Abstract
For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as these two recent bibliographies attest, there is as yet no single scholarly overview of the subject in English. Such neglect is unfortunate, for the problems and potential insights involved are substantial.
Notes
Two collections, largely ignored by Western scholars, provide a point of entry into the nature of popular consciousness and “social movements” in presurrender Japan.
On the U. S. side, “informal” pressure will entail examination of the role of the American Council on Japan (headed by Harry F. Kern, Eugene Doom an, and James Lee KaufTman); the petroleum cartels; key banks (especially National City Bank of New York, Chase National, and Bank of America); investment firms such as Dillon Read (and the role of William Draper in panic-ular); the Rockefeller interests; agricultural and textile lobbies; etc.
For a massive (487 pp., triple-column), un-annotatcd, and somewhat unwieldy compilation of Japanese materials on the 1945–1952 period, which contains in the neighborhood of 20,000 entries,
Among works neglected arc Hara Kaoru's monograph on the postwar inflation; Suzuki Takco's two early volumes on the Dodge Line;
The writings, for example, of Mark Gayn, Robert Textor, Owen Lattimore, Honor Tracy, Helen Mears, John Gunthcr, William Costello, Hes-sell Tiltman, Russell Brines, Harry Emerson Wildes, M. Hankey, Rahabinod Pal, Frank Reel, Hans Baerwald, Lawrence Hewes, T. A. Bisson, W. Mac-mahon Ball, William Sebald, Charles Willoughby, Courtney Whitney, Cordell Hull, James Byrnes, Edward Stcttinius, Jerome Cohen, Robert Fearey, Edwin Martin, Herbert Feis, Max BelofT, Edwin Reischauer, I. F. Stone, Rodger Swearingen and Paul Langer, and James Auer. Some manuscripts not available in English also have been published in Japanese, such as Nihon Smgunbi (1969) by Frank Kowalski, a former U.S. Army colonel in charge of recreating the Japanese military between 1950-1952. It might be noted in passing that Nihon senryō bunken mokuroku contains occasional errors in the transliteration of Western names.
Among neglected primary documents, it might be noted that many materials in the Dodge Papers and SCAP–s Economic and Scientific Section (ESS) explicidy place economic policy for Japan in the larger global context—a most important concern for future research. The projected remilitarization of the Japanese economy and its integration with South and Southeast Asia is also frankly summarized in three ESS volumes entitled Japan's In-dustrial Potential, issued in February and October, 1951, and February 1952. A formerly top-secret section of the Edwards Report (WS 1809) is now also available, and occasional insights into initial U.S. planning appear in various Civil Affairs Information Guides issued by the War Department in 1945 (not to be confused with the “Handbooks” cited in WS 235).
Among published but still essentially primary materials, note should be taken of the following: (I) National Security Council documents of December 1949 anD May 1951 dealing specifically with Japan and included in Book 8 of the govern-mEnt edition of the “Pentagon Papers” (Department of Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967); (2) the 1951 Senate hearings which followed General MacArthur's dismissal (Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings, Military Situation in the Far East); (3) successive congressional hearings of 1950-1952, and after, on MSA policies (Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings, Mutual Security Act of [year]); (4) the incidental references to occupation policy and personnel which appear in the Senate inquisitions of 1951–1952 and 1957 concerning “communist” influence on U.S. policy (Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Institute of Pacific Relations [1951–1952] and Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States [1957]); (5) the 1960 Senate hearings on revision of the security treaty, which help illuminate the nature of the original pact (Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings, Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan).
The excellent list of private papers in Ward-Shulman can be supplemented with the Dean Acheson papers, Harry S. Truman Library; Post-Presidential Files of Herbert Hoover, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa; Richard L-G. Deverall papers, Catholic University, Washington, D.C.; William Veazie Pratt papers, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island; American Federation of Labor papers, State Historical Library, Madison, Wisconsin. I am indebted to Howard Schonberger for information concerning the last four of these collections.
SCAP records are classified as part of National Archives Record Group 331, and are in the custody of the General Archives Division (rather than Modern Military Records Division as cited in Ward-Shulman). They comprise 10,100 linear feet, and were never systematically indexed by SCAP, thus posing considerable difficulties of use. The bulk of these documents, which originated in SCAP, are under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Army, and as of June 1973 had been declassified as follows: Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 (160 feet); Civil Affairs Section (900 feet); Civil Communications Section (95 feet); Civil Historical Section (403 feet); Civil Information and Education Section (917 feet); Civil Property Custodian (1,408 feet); Civil Transportation Section (64 feet); Eco-nomic and Scientific Section (2,534 feet); Government Section (294 feet); Legal Section (1,261 feet); Judge Advocate Section (400 feet); Natural Resources Section (529 feet); Public Information Section (11 feet). All sections are under review by the Army, and it is estimated that eventually an average of less than five percent of material in each section will remain classified. Records of the Far Eastern Commission and State-War-Navy Coordinating Commission are in the custody of the Diplomatic Branch of the National Archives and Records Service. The former have been declassified regardless of date, and the latter through 1946. This information was kindly provided by James J. Hastings of the General Archives Division.
Pertinent ECAFE reports are found under Committee on Industry and Trade, ECAFE, Economic and Social Council, United Nations; sec in particular the working papers emanating from conferences at Singapore (October 1949), Bangkok (May 1950), Lahore (February 1951), and Rangoon (January 1952). Soviet materials available in English are quite well covered in Ward-Shul-man. Translations from the Chinese include such series as China Digest, Hsinhua News Agency, New China News Agency, and Survey of the Chinese Mainland Press. In addition, future researchers will also wish to examine the occupation from the point of view of other countries, particularly the Philippines, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain.
