ABSTRACT

The impact of the American occupation years on Japan was momentous. The victor was admired and America’s national sport, baseball, and clothes and manners were widely copied, especially by the young. The occupiers found it hard to believe that this was the enemy that only recently had fought so fiercely and cruelly. To all outward appearances Japan was adapting quickly to a new image of ‘Made in America’. A brand new constitution in 1947 introduced ‘democracy’ and was based on the finest ideals of the West, a mixture of Jefferson and Montesquieu. It provided for a parliament with an upper and a lower house elected by universal suffrage, political parties, a prime minister and Cabinet dependent on a majority in the lower house, and an independent judiciary. The emperor became a mortal, a national symbol rather than a divinity. The changes were for real, but this Western model of democratic institutions had a very traditional Japanese orientation. Western and Japanese attitudes fused to create something different from the constitutional governments of the West but also from the autocratic military-dominated regime of pre-war Nippon.