Japan, the United States, and the Cold War, 1945–1960

Abstract

On August 14, 1945, still reeling from the aftershock of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government accepted the Allied powers’ Potsdam Declaration, and World War II came to an end in the Asia-Pacific. Stripped of all of its colonial possessions acquired since 1895, Japan faced, for the first time in its history, occupation by foreign troops and reconstitution of its government at the behest of external authorities. As the nominally Allied occupation of the vanquished empire began, US general Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), stood atop the Allied military command and administrative structure in Japan. At this moment, the post-World War II histories of the United States and Japan became inexorably entwined. The atomic blasts, which killed 40,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000 inhabitants and 70,000 of the 270,000 people in Nagasaki, ushered in the nuclear age and Japan’s quest for redemption in the postwar world where visions of the “American century” now reigned supreme. This symbiotic genesis foreshadowed the knotting of Japan’s antinuclear pacifism and the United States’ investment, both material and metaphorical, in a nuclear arsenal as the bedrock of international peace and security during the Cold War. In this braided history, it was the United States’ self-assigned mission to remold Japan into a stable democracy conforming to the Western and capitalist rules of the game. But within months of the war’s end, the confrontation with the Soviet Union began to color American strategic thinking and foreign policymaking, and the task of refashioning Japan came under the added and accumulating weight of the developing Cold War between the two superpowers. Officials in Washington and the American proconsul in Japan became determined to minimize Soviet influence in occupied Japan. By early 1946, the effective exclusion from the Allied Council and the Far East Commission – the inter-Allied institutions overseeing the occupation – of Soviet, and to a lesser extent British, voices infused another source of rancor into the former Grand Alliance. The implementation of occupation policies became in all vital respects an American enterprise, with a small contingent of British Commonwealth forces, mostly Australian, sharing peripheral military tasks.