Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (30 page)

At the same time, the constraints on Japanese remilitarization that stemmed from the early period of demilitarization and democratization and remained embodied in the constitution did more than merely buttress a general policy of go-slow rearmament. They also thwarted the emergence of a powerful defense lobby comparable to that in the United States. In the absence of a
bona fide ministry of defense, the Ministry of Finance remained the major actor in shaping the postwar military budget. There was no Japanese counterpart to the Pentagon. And despite a handful of large military contractors such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, there emerged no civilian defense sector remotely comparable to the military-industrial complex in the United States. Thus, contrary to the situation in America, the best scientists and engineers in postwar Japan turned their talents to the production of commodities for the civilian marketplace, rather than weapons of war. All this was critical to the economic takeoff Japan experienced beginning in the late 1950s and the country's extraordinary competitiveness in ensuing decades. And all this also must be reckoned an integral part of the San Francisco System.

Like the San Francisco System, the conservative hegemony later known as the 1955 System had its genesis in the occupation-period reverse course, when U.S. policymakers began to jettison many of their more radical democratic ideals and reforms. A general strike planned for February 1, 1947, was banned by General Douglas MacArthur. Prolabor legislation was watered down beginning in 1948. The immense power of the bureaucracy—augmented by a decade and a half of mobilization for “total war”—was never curtailed by the occupation reformers (beyond abolition of the prewar Home Ministry), and the financial structure remained largely untouched despite initial proposals to democratize it. Fairly ambitious plans to promote economic democratization through industrial deconcentration were abandoned by 1949. Individuals purged from public life “for all time” because of their wartime activities or affiliations began to be depurged in 1950, and by the end of the occupation only a few hundred persons remained under the original purge designation. At the same time, between late 1949 and the end of 1950 U.S. authorities and the Japanese government collaborated in a “Red purge” in the public sector, and then the
private sector, that eventually led to the firing of some twenty-two thousand individuals, mostly left-wing union activists. In July 1950, in the midst of this conspicuous turn to the right, the rearmament of Japan began.
¹⁵

The San Francisco settlement thus took place in a setting of domestic turmoil, when both of the early ideals of “demilitarization” and “democratization” were under attack by the conservative elites and their new American partners. To critics, rearmament and the “Red purges,” military bases and the gutting of the labor laws, the separate peace and resurrection of the old economic and political elites—all were part of a single reverse course that was simultaneously international and domestic in its ramifications. Japanese partisanship in the Cold War required the resurrection of the civilian old guard, and the old guard required the Cold War to enlist U.S. support against domestic opponents.

With the exception of the brief Katayama interlude (May 1947 to March 1948), conservative leaders headed every Japanese cabinet of the postwar period, even before the reverse course was initiated.
^*
However, it was not until the third Yoshida cabinet, formed in January 1949, that the conservative leadership enjoyed a firm majority in the Diet. For Yoshida personally this proved to be an ephemeral peak of power and stability. The general elections of October 1952 saw the return to national politics of hundreds of formerly purged politicians, and by 1954 conservative ranks were severely factionalized. When Yoshida and his Liberal Party supporters were unceremoniously ousted from power in December 1954, it was not anti-conservatives who did them in but rather a rival conservative coalition, the Democratic Party, headed by
Hatoyama Ichir
ō
. Hatoyama, who succeeded Yoshida as prime minister, was a former purgee with a record of support not only for Japanese aggression in the recent war but also for the suppression of dissent in the 1920s and 1930s. Also in the anti-Yoshida camp at this time was another future prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, a brilliant technocrat who had been a leading economic planner in the puppet state of Manchukuo in the 1930s, a vice minister of munitions under Prime Minister T
ō
j
ō
Hideki in 1943–44, and an inmate of Sugamo Prison from late 1945 to 1948, accused of “Class A” war crimes but never brought to trial. The conservatives were unquestionably in the saddle, but so great was their internal fighting that they seemed capable of throwing each other out of it.

This turmoil set the stage for consolidation of the conservative parties a year later. In November 1955 Hatoyama's Democrats and Yoshida's Liberals merged to form the Liberal Democratic Party—which, like its predecessors, was neither liberal nor democratic and thus woefully misnamed. Over the ensuing decades the LDP retained uninterrupted control of the government, and this remarkable stability naturally became a central axis of the so-called 1955 System. The capacity for long-term planning that became so distinctive a feature of the postwar political economy was made possible in considerable part by this continuity of single-party domination. However, 1955 was a signal year in other ways as well, and it was this larger conjunction of political and economic developments that seemed to constitute the systematization and clarification of power and influence in postwar Japan—just one decade, as it happened, after Japan's surrender. These related developments took place in both the anticonservative and conservative camps.

It was, in fact, the Socialists and left-wing unionists who moved first. In January 1955 S
ō
hy
ō
—the General Council of Trade Unions, which was closely affiliated with the left-wing Socialists—mobilized some eight hundred thousand workers in the first demonstration of what subsequently was institutionalized as the
shunt
ō
“spring wage offensive.” From this year on, the
shunt
ō
became
the basic vehicle for organizing enterprise unions in demanding industry-wide “base up” wage increases on a regular—almost ritualized—basis. That same month the left-wing and right-wing factions of the Socialist Party, which had formally split in 1951 over whether to support the San Francisco settlement, agreed to reunite. Reunification was finalized in October, but well before then, in the general elections of February 1955, the two factions together won slightly more than one-third of the seats (156 of 453) in the critical House of Representatives. Significantly, this parliamentary representation gave them sufficient combined strength to block constitutional revision, which required a two-thirds vote of approval in the Diet.

