From Charlottesville to Tokyo: Military Government Training and Democratic Reforms in Occupied Japan

Abstract

THE MILITARY GOVERNMENT and civil affairs training program for American Army and Navy officers in 1944 and 1945 had a significant but little known impact on the Allied occupation of Japan. It was the sine qua non of the rapid-fire non-military reforms General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), carried out during the first six months of the eighty-month occupation, which began in September 1945. Except for the availability of a few officers trained in military government at the beginning of the occupation, SCAP would, of necessity, have delayed making most of the reforms of Japanese institutions until the arrival of civilian experts from the United States. By that time policymaking responsibility for the occupation would have passed from the American State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee to the multinational Far Eastern Commission, in which the United States, Soviet Russia, the United Kingdom, and China each exercised veto power. Had the Far Eastern Commission made policy for the initial economic, political, and social reforms, the history of the occupation would have been very different. It is in order, therefore, to reexamine the military government training pro-