Mistakes of the United States Occupation of Japan

[Dacalo]

how come Germany is so scrutinized about what they did to Jews and other minorities but Japan is not about what they did to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians?

They had an infamous medical group that would rip open a live pregnant women without anesthesia, freeze people's arms and then dip in boiling water, I mean they did some barbaric $hit.

Not to mention taking most of women from Asia and sending them to their army so they would get raped, calling them "Morale Support Group"

What I hate about Japan is, they are so damn arrogant. They denied that all this occured although there are records of all this and more.

Germany acknowledges their mistake, but Japan just denies all their atrocities. :|

 

[Dari]

how come Germany is so scrutinized about what they did to Jews and other minorities but Japan is not about what they did to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians?

It's up to the Chinese to bring this to light and let the whole world know. The Jews did it. Besides, we live in the West, not Asia. So it's literally a far away problem.

 

[Dacalo]

Originally posted by: Dari

how come Germany is so scrutinized about what they did to Jews and other minorities but Japan is not about what they did to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians?

It's up to the Chinese to bring this to light and let the whole world know. The Jews did it. Besides, we live in the West, not Asia. So it's literally a far away problem.

wow, what an ignorant remark!

FYI, it was brought up by Asian countries, hence the denial.

 

[Dari]

wow, what an ignorant remark! ...

I mean write books, expose generals, and sue, sue, sue. No one will care if the victim doesn't expose the criminal

 

[Daovonnaex]

Mistakes
*Excessive black marketeering by US troops led to development of powerful organized-crime syndicates (collectively, the Yakuza) which greatly influenced Japan and continues to do so today. SCAP did little to crush the Yakuza
*Starry-eyed New Dealers set up a social security system--a disaster today given how old Japan's populace is today
*Creation of a one-party state based on parliamentary democracy--much like Mexico's government--for the purpose of stopping communism
*Forcing the Japanese to renounce any military whatsoever and creating a dangerous aversion to the use of military force
*Creating a permanent occupation of Japan in exchange for free access to the US market while Japan kept high tarriffs and non-tarriff barriers (remember the 80s?)
*Creating attitudes culminating in the criminalization of prostitution in 1956
*Breaking up numerous zaibatsu led to the Japanese economy be hampered until 1964--when the new khetsu system reached fruition. Making the zaibatsu illegal forced the invention of the khetsu. The khetsu system created an excessive cronyism between banks, business, and the MTI (Ministry of Trade and Industry) which led to the Japanese bubble and Japan's current decade-long recession. Had the Japanese market been left to itself (and had we not allowed them an absurd trade surplus) Japan would've recovered faster, and there would've been no bubble (ergo, no decade-long recession).

 

[AlienCraft]

We allowed our quest for aquisition blind us to the criminal (yakuza) element that pervades most of Japanese Business and Government. These white collar criminals have subverted American Industry (The Lockheed Scandal) and politics and diverted untold Billions of dollars away from legitimate business and into the pockets of a few Criminal Cartels and Families. They have traded in all manner of crime and corruption, to the very highest levels of our Government.
I have been looking for a Book I had on the Yakuza and their rise to Power after WW2. It seems to have been "borrowed" and I can't remember the exact title.
It was quite an eye opener.

 

[ReiAyanami]

the disallowance of letting japan have an offensive military force, which means they wont be able to help much during world war 3 which might possibly be us vs a certain giant communist country.

 

[AndrewR]

you can argue the little regards the GI had toward japan's history and culture, which effectively killed off most of japan's culture.

Sure, because there are no examples of Japanese culture in modern Japan.

Ever lived here?

*Forcing the Japanese to renounce any military whatsoever and creating a dangerous aversion to the use of military force

I agree with this one because a country this size should have some responsibility for maintaining security with the use of its armed forces, more than just sending money to places. This attitude is slowly changing, however, as at least one high level government official is trying to amend the current interpretation of the constitutional limits.

My take on the biggest mistakes:
Failure to mandate street maps.
Failure to mandate street NAMES

Ok, that's about it, but they're huge -- it's impossible to find someone's house here if they are bad at giving directions because there aren't any street names to guide you!

 

[BigNeko]

Constitution of Japan

Apparently, this is against the Constitution, but has been signed into law anyway, but not formally an amendment:
Warship deployment.

The only bad thing here that I can think of is McDonald`s.

While searching found this:
Cybersquatting

 

[brjames]

You might mention the American arrogance (specifically MacArthur's) toward the Japanese people as a race and as a culture. MacArthur was immensely popular but he lost much of that after he made some comments to Congress about the Japanese being the equivalent of "children" (as opposed to the "grown-ups" in the West). This was after he left Japan. They were going to put a giant statue of him in Tokyo harbor (something like the Statue of Liberty) but the project was dropped shortly after he made those comments.

The Americans also had a hang-up about not touching the emperor (as has already been mentioned). There are some indications that Hirohito's continuance as emperor was not as fundamental to the Japanese psyche as the Americans believed, but that is somewhat debateable.

The constitution that the Americans originally gave the Japanese government included provisions guaranteeing the rights of foreign born residents. Through a combination of semantics and clever Japanese translation, these provisions did not survive into the final adopted constitution.

The American control of the press violated the fundamental principles of the First Amendment. Not that they were legally required to extend American rights outside of Japan, but it is a moral discrepancy.

The Americans (after initially supporting economic equity) stopped popular efforts at economic redistribution. Note that whether you feel this is a mistake or not depends in large part on your current political inclinations. My college professor tended to harp on this, but I personally do not feel it was particularly villainous to make a country self-sufficient.

 

[bolido2000]

China and other countries have protestested several times about Japan not recognizing their war crimes against them. Furthermore the recently published History books for Junior High pretty much skip all the atrocities Japan did to its Asian neightbors. Moreover, the prime minister and the emperor up to this day still visit to the shrines of the japanese military "heroes".

China and Korea have sued the japanese government about the "comfort women" but they simply won't acknoledge that those things ever happened.


I think one mistake of the US occupation in Japan is that the US was willing to absolve the japanese scientist from any war crime if they were willing to turn in all the reports on the biological "experiments" they did on the chinese.