by Michael Schaller
Evidence in a variety of open and still classified U.S. government documents strongly indicates that early in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, making what he and his aides earlier called a "big bet," authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke--formerly an accused war criminal--and selected members of the Liberal Democratic Party. This fateful decision followed Kishi's June 1957 visit to the United States, where he had addressed both Houses of Congress, thrown out the first pitch at a New York Yankees baseball game, and joined Eisenhower in a round of golf at an otherwise racially segregated country club. In private discussions, the president and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also gave Kishi a crucial political reward: their pledge to renegotiate the unpopular 1951 security treaty imposed upon Japan as the price of ending the Occupation.
The honors bestowed upon the prime minister could only be described as remarkable, given the fact that as a member of General Tojo's cabinet in 1941 Kishi had co-signed the declaration of war against the United States. As minister of Commerce and Industry and later head of the Munitions Ministry, he had overseen the forced conscription of hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese laborers and been responsible for military production. When American Occupation troops entered Japan in August 1945, they arrested Kishi as a suspected Class A war criminal and he spent three years in Sugamo Prison under investigation.
As much as anyone, Kishi represented everything the United States detested about Imperial Japan and had pledged to eradicate. His political resurrection symbolized the transformation of Japanese-American relations during the 1950s. In a literal sense, Kishi's life mirrored Japan's evolution from enemy to ally, the emergence of the Cold War in Asia, and the role played by the U.S. in forging Japan's postwar political and economic structure.
Kishi first came to the attention of American officials shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack when, as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, he struck up a friendship with Ambassador Joseph C. Grew. Grew's admiration was evident in 1942 when, while under detention and awaiting an exchange of diplomats, the ambassador commented on Kishi's offer to release the detained American to play a round of golf. "Kishi has always been one of my highly valued friends in Japan and nothing can ever change my feeling of personal friendship and affection for him," Grew wrote. "That feeling will endure permanently, no matter what has happened or what may happen in the future." This testimonial served Kishi better than he could ever have dreamed.
Kishi's release from prison in December 1948 reflected the dramatic reversal of Occupation priorities during the previous 18 months. American forces arrived in Japan armed with a bold plan to demilitarize, democratize, and economically reorganize the nation. By the summer of 1947, enthusiasm for the radical restructuring of Japan waned. With China racked by a civil war and Europe politically divided and economically prostrate, the Truman administration viewed Japan, like Germany, as a power vacuum into which Soviet influence might flow. Soviet control of German and Japanese industrial potential, men such as State Department Policy Planner George Kennan, Army Undersecretary William Draper, and Navy (later Defense) Secretary James Forrestal believed, would tilt the global balance in Moscow's favor. In simplest terms, Forrestal put it, real security against communism required the "restoration of commerce, trade and business" worldwide. This meant putting "Japan, Germany and other affiliates of the Axis back to work."
George Kennan argued that Japan must be redeveloped as the "cornerstone of a Pacific Security system." The "radically changed world situation," Kennan resolved in 1947, "required that Japan be made internally stable, amenable to American leadership, and industrially revived as a producer . . . of consumer goods and secondarily of capital goods." Had it not been for the opposition of Occupation commander General Douglas MacArthur--whose stubborn commitment to the initial reform program was part of his strategy to seek the American presidency--the Truman administration would have "reversed course" in Japan by the end of 1947, as it did in Germany. Instead, it postponed action until mid-1948, after MacArthur's defeat in a series of presidential primary elections and his withdrawal from the race.
Once the general ceased to be a political threat, President Harry Truman moved swiftly to implement the economic and political policies advocated by Kennan and Draper. By the end of 1948, the United States ended war crimes trials, abandoned plans to break up the zaibatsu, and stopped the flow of reparations to Japan's wartime victims. Washington encouraged the Japanese government to rein in organized labor and named Detroit banker Joseph Dodge "economic czar" to "crank up" Japan's economy by imposing central planning designed to maximize export production at the expense of domestic consumption. Dodge encouraged the creation of powerful government planning and trade ministries, such as MITI, to promote export production by large, integrated firms. These new priorities, resembling many of Kishi's wartime economic control measures, led directly to Kishi's release from prison and his return to politics by the time the Occupation ended.
