ABSTRACT
Anti-communism in Cold War Japan is often understood to have been a by-product of the American Occupation of Japan and subsequent American political and military influence in the archipelago. However, this view overlooks a variety of anti-communist traditions inside of Japan, in particular the Japanese Catholic articulation of anti-communist views before and during the Cold War. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Japanese Catholics such as jurist and Tokyo University law professor Tanaka Kōtarō responded to the writings of Pope Pius XI and Pope Leo XIII, Jesuit Pedro Arrupe, and Marxists Tosaka Jun, Tokuda Kyūichi, and Shiga Yoshio, as well as to events such as President Plutarco Elías Calles’s persecution of Catholics in Mexico (the “Cristero War”) and the arrest of Cardinal József Mindszenty in Soviet-dominated Hungary, in formulating an anti-communist Cold War information regime in Japan grounded in Japanese Catholicism rather than in American political considerations.