The LDP merger in November was in considerable part a response to this specter of a reunified and purposeful left-wing opposition. At the same time, it also constituted the open wedding of big business with Japan's right-of-center politicians. Corporate Japan (the
zaikai
) not only played a decisive role in promoting the 1955 conservative merger but also mobilized the business community at this time as the major ongoing source of money for the LDP. The vehicle for assuring tight control of this political funding also was set up in those busy early months of 1955 in the form of an Economic Reconstruction Council (Keizai Saiken Kondankai) established in January and supported by all four major big-business organizations: the Japan Federation of Employers' Associations (Nikkeiren), Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren), Japan Committee for Economic Development (Keizai D
ō
yukai), and Japan Chamber of Commerce (Nissh
ō
). Although some big-business funds were made available to Socialists, the vast bulk of contributions funneled through the Economic Reconstruction Council (96 percent in 1960) went to the LDP. Reorganized as the Kokumin Ky
ō
kai in 1961, this consortium provided over 90 percent of LDP funding through the 1960s and 1970s.
¹⁶
This consolidation and rationalization of the relationship between the
zaikai
and conservative politicians constituted two legs of the vaunted “tripod” on which conservative power rested over the ensuing decades.
The third leg was the bureaucracy, which drafted most of the legislation introduced in the Diet and also provided a steady exodus of influential former officials into the LDP.

From a broader socioeconomic perspective 1955 also appeared to be, if not a watershed, at least a symbolic point at which lines of future development became clarified. Economically, the Korean War had wound down and as a consequence the previous year had been dismal for Japan, as conveyed in the catchphrase “1954 recession” (
nij
Å«
ky
Å«
nen fuky
ō
). Japanese missions to Washington in the waning years of Yoshida's premiership privately expressed deep and genuine pessimism about the future prospects of Japan's “shallow economy.” Contrary to these gloomy prognostications, however, 1955 proved to be a turning point for the postwar economy, and the popular phrases of this year captured this turnabout as well: “postwar high” (
sengo saik
ō
) was one, “best year of the postwar economy” (
sengo keizai sairy
ō
no toshi
) another. As it turned out, in 1955 the gross national product (GNP) surpassed the prewar peak for the first time, marking the symbolic end of postdefeat recovery. Indeed, the official
Economic White Paper
(Keizai Hakusho) published the next year heralded this accomplishment as signaling the end of the postwar period (
mohaya “sengo” de wa nai
). This upturn coincided, moreover, with the establishment of one of the most important of Japan's long-range industrial planning organizations, the Japan Productivity Center (Nihon Seisansei Honbu). Created on the basis of a U.S.-Japan agreement, with initial funding from both governments as well as Japanese business and financial circles, the center drew support from the ranks of labor as well as management and became the major postwar sponsor of technical missions sent abroad to study the most up-to-date methods of increasing industrial production. The formal wherewithal for exporting the products manufactured by these cutting-edge techniques also was obtained in 1955, when Japan was admitted to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It was also in 1955 that centralized planning was significantly advanced through creation of the Economic Planning Agency (in July) and
the issuance (in December) of a Five-Year Plan for Economic Independence.
¹⁷

By many reckonings the advent of mass consumer culture also dates from essentially this same moment in the mid-1950s. It was in 1955, for example, that MITI announced the inauguration of a “citizen's car project”; heretofore, the vehicle industry had concentrated on producing trucks (especially for U.S. use in the Korean War) and buses and taxis (including many for export to Southeast Asia). With MITI's plan as a springboard the “age of the citizen's car” (
kokumin jid
ō
sha no jidai
) commenced with the appearance of the Datsun Bluebird four years later. The “age of the electrified household” (
katei denka no jidai
) is said to have materialized in 1955, when housewives dreamed of owning the “three divine appliances” (
sanshu no jingi
)—electric washing machines, refrigerators, and television—and magazines spoke of the seven ascending stages of household electrification: (7) electric lights, (6) radio and iron, (5) toaster and electric heater, (4) mixer, fan, and telephone, (3) washing machine, (2) refrigerator, and (1) television and vacuum cleaner. For whatever one may make of the fact, Godzilla made his debut in November 1954 and thus stepped into (or on) the popular consciousness in 1955. It was also at this time that book publishers began to cater more explicitly to mass tastes. Nicely befitting the advent of a new age of mass culture, another popular slogan of 1955 was “the age of neurosis” (
noir
ō
se jidai
), a phrase sparked by several well-publicized suicides in midyear. As a popular weekly put it, claiming one was neurotic had now become an “accessory” (they used the English word) of modern people.
¹⁸

That the consolidation of conservative power coincided with full recovery from the war and the onset of commercialized mass culture may help explain the staying power of the new conservative hegemony. This durability was not immediately apparent, however, and the decade and a half that followed witnessed a series of intense confrontations over basic issues of peace and democracy. The fundamental lines of political cleavage within the 1955 System have been summarized as pitting a conservative camp committed
to revising the constitution and protecting the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty against a progressive (
kakushin
) opposition committed to doing just the opposite: defending the constitution and opposing the Security Treaty.
¹⁹
This summary is concise and clever, although it oversimplifies positions on both sides. The initial platform of the LDP did call for constitutional revision, and one of the first steps the new party took was to establish a Constitution Investigation Committee (Kemp
ō
Ch
ō
sakai) to prepare the ground for revision. At the same time, under Hatoyama and his successors the party also undertook to continue undoing “excesses” of the early democratic postsurrender reforms that lay outside the purview of the constitution—such as revision of the electoral system, abolition of elected school boards, imposition of restraints on political activity by teachers, promotion of “moral” and patriotic education, and strengthening of the police.