Kishi's prewar friendship with Ambassador Grew assisted his political rehabilitation. A small but influential group of private Americans, who played a key role in drafting the Reverse Course policy, identified Kishi as among those best suited to lead the new Japan. In 1947, Newsweek foreign affairs editor Harry Kern, Newsweek Tokyo bureau chief Compton Packenham, corporate lawyer James L. Kauffman, the retired Joseph C. Grew, and Eugene Dooman, a retired diplomat who served under Grew in Tokyo, took the lead in creating the "American Council on Japan" (ACJ) with the aim of changing occupation policy. These men had prewar ties with numerous Japanese business and political leaders purged after 1945 and served as mediators between them and American officials. The ACJ members, like their Japanese counterparts, were bitterly critical of SCAP policy and resented Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru's resistance to rearmament and military cooperation with the U.S.
During its years of operation from 1947 to 1952, ACJ members such as Kern, Dooman, Kauffman, and Packenham consulted regularly with Kennan and Dulles, influencing their policy views and arranging meetings in Tokyo between the visiting American envoys and their Japanese friends, who included members of the emperor's household, former military officers, purged business leaders and politicians. As part of their effort to "polish" Kishi's image in the early 1950s, Packenham tutored Kishi in English and Kern served as a public relations consultant, arranging trips for Kishi to Europe and the United States.
By 1953, with financial backing from industrialist Fujiyama Aiichiro and Kodama Yoshio (a fellow Sugamo inmate who amassed a fortune in wartime China and began working with U.S. intelligence officials during the Korean war when he smuggled tungsten out of China), Kishi emerged as leader of the Democratic Party, one of two major conservative groups vying for power.
By the end of 1954, the economic dislocation caused by the end of the Korean War, combined with American frustration over Yoshida's reluctance to rearm, eroded the prime minister's base of support and forced his resignation. U.S. Ambassador John Allison pressed the conservative parties to select Kishi Nobusuke as his replacement. Kishi had ingratiated himself with Allison by working to unify the factious conservatives (a goal achieved in 1955) and by reassuring the ambassador that "for the next twenty five years it would be in Japan's best interests to cooperate closely with the United States." Despite American pressure, another conservative and former purgee, Hatoyama Ichiro, was elected prime minister.
To America's disgust, Hatoyama proved nearly as reluctant as Yoshida to amend the "no war" clause of the constitution, speed rearmament, accept strict limits on trade with China, or passively accept the security treaty. Hatoyama's effort to negotiate a peace treaty with the Soviet Union drove Dulles wild. When it appeared likely Tokyo and Moscow would reach a compromise over the disputed "northern territories," Dulles scuttled the chance by threatening to occupy Okinawa permanently.
Hatoyama's tacit support of efforts by Japanese firms to expand trade with China also offended Washington. The Eisenhower administration's outlook was epitomized by Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, who declared "we could not hope to keep Japan as a loyal ally. . . if it became dependent economically on Communist China." Trade would hand the "Chinese Communists a terrible club to hold over Japan." At the same time, Dulles believed that American consumers would shun Japanese products as merely "cheap imitations of our own." The only "solution" for Japan, Dulles argued, was to sell goods to and obtain raw materials from "presently underdeveloped areas such as Southeast Asia."
When Hatoyama resigned in December 1956, United States' representatives in Japan renewed their campaign for Kishi. Over the previous three years he had further ingratiated himself to the Americans by providing "inside" information about LDP policies, finances and personalities. He convinced American diplomats that he was the only politician capable of halting Japan's drift toward neutrality abroad and toward Socialism at home.
In a close party vote, Ishibashi Tanzan, the least pro-American among the major LDP leaders, edged out Kishi. One American diplomat complained that the U.S. put its "money on Kishi, but the wrong horse won." If Hatoyama proved a disappointment, Ishibashi terrified the Eisenhower administration. U.S. diplomats described him as a "headstrong rabble rouser" who "never got over the personal affront of having been purged during the Occupation." When Ishibashi declared that the "era of more or less automatic compliance with American wishes on China was over," Washington braced itself for battles with Tokyo over China, and anticipated demands to recover Okinawa and dump the security treaty.
Only Ishibashi's declining health and resignation after two months in office averted a crisis. When the LDP finally selected Kishi as prime minister in February 1957, Washington heaved an audible sigh of relief. Kishi reasserted his loyalty to America's Cold War strategy, pledging to limit contact with China and, instead, to focus Japanese economic attention on exports to the United States and mutual development of Southeast Asia.
Still, American policymakers recognized that their troubles were hardly over. The recently merged Japan Socialist Party garnered public support with its calls for economic reform, an opening to China, and a campaign to rid Japan of its humiliating military pact with the United States. U.S. political analysts predicted that in the Diet election expected in the spring of 1958, the JSP might win nearly as many seats as the factionalized LDP.
