upside down, as was evident in Japan’s remilitarization, the strengthening of conservative elites, and the return to monopoly capitalism during the Korean War.32
Although the rhetoric of Japanese communists who labeled Japan’s occupation a manifestation of imperialism may sound polemical, their analysis did point out key pitfalls of U.S. occupation policy. It is no surprise that Tokuda changed his opinion at the beginning of the 1950s. Around this time, a significant political shift in the occupation period occurred, which came to be known as the reverse course. It describes a paradigmatic change in U.S. occupation policy within Japan and postwar U.S. foreign policy concerning Asia in general by dividing the occupation period into a first phase of ambitious democratic reforms and demilitarization and a second phase of U.S. imperialism and Cold War containment concomitant with Japan’s economic and military recovery. The beginning of the reverse course is marked by the change in SCAP’s labor policy in 1947, by restricting workers’ rights and starting to remove communists and other leftist labor activists and intellectuals from public life. And, around the same time, grassroots reforms such as the redistribution of land ownership had ended.33 Furthermore, American strategists entangled Japan in emerging Cold War thinking and pushed it as an anticommunist ally in Asia. They rebuilt Japan’s military and economy, and sycophantically embraced conservative elites—even those associated with wartime crimes—while systematically purging Japanese communists and socialists.34
However, newer studies on the occupation period and the postwar history of East Asia have repeatedly questioned the explanatory model of the reverse course for several reasons. Although there is little dispute about a paradigm shift in occupation policy, various scholars have raised concerns about an overdetermining reverse course narrative that fails to grasp the continuities in Japan’s imperial power structures between the prewar, wartime, and postwar period. Agents and institutions of imperial Japan in politics, economy, bureaucracy, education, and the police system—who were all to varying degrees actively involved in prewar administration, wartime planning, and postwar management—were often not as fundamentally restructured during the early occupation period as the occupiers and Japanese reformers liked to think.35 Connected to this critique is also the evaluation of the date “1945” in the reverse course narrative as a temporal caesura that would supposedly mark a clear-cut split between imperial, wartime, and postwar Japan. Although something significant did happen “within” Japan after Japan’s defeat, emphasizing a supposedly decisive break between war and peace does not account for the multiple experiences of Japan’s empire, war, and legacy in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific region.36
A comparison of the occupation of Japan with the postwar history of Korea further illuminates the limits of the reverse course narrative. Japan had been colonizing Korea officially since 1910, increasingly incorporating Korea into Japan’s empire from the 1930s onward, and rigorously mobilizing its people for Japan’s war effort.37 After World War II, the American military also occupied Korea, headed by Lt. General John R. Hodge under the command of Douglas MacArthur as superior commander of the Far East Command (FEC). Unlike Japan, the U.S. occupiers implemented occupation policy in Korea according to Cold War objectives from its very beginning in 1945, and Korea was thus never the subject of a reverse course.38 Moreover, the occupying U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) basically replaced Japan’s colonial rule and established a military government, which relied heavily on the previous colonial administration and its elites.39 The overall plan was to incorporate Korea into what Dean Acheson, U.S. secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, called a “great crescent” of U.S. hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. American Cold War strategists envisioned a network of anticommunist periphery states with close economic and military-strategic ties to Japan, which was to function as a subcenter under the control of the United States. As this vision came close to replacing Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, it is no wonder that it reproduced older regional imperial formations.40
Yet even in postsurrender Japan it is rather questionable whether U.S. imperialism in its neocolonial form manifested after a reverse course had occurred, or whether imperialistic rule had already characterized the occupation of Japan from the very beginning. It is striking to consider the applicability of Jürgen Osterhammel’s notion of a colony to the case of occupied Japan after World War II. Osterhammel perceives a colony as a newly established political body, created through invasion and ties to precolonial conditions, with a longer durability than a merely temporary military occupation. Furthermore, the new and foreign elites are in an enduring dependency on a spatially distant imperial center, which claims exclusive property rights within the colony.41 In unraveling this definition in the context of occupied Japan, it is imperative to acknowledge that—despite the many contradictory explanations of the war’s legitimation—Allied and especially American forces occupied Japan subsequent to military invasion after World War II. The occupiers erected a new body of authoritarian rule in the occupied territory. They exercised their political power indirectly, with SCAP relying on “precolonial” conditions in the form of existing Japanese governmental and bureaucratic institutions and personnel, mainly because the occupiers lacked Japanese-language skills and the cultural competence to rule on their own.42 MacArthur and his General Headquarters were dependent on an imperial center, being nominally bound to the advice by the Far Eastern Commission and its U.S.-dominated Allied Council for Japan as well as to orders from the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC. And the United States claimed exclusive property rights within Japan, especially in the form of military bases. Such claims did not vanish with the official end of the occupation period, marked by the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed on September 8, 1951, and in force since April 28, 1952. Many of the occupation policy’s remnants prevailed far beyond 1952, which questions the provisional nature of the military occupation.
As a range of now classic studies has argued, characteristics of colonial rule and imperialism are not only manifest in political, economic, and military power structures, but equally present in forms of knowledge and culture, which are arguably more subtle, but not less powerful manifestations of domination.43 In the case of the occupation of Japan, MacArthur’s performances and in particular his public speeches throughout the occupation period are paradigmatic in stressing the cultural dimensions of imperialistic asymmetries of power between occupier and occupied. One significant emblem is a famous photograph that started circulating in the American and Japanese press in September 1945, in which MacArthur stands next to Emperor Hirohito and embodies the masculine and self-confident vanquisher in contrast to the subordinate, emasculated, and gawky-looking defeated, a picture that came to symbolize the enduring shadow America cast over postwar Japan.44 On other occasions, MacArthur publicly explained Japan’s aggression and expansion between 1932 and 1945 as an odyssey in which Japan got on the wrong track into a “dark valley” (kurai tanima), a nightmare from which he could wake Japan with a lesson in American-style democracy. He not only proposed a Salvationist mission under his command, but also took the liberty of adopting an apologetic stance toward Japan’s wartime aggression and atrocities. Similarly, at a U.S. Senate hearing in 1951, MacArthur compared Japan to a “twelve-year-old boy” he had educated and guided to modernity and democracy during the occupation period. The trope of the “twelve-year-old boy” has been criticized as being a gendered category that would allow boys but not girls to attain higher education.45 Equally important, the dimension of a civilizing mission is inherent in the trope of the little boy and signifies its tight entanglement with a colonial discourse that preached civilization and conceptualized its development in linear-temporal stages.46 Similar to colonialists in other non-Western countries, the occupiers typically framed Japan in 1945 in a “waiting room of history” that constantly categorized the non-West as “not yet civilized.”47 Like former colonialists, MacArthur believed in the civilization of people of color and propagated educating the Japanese with the promise of independence and sovereignty after successful democratization—which MacArthur unmistakably understood as civilizational development according to an American blueprint. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out, such differences between colonizer and colonized marked by time, construed in teleologically developing stages—in this case between occupiers and occupied—can never be overcome.
