World War Two - Post-War Japan
"On Tuesday, August 28 (Tokyo time), the Japs got their first taste of the ignominy of surrender... The occupation forces were ordered to go ashore much as they regularly did in amphibious operations - with full combat equipment and battle dress, across beaches and onto docks. No chances were to be taken." Four years after Pearl Harbor, the editors of the Japanese newspaper Asahi gazed out of the windows from their offices and saw the charred remains of their enemy-occupied homeland and recognized that they'd made a fatal mistake:
"We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach..." The attached article is about the governance of
General Douglas MacArthur (1880 – 1964) over conquered Japan following the close of World War II and was written half way through the American occupation period by the well-respected American journalist George Creel (1876 - 1953). The article clarifies what regime change meant for post-war Japan and the roll that MacArthur's creed and character played in the process.
Click here to read about the 1918 portrait of General MacArthur painted by Joseph Cummings Chase.
"Under the supervision of Allied occupation authorities, Japan made more substantial recovery during 1946 than any of the other defeated Axis powers." "In December 1945, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) issued a sweeping directive demanding that Japanese peasants be freed from the burden of absentee landlordism, oppressive debt, discriminatory taxation, usury and other evils that had plagued the Japanese peasants for centuries." "The main Japanese war trials started with the indictment on April 29 of twenty-eight political and military leaders on fifty-five counts charging crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and 'conventional' war crimes... The twenty-eight accused war criminals were formally arraigned before an eleven-nation tribunal presided over by Chief Justice Sir William Webb of Great Britain on May 3 and 4. |
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