COMPETING VISIONS IN GHQ: NEW DEALERS, ANTI-COMMUNISTS, AND THE POLITICAL STRUGGLES IN OCCUPIED JAPAN

Abstract

The history of the American Occupation of Japan has been the subject of countless studies. Within these studies, the story of the Occupation’s initial period of reform led by New Dealers under MacArthur followed by a “reverse course” brought on by the Cold War and changing attitudes in Washington is commonly told and retold. However, one side of the story which has received comparatively little focus is the internal conflicts in General Headquarters (GHQ) between the New Dealers and the anti-Communists. Numerous studies, memoirs, and reports mention a split between the two sides which got so severe that there was an attempted purge of New Dealers reminiscent of the McCarthyite attacks back in the U.S. In this thesis, I aim to understand the motivations and actions of the Americans who were part of the machinery of the occupation of Japan and relate both to the political environment of America in the early Cold War. To do so, I examine the ideological origins and nature of the internal persecution in GHQ and tie my finding into the developments in the U.S. after WWII. With my findings, I argue that the Americans in the Occupation fought with each other to carry out policies designed to bring about their competing visions for an ideal postwar society in not only Japan, but the United States. By analyzing these ideological struggles in a framework that accounts for the postwar political shift occurring in America, we gain a greater understanding of the ideological forces which pushed Americans to focus more on national security and fighting communism than on social reform.