13 10:04 And this comes to the issue of Japan’s constitution that we discussed about the implications of Article 9 and what you think the implications of Article 9 are on the kind of ability of Japan to defend itself without American assistance. But thank you for that.
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2024-11-13 10:04 But Article 9, short term was this is going back to the history part, but the changing American occupation policies. So when the Korean War broke out in 1950, that’s when Makasa decided to order Japanese government to create the police reserve which was nothing but military. So despite the fact that Americans imposed Article 9, Americans came back and told Japanese to create a military again. And from there on basically US Japan relationship is determined by this military.
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2024-11-13 08:54 And on the other side of the picture there are those who think that Japan will embrace Soviet style politics.