No nation was more deeply affected by America's rise to world power than Japan. The US policy of unconditional surrender as part of its goal of a new world order led to the catastrophic end of the Asia Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Democratic institutions were imposed on Japan and so, too, was a long-term military alliance when the Cold War broke out.
Within this complex historical tapestry, Jennifer Miller has traced a particular strand of thought in early postwar US-Japan relations in Cold War Democracy. Miller, a professor of American history at Dartmouth, finds a persistent and pervasive “psychological definition of democracy” (p. 56) as being a state of mind, rather than simply the governing structures and institutions of representative politics. In an impressively researched and insightful analysis that provides a fresh perspective on this critical period, she demonstrates a recurrent vision of democracy as a proper attitude, mindset, and mentalité. She finds this understanding of democracy common to American and Japanese elites as well as to the progressive opposition in Japan.
To combat militarism, American wartime planning emphasized the goal of changing the way Japanese think. When the Occupation began, freedom of thought and religion, reform of education, and other means were instituted to achieve the goal of demilitarizing and democratizing Japan. With the onset of the Cold War, the United States, in an about-face, began to pressure Japan to rearm as an ally in the global struggle. Miller describes the “reverse course” less as an abrupt change than as a readjustment of the democratic vision and a stabilization of the democratic mindset against a misleading and deceptive communist ideology. “Cold War democracy” therefore justified the remilitarization of Japan as essential to a mental strength and vigilance required for struggle against communist influence.
This definition of democracy facilitated the suppression of alternative political visions. When Japanese progressives resisted such a “radical transformation” (p. 75) of democratic purpose, Japanese conservative elites converged with American leaders in the new vision of Cold War democracy. Protesters were disparaged as lacking the mature attitudes that would provide the stability and order necessary to resist communist subversion. This emerging Cold War version of democracy stressed elite leadership that would overcome the simplistic and irrational impulses of popular activism. Miller argues that the appeal of the new American emphasis was immediately attractive to Japanese conservative elites and brought about an “ideological convergence around specific political outlooks” (p. 14) that became the lasting basis of the alliance.
In the final portion of Cold War Democracy, Miller describes this convergence of elites as materializing in a vision of economic cooperation, productivity, and capitalist development. Chastened by the Anpo protests, both American and Japanese elites drained their definition of democracy of much of its political content and replaced it with an emphasis on a “healthy” and “stable mentality” (pp. 228–29) in pursuit of productivity and affluence. American policy, through its technical assistance programs, helped Japanese conservative elites to defang labor activism and popular protest and to establish corporate hegemony in the workplace. Japan now exemplified Cold War democracy by serving as a model for the rest of Asia of how modernization could serve as an attractive alternative to communist ideology.
Miller points out that the progressives, for their part, also stressed a spiritual mindset as essential for democracy, but whereas much of the other rhetoric of the proper attitude of democracy was blatantly self-serving, it is (for me) the Japanese progressives whose ideological assumptions ring true. They understood in a genuine way that democratic freedoms came not through tutelage; democracy had to be achieved to be in the lifeblood of the people. It had to be struggled for and won. Maruyama Masao, in his first lecture at the University of Tokyo after the war, saw the problem:
Today, we have had freedom issued to us—forced upon us, in fact, by a foreign country. But freedom as a handout, or coerced freedom, is a fundamental contradiction in terms … because freedom is nothing other than the Japanese people exercising their spirit to determine matters for themselves.Footnote 1
The progressives argued for what the Anpo demonstrations proved, which was that the great majority of the Japanese people favored national independence and neutrality in the Cold War. Their quest for self-determination and the possibility of a democratic revolution, however, was doubly handicapped by American policy. The Occupation imposed democratic institutions and then left the conservatives whose sympathies were not with democratization to administer them.
Miller makes a notable contribution in tracing this thread through the early postwar ideological discourse. Inevitably, singling out this one strand of thought and divorcing the ideology of the alliance from the power relations and geopolitical calculations that underlay it leaves aside full analysis of the motivations that were fundamental to the dynamics of the alliance. Largely absent from the analysis is the opportunistic way in which the Yoshida school of politicians, who held sway through most of the Cold War, paid lip service to democratic norms while using the constitution's Article 9 as a shield to resist active involvement in the Cold War while pursuing all-out economic nationalism at American expense. From this perspective, the alliance exemplified not convergence in democratic development but a peculiarly twisted and anomalous alliance of deeply divergent purpose.
