America's war against the Axis powers was an ideological struggle between democracy and fascism and the US explicitly pledged to avoid seeking territorial aggrandisement in the Atlantic Charter that defined the Allied goals for the post-war world. Roosevelt's personal views on European colonialism influenced American foreign policy during the war and liquidating the British Empire in the name of national self-determination was one of his main agendas, which helped the US emerge as an unrivalled superpower in the post-war era. The American occupation of Japan was considered a huge success but the Japanese constitution was drafted by a group of American lawyers and the Japanese were only allowed to translate the American version of the new constitution. In the course of denazification of Japan, millions of copies of wartime books were confiscated and destroyed and Japan had lost valuable historical documents on its past, which resulted in a collective memory loss, and the US imposed an alternative version of Japanese history by censoring the media and school textbooks.
So thirdterm, what your saying is in at least Japan's post 45 world it was colonizing without calling it colonizing? Do you still think Tokyo is our puppet today?
Washington has been covertly manipulating Japanese politics since the 1950s and we know now that prominent Japanese politicians including former prime ministers were on the CIA's payroll, actively promoting pro-American policies in Japan. It's been suspected that the CIA was behind mysterious covert operations in the post-war era to discredit the opposition against the American-funded Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and any opposition parties had tremendous difficulties in gaining power, allowing the LDP's one-party rule in the Cold War era.
In a major covert operation of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan's politics for a generation. The C.I.A. gave money to the Liberal Democratic Party and its members in the 1950's and the 1960's, to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left, said retired intelligence officials and former diplomats. Since then, the C.I.A. has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan's party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said. The Liberal Democrats' 38 years of one-party governance ended last year when they fell from power after a series of corruption cases -- many involving secret cash contributions. Still the largest party in Japan's parliament, they formed an awkward coalition in June with their old cold war enemies, the Socialists -- the party that the C.I.A.'s aid aimed in part to undermine. Though the C.I.A.'s financial role in Japanese politics has long been suspected by historians and journalists, the Liberal Democrats have always denied it existed, and the breadth and depth of the support has never been detailed publicly. Disclosure of the covert aid could open old wounds and harm the Liberal Democrats' credibility as an independent voice for Japanese interests. The subject of spying between allies has always been sensitive. Bits and pieces of the story are revealed in United States Government records slowly being declassified. A State Department document in the National Archives describes a secret meeting in a Tokyo hotel at which Eisaku Sato, a former Prime Minister of Japan, sought under-the-table contributions from the United States for the 1958 parliamentary election. A newly declassified C.I.A. history also discusses covert support sent that year.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world ... -60-s.html
a) Japan was not a Nazi country, so what denazification you are talking about?
MacArthur's SCAP employed similar tactics that had been tried in Nazi Germany to Japan to democratise these former fascist countries and the former Nazis and their Japanese equivalents, who were ultra-nationalists, were banned from taking up posts as public servants. The US tried to ideologically cleanse the two nations so that they would not revert to their old ways in the 1930s and the Germans and Japanese were somewhat brainwashed into becoming democratic and peace-loving peoples through a series of measures of thought control such as media censorship and book burning.
In this turbulent time of socio-economic upheaval, the military engaged in assassinations and other acts of intimidation against government officials, often in the name of the Emperor. Young military officers were committed to purifying Japan by imposing greater discipline and rooting out the corrupt excesses of capitalism and party politics. Some scholars have described this as fascism, but there were significant differences from developments in Germany and Italy where Hitler and Mussolini rose to power. The Taisho era (1912–25) was a heady period for Japanese internationalism and democracy. There is general agreement that Japan became disenchanted with the post-First World War international system because it seemed weighted to the advantage of the Western-directed status quo and relegated Japan to the second tier of nations. The roots of Japan’s alienation from the international system are long and complex, but clearly Western racism and double standards played a key part. Japan’s moderates had little to show for their efforts at working within the international system, prompting criticism of those efforts and highlighting the insults and sacrifices Japan was seen to be enduring at the hands of the Western powers. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 marked the end of Japan’s support for the international system. The militarist hardliners succeeded in taking over Japan’s foreign policy, steering it on a collision course with the United States as they escalated expansion into China,especially after 1937, and later targeted Southeast Asia’s natural resources. Reischauer (1977) has suggested that Taisho democracy was going well until it was hijacked by the militarists in the 1930s, arguing that Japan wason a trajectory of modernization until this process was derailed by a relatively small group of ultra-nationalists. Those sympathetic to his view argue that the Occupation was an effort to revive democracy and return Japan to the modernization trajectory. Others argue that Taisho democracy was an illusion doomed to fail because of the structural flaws of the Meiji Constitution that favoured the emergence of authoritarianism. Proponents of this view dismiss the ‘hijacking’ theory and point out that the shift towards ultra-nationalism and imperial expansionism enjoyed broad media and popular support (Young, 1998). Blaming a small group of fanatics, they argue, tends to exonerate the Japanese people from responsibility for Japan’s expansionist rampage in Asia and overlooks sustained public enthusiasm for such policies. These differing interpretations of what went wrong are connected to the ongoing debate over continuity and transformation between contemporary and wartime Japan. Did SCAP remake wartime Japan or, in making common cause with the existing conservative elite, did it accommodate a certain degree of continuity unimaginable in occupied Germany?
http://catalogue.pearsoned.co.uk/assets ... SE_C02.pdf
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