ABSTRACT
It is customary to regard the defeat of Japan and the period of the Occupation as a break with militarist and anti-democratic Japan. It is true that a past like that, leading to Japanese expansion, to war throughout East Asia, and to nuclear disasters, could not have been sustained in the face of a victor whose declared goal was to eliminate the harmful influence of Japanese leaders who had deceived their people, and to democratise the country. Even if the bombing of Hiroshima, and still more of Nagasaki, still raise questions, the efforts of the occupier were indubitably directed towards a process of democratisation, through a series of decisions. The most spectacular of these included the purges of leaders between 1946 and 1948, the abolition of the Ministry of the Interior and of numerous decrees limiting freedoms, and the putting into effect of a new pacifist Constitution in 1947. Even so, going beyond discussion of how officials justified all this, we cannot evaluate what they did without revisiting the purges of communists and their affiliates (red purges, 1 to use the expression given to them), since we may see in the comparison they provide with the purges of militarist leaders a process at the crossroads between national and international issues.
