ABSTRACT
Kawaji Toshiyoshi, the architect of Japan’s modern police system, characterized the police as ‘nursemaids’ of the people. 1 The degree to which they supervised and regulated the lives of ordinary Japanese was seen as excessive by American reformers, accustomed to a more circumscribed form of policing. In March 1946 Lewis Valentine, former commissioner of the New York city police, and Oscar Olander, commissioner of Michigan state police, arrived in Japan. Invited by the Occupation authorities to assess the current situation and recommend changes, they were to oversee the compilation of reports on Japan’s metropolitan police organization and her rural forces respectively. Both missions called for ‘deconcentration’ and decentralization, that is to say the removal of extraneous police functions and the devolution of police power. 2 The Valentine Report instructed the Occupation to ‘strip the existing police of every duty not acceptable by American standards to the field of police work’, 3 and Olander recommended that such functions be transferred as soon as other government agencies could absorb them. 4
