Japan, 1936–1945: Fascism or Communism?

Abstract

August 2006 marked the sixtieth anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II. It is usually said that Japan was dominated by ruling fascist capitalists and landowners who wanted war in order to secure access to colonial resources and markets. The actions of the Allies after the war, mostly led by the United States, stemmed from this belief, including such policies as taking land from the former owners and distributing it among farmers, and dismantling the zaibatsu cartels by taking the shares from the largescale capitalists and selling them. Recent research on the Japanese wartime economy, however, has cast doubt on this view. For the capitalists and landowners, peace and markets were far more profitable than war and colonial dominance. Japanese capitalists reaped great profits before the war, not from Japan's colonies, but from trade with the United States and Asia, especially with America- and British-owned companies that operated in and around Shanghai, and European colonies such as Singapore and Malaya. Japan's military incursions into povertystricken northeast China yielded little of value to Japanese capitalists. On the contrary, they had the adverse effects of restricting trade with the United States and the United Kingdom (and their colonies), and arousing anti-Japanese sentiment in China. Similarly, cheap grain imported from Japan's colonies did nothing to increase the profits of the large Japanese landowners, whose main source of profits came from exporting silk products to the United States. The military and the government bureaucrats regulated and controlled Japan's economy after the military took over the government in 1936. The policies they adopted are fascinating. First of all, workers' fights were substantially strengthened, with companies prohibited from firing or reducing the wages of their employees. At the same time, the profits and rights of the capitalists and landowners were greatly reduced. Dividend payments to the shareholders were restricted to an extremely low level, and companies were forced to name their presidents not from among the shareholders or the founding families, but from among the workers. Rent paid by tenant farmers and rental-property residents was set by fixed contracts, which could not be unilaterally broken by the landowners.