Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 43

MILITARY OCCUPATION

B

efore the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003,
the U.S. occupation of Japan from 1945 to
1952 was often invoked as evidence that
Americans knew how to do occupations right.
Consequently, at the outset of Operation Iraqi
Freedom, it was assumed that, just as we Americans
had done previously with non-Western Japan, we
would be able to defeat non-Western Iraq and then
turn it into a beacon of democratic hope in the
benighted Middle East just as we had established
Japan as an enlightened democratic state in the Far
East. Confident in the already developed template of
Japanese occupation, we would walk away with a new
and successful ally left in place.
Of course, that is not what our occupation of Iraq
resulted in. In retrospect, the main question has now
become: Why did the Japan occupation succeed and
the Iraq occupation fail? But, additionally, we should
ask ourselves if the assumptions and supposed lessons drawn from the occupation in Japan were faulty
to begin with?
Professionally, as a historian, I have studied extensively the U.S. occupation of Japan. Additionally,
I was assigned to serve in the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) in Baghdad to help establish the
ground work for the occupation of Iraq while I was on
active duty in the U.S. Army. This background has perhaps given me the ability to offer a unique perspective
due to my familiarity with the details of the occupation of Japan complemented by personal observations
collected from my practical experience participating in
establishing the ground floor phase of coalition efforts
to successfully occupy and transform Iraq.
Consequently, in my view, the most concise answer
to why the two occupations differed is captured by
John Dower in his book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor
/ Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq, which can be summarized as
follows: the roles of the U.S. occupying apparatus and
the central and local Japanese government entities
through which it worked had been “tailored to the
particular circumstances of time and place in Japan.”1
In Iraq, they were not.
Though “location, location, location” was the real
key difference, other factors were important. But
before addressing those factors, the next question
should be, why do Americans consider the occupation
of Japan to be a success?
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Success in Japan
To some extent, the idea that Japan became a democracy, an economic powerhouse, and a loyal U.S. ally
mainly as a result of prescient and consciously developed
American postwar occupation policies is a holdover
from the influence of an outdated historiography of
Japan that also claimed Japan was the first non-Western state to successfully industrialize—during its Meiji
Restoration—primarily because it copied Western
techniques. The implication in such histories of course is
that the Japanese, as a people, had no special originality
in either political philosophy or industrial organization—that such had to be borrowed from the outside.
From such an erroneous perspective, almost all of Japan’s
previous history is thus ignored. In this distorted view,
modern Japanese history starts when Commodore
Matthew Perry opens up a secluded Japan, which begins
to copy from the superior West, dispensing almost
entirely with the cultural and sociopolitical influence of
Japan’s past. Such a notion is absurd on its face, but has
often been accepted without questioning it.
Similarly, in many of the initial histories written
about the American occupation, the extensive influence
of Japan’s own complicated, multi-faceted cultural and
social history simply disappear. According to such facile
histories, a new Japan emerges as a result of the occupation, molded by America in its own image, as if World
War II had wiped the Japanese historical slate clean, and
this new Japan only succeeded to the degree it learned
from its occupier.
Fortunately, later histories of Japan have restored
more honest depth to the record and have acknowledged
Japanese agency in the direction of postwar recovery,
giving better context when explaining Japan’s foundational steps toward modern industrialization during the
Meiji Restoration as a precursor to Japan’s later success
during the occupation and its aftermath. For example,
while it is true that Japan imported technologies and
entire factories from the West as it industrialized around
the turn of the last century, it is more accurate to recognize that Japan had already arrived at a proto-industrial
stage independently prior to Perry’s arrival, just as it was
already experimenting and struggling with democratic concepts and institutions. Just as Great Britain had
moved from cottage-industry production into factory production before the advent of the steam engine,
Japan, too, had independently developed a proto-factory
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