Occupation in Japan
The occupation in Japan began on September 2, 1945 with the capitulation of Japan , which marked the end of the Pacific War and thus the Second World War . With the peace treaty of San Francisco signed on September 8, 1951, the occupation period ended on the main Japanese islands . The United States introduced as a former chief opponent most of the occupation forces, to come British soldiers in a significantly smaller number. It was the first time in Japanese history that the island nation was occupied by foreign powers. The occupation transformed the Japanese Empireinto a parliamentary democracy based in part on the US New Deal .
Preparations
On August 8, 1945, the US military leadership finalized the plans for Operation Blacklist . This laid down exactly how and with which troops Japan was to be occupied immediately after the surrender. As a result, a plan for the administrative control of occupied Japan was worked out.
The President of the United States , Harry S. Truman , the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin agreed on how the occupation of the remaining Japanese sphere of influence should be carried out: the Soviet Union would cover the northern part of the Japanese province of Chosen (the later North Korea ), the Kuril Archipelago and Sakhalin Island , while the United States and Great Britain would be responsible for the remainder of Japan's possessions (including the southern part of Chōsen Province, later South Korea ).
Surrender and occupation
Japan's armed forces achieved some spectacular initial successes after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941; then the fortunes of war turned increasingly in favor of the Allies. In mid-1945 the military situation in the Pacific War had finally become extremely precarious for the Japanese. The once powerful Imperial Japanese Navy was almost completely destroyed. Since the beginning of 1945, B-29 formations of the US Air Force covered the cities and industrial centers on Japan's main islands with increasingly devastating bombing raids. Desperate Japanese pilots tried to stop the US fleet with kamikaze attacks. In the Battle of Okinawa , the Americans had conquered the island by the end of June 1945 after two months of heavy fighting. With Okinawa they had a strategic base for invading the main Japanese islands . In addition, the first atomic bomb test had been successful and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan in accordance with the agreements of the Yalta Conference in August, although this was unknown in Japan. As against the German Reich, the Allies demanded unconditional surrender ("unconditional surrender") in view of their superiority .
On July 26, 1945, the Allied Powers, without the participation of the Soviet Union, passed the so-called Potsdam Declaration at the Potsdam Conference , which was intended to underpin this demand again. From the Americans' point of view, the declaration was the final warning against the use of atomic bombs. It was hoped that this would accelerate the surrender considerably and thereby deprive the Soviet Union of any basis for demands that were aimed at influencing the later occupation policy. The reaction of the Japanese government was interpreted by the Americans as a rejection.
At the same time as the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, the Soviet Union launched Operation August Storm , the attack on Manchuria, on August 8, in accordance with the Yalta Agreement . On August 10, after the intervention of Tennō Hirohito , the Japanese government finally signaled its informal approval of the Potsdam Declaration, on the condition that the institution of the Tennō would remain intact. US President Harry S. Truman replied that Hirohito could remain in office if this corresponded to the "freely expressed will of the Japanese people". After the Cabinet approved the draft of the War Ending Ordinance (大 東 亜 戦 争 終結 ノ 詔書, daitōa sensō shūketsu no shōsho ), a radio address was broadcast on August 15 in which Hirohito announced that his government would accept the Potsdam's terms Declaration accept. He urged the Japanese people to “endure the unbearable” and to refrain from any “outburst of feelings”. Previously, a few officers who wanted to prevent surrender at all costs had tried forcibly to prevent the speech from being broadcast.
On the same day, Truman announced that General Douglas MacArthur would be named Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers ("SCAP"). On August 19, MacArthur met with representatives of Japan in Manila to brief them on his plans for the occupation. The Japanese envoys asked that the arrival of the first American units on Japanese soil be delayed; MacArthur refused. The first advance command, 146 soldiers from the US 11th Airborne Division , landed at Atsugi Air Force Base in Kanagawa Prefecture on August 28, despite some security concerns , making it the first American military unit to land on Japanese soil. Two days later, MacArthur, along with four thousand other soldiers, arrived in Atsugi in person.
The official surrender was scheduled for September 2 and took place on the battleship USS Missouri in Tōkyō Bay. On the Japanese side, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru signed for the government and General Umezu Yoshijirō for the military; signed for the USA by Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz . In addition, the document was signed by representatives of Great Britain, France, the Republic of China , the Soviet Union , the Netherlands and the member states of the British Commonwealth . This marked the official beginning of the occupation.
In the course of the occupation of Japan called Operation Blacklist , more soldiers soon arrived, so that by the end of 1945 more than 350,000 US soldiers were stationed in Japan. The official occupation force of the British Commonwealth consisted of Australian , British, Indian and New Zealand soldiers.
The top priority was initially to build a network for food distribution, as a large part of the population went hungry due to the collapse of the Japanese administrative structure and the destruction of important cities by bombing .
After such a network was built, which cost more than a million US dollars a day, General MacArthur wanted to win the support of Emperor Hirohito. The two first met on September 28, 1945. The photo in which they can be seen together is one of the most famous in Japanese history. Many Japanese were shocked to find that the general was wearing his standard and not his dress uniform when he met the emperor.
End of the occupation
The end of the Allied occupation of Japan was set in the San Francisco Peace Treaty , which was signed on September 8, 1951. When it came into force on April 28, 1952, Japan was again an independent country. However, under Article 3 of the treaty, the United States retained trust administration in the form of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) over a number of archipelagos. The occupation ended on the Amami Islands in 1953 and on the Ogasawara Islands in 1968. With the return of Okinawa agreed between Richard Nixon and Satō Eisaku in 1972, the Western Allies put all areas provided for in the peace treaty back under Japanese sovereignty.
literature
- John W. Dower: Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Wake of World War II . Norton et al., New York et al. 1999, ISBN 0-393-04686-9 .
- John W. Dower: Japan in War and Peace. Selected essays . New Press, New York 1993, ISBN 1-56584-067-4 .
- Richard B. Finn: Winners in Peace. MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan . University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1992, ISBN 0-520-06909-9 .
- Grant Kohn Goodman: America's Japan: The First Year. 1945-1946 . Fordham University Press, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8232-2515-1 .
- Michael Schaller: The American Occupation of Japan. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia . Oxford Univ. Press, New York et al. 1987, ISBN 0-19-505190-4 .
- Winfried Scharlau: The General and the Kaiser. The American Occupation of Japan: 1945–1952 . Hauschild Verlag , Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-89757-197-8 .
- Howard B. Schonberger: Aftermath of War. Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952 . Kent University Press, Kent, Ohio / London 1989, ISBN 0-87338-369-9 .
- Robert Wolfe: Americans as Proconsuls. United States Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944–1952 . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale et al. 1984, ISBN 0-8093-1115-1 .
Web links
- Basic Outline Plan for Blacklist Operations - The original plans for Operation Blacklist
- Basic directive of the Allied military government in Japan ( Basic Directive For Post-Surrender Military Government in Japan Proper. English)
- US Army Occupation Time Page
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Michael Schaller: The American Occupation of Japan. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. P. 15.
- ↑ See Michael Schaller: The American Occupation of Japan. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. P. 17.
- ↑ Quoted from Winfried Scharlau : The General and the Kaiser. The American Occupation of Japan: 1945–1952. P. 14.