ABSTRACT
Until now, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power in Japan, apart from two brief intervals, ever since it formed out of the Liberal Party and the Japan Democratic Party in 1955. 1 From the start, the LDP was composed of numerous groups, or factions, all basically conservative and all centered around powerful fi gures. Though the conservative factions underwent minor splits and mergers, they can be grouped into two camps, “mainstream” and “tributaries,” the former originating with Yoshida Shigeru, a man who was several times prime minister in the postwar period, and the latter with, among many others, Kishi Nobusuke, a Manchukuo bureaucrat, wartime cabinet member, and postwar prime minister. While the “mainstream” factions promoted the foreign policy of the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, which argued for a limited military but pushed for economic development and security ties with the United States, the tributaries generally supported “autonomous diplomacy” ( jishu gaikō ), specifi cally through rearmament and amendment of the postwar pacifi st constitution. Kishi and his followers, in particular, attached importance to Japan’s national interests in a traditional sense (i.e. military power) and were “hawks” with strong anti-communist tendencies and pro-Taiwan lobbying proclivities. 2
Historians often point to the legacy of the prewar era in the stances and preoccupations of Japan’s leaders: Yoshida stressed trade and friendly relations with the United States and European nations after the war and yet retained some elements of an imperialist mindset. Kishi had been a leading reform bureaucrat in Manchukuo before the war, one of a group of men who wanted to transform the country along state-managed lines, and even after the war his policies could be characterized as statist. Kishi pushed for strong government control over industry and the creation of a strong Asian bloc with Japan at the center (often referred to as “Asianism” or ajiashugi in Japanese). 3 His attitudes often led to the suspicion among neighboring nations in the postwar period that he and members of his faction had residual imperial designs for the region. 4
In contrast to the two postwar prime ministers, Yoshida and Kishi, Shiina Etsusaburō is perhaps a relatively minor fi gure in the larger history of twentiethcentury Japan. A leading reform bureaucrat who had worked with Kishi before the
war, someone who had promoted Japan’s imperialist dream of building the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo on the Chinese continent and promoting totalitarian militarism, Shiina continued to have “Asianist” leanings after the war and committed himself to Kishi’s nationalistic agendas. As Japan’s economy took off in the 1960s, however, he gradually shifted his position toward an economy-centered policy line. His shift demonstrates the impact caused by the success of Japan’s high growth, the so-called economic miracle, on Japanese postwar politics. The recent disclosure in 2012 of a collection of diaries and personal documents of Shiina sheds new light onto the intellectual and political development of this relatively minor fi gure. 5 Shiina “served Kishi like his shadow” before the war and was the “closest of Kishi’s aides after the war”; indeed, he was an infl uential force in the Kishi faction. 6 On the basis of this new collection of Shiina’s papers and other signifi cant fi ndings such as diplomatic documents and published secondary sources, this chapter discusses Shiina’s life and investigates the shift that took place in his mindset, particularly from the 1960s onward. The fact that even Shiina, who was at the center of Japanese totalitarian militarism before the war, shifted his position to be a supporter of an economy-centered policy line, or the Yoshida Doctrine, demonstrates the broad changes in Japanese political circles that the economic miracle brought about during the 1960s.