The recently appointed ambassador to Tokyo, Douglas MacArthur II (the general's nephew), described Kishi as the only Japanese politician able to stem this tide. The U.S. needed Kishi as prime minister, MacArthur informed Dulles, but Kishi could only hold on to power if Washington agreed to revise the security treaty. Japan, MacArthur warned early in 1957, faced a "turning point." Without movement toward treaty reform and Kishi's hand on the tiller, relations with the U.S. would deteriorate "in an atmosphere of acrimony and mounting hostility." Japan would turn toward neutralism or even an accommodation with the communist bloc.
Dulles was persuaded that the United States had little choice but to negotiate a new treaty if it hoped to retain base rights and keep the LDP in power. He described himself "at the point of having to make a Big Bet" on Japan and agreed with his advisers that Kishi was the "only bet we had left in Japan." Dulles and Eisenhower resolved that "the time had come to take the initiative in proposing a readjustment" to the security treaty and to bolster Kishi. The decision led to both Kishi's triumphant June 1957 visit to Washington and the CIA payments.
In the aftermath of Kishi's visit, it appears that Eisenhower was persuaded to approve a plan for the CIA to begin influencing Japanese politics. With the aim of both strengthening Kishi's grip on the LDP and stemming Socialist gains in the upcoming Diet election, the CIA utilized nominally "private" Americans to deliver money to Kishi's circle within the LDP. This allowed both donor and recipient to deny any official foreign involvement. Additional money reportedly went to so-called moderate elements within the JSP, with the aim of securing political intelligence, boosting their numbers, and encouraging ideological warfare within the party. While the exact amount of secret funding remains uncertain, sums as high as $10 million may have been spent annually between 1958 and 1960.
The investment paid off handsomely. In the May 1958 election to the Diet's lower house, the LDP retained nearly all its seats while the frustrated Socialists fell to bickering, culminating in a party split at the end of 1959. Meanwhile one of the Americans involved in the operation remarked cynically that Japanese politicians proved they were like those everywhere else--anyone was welcome to play in their game as long as they put up the money.
During the next 18 months Kishi collaborated closely with Ambassador MacArthur in revising the security treaty. The U.S. agreed to scrap many of the most unpopular elements of the 1951 pact in return for the right to retain air, naval, repair, and logistic facilities in Japan--along with a secret protocol preserving the right to move nuclear weapons "through" Japan. The importance of these bases, and those in Okinawa, became abundantly clear during the Vietnam war.
In January 1960, Prime Minister Kishi flew to Washington to sign a revised mutual security treaty. President Eisenhower welcomed him warmly and the American press lavished effusive praise on the visitor, barely mentioning the demonstrations against him and the treaty when he left Tokyo. Time magazine graced its January 25, 1960, cover with a portrait of a smiling Kishi against a background of humming industry. The prime minister's "134 pound body," Time noted, "packed pride, power and passion--a perfect embodiment of his country's amazing resurgence." Newsweek trumpeted the arrival of a "Friendly, Savy, Salesman from Japan." The revised treaty, along with the ubiquitous Sony transistor radios shipped to America, Newsweek explained, symbolized the U.S. alliance with the "economic powerhouse of Asia."
American leaders and journalists were baffled by the tumultuous opposition to the security treaty that swept Japan a few months later. Clearly, they mistook Kishi's popularity in Washington for broad acceptance of his policies by the Japanese people. In part, this was a price the United States paid for its manipulation of Japanese politics during the 1950s.
In June 1960, as soon as the new treaty became effective, the United States withdrew its support from Kishi--who now seemed like damaged goods. In a splendid irony, American officials secretly approached the elderly Yoshida Shigeru, offering to provide financial support to one of his proteges who might be able both to calm protests in Japan and cooperate with Washington.
Although the Kennedy administration in 1961 continued secret payments to the LDP and other parties, it viewed trade expansion as a better way to stabilize Japan and bind it to the United States. President John F. Kennedy's advisers envisioned a future in which Japan doubled or tripled its exports to the U.S., making Japan so dependent on American consumers that it could never contemplate neutrality! But just as support for Kishi had unintended consequences, this trade strategy contributed to an economic transformation barely imaginable to leaders on either side of the Pacific.
MICHAEL SCHALLER is a professor of history at the University of Arizona and author of The United States and China in the Twentieth Century (1979), The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (1985), and Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (1989), all published by Oxford University Press. This article is reprinted in English from the Japanese version in This is Yomiuri and is used with permission.
Return to JPRI Home Page
Copyright© 1997 by the Japan Policy Research Institute All rights reserved.
http://www.jpri.org/public/wp11.html