The Liberal Myth in Japan

Abstract

O F ALL the Axis powers, Japan will unquestionably present the most difficult problem when the time comes for the postwar reorganization of our defeated enemies. The hard fact which we must recognize as we fight to defeat Japan and which we must hold foremost in mind after victory is won is that we have no really liberal allies within the fabric of Japanese life toward whom we can appeal now through propaganda or with whom we can work later for the establishment of a democratic, liberal Japan. No policy toward Japan, now or later, can safely assume that the Japanese militarists have seized power and eradicated Japanese liberalism and that the primary remedy for this situation is simply a matter of defeating the militarists and restoring the liberals. The militarists of Japan are merely one by-product of a military tradition that has profoundly affected all classes in Japanese society. Throughout the history of modern Japan the political groups we have been pleased to call the Japanese liberals have offered little or no opposition to the basic national policy of conquest and expansion which on December 7, 1941, finally brought Japan into war with the United States. On this fundamental issue, the liberals have been in truth the full-time allies of the Japanese militarists. The liberal myth in Japan arose from the paradoxical fact that until very recently the Japanese liberals displayed what we would call a liberal attitude, but only on certain questions of a strictly domestic nature, such as universal manhood suffrage, over which there was a distinct conflict with the militarists and their bureau cratic cohorts. The major triumph of the Japanese militarists was not the ficticious seizure of power or the alleged suppression of liberalism Rather, it was their success in associating the universal admiration of the people for the modern samurai who have extended overseas