After the war, the US government found the weird and really nasty fascist ruling clique to be rational business partners.
***** America's Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S.-Japan Relations
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....
<http://www.jpri.org/WPapers/wp11.html> *****
***** Why Can't Japan Apologize?: Institutions and War Memory Since 1945
By STEVEN T. BENFELL
...As with the Tokyo Trials, relatively few people were removed from public life (0.29% of the population, in contrast with 2.5% in US-occupied areas of Germany), and many of those were ultimately rehabilitated, even before the end of the occupation.7...
7 For relevant figures, see Howard B. Shonberger, Aftermath of War (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1989), 61.
<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/200202/0202a001.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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