On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Todd Archer wrote:
> Did the American occupations of Germany and Japan get hit by some level
> of resistance?
No. In Japan the comparison is kind of remarkable. We only had 250,000 troops to garrison a country of 70 million, and our initial economic policy was basically "let them starve, they deserve it." There was massive looting of military stores. But there was no military resistance at all. The military stores all ended up getting converted into peacetime goods.
Of course many, many, many other things were different -- not least that for the Japanese, occupation was a relief from what most of them thought was certain death; that as awful as conditions were, they were better than during the last years of the war; and that we ruled through the emperor and the old ruling class.
If you're really interested, a wonderful book on the subject is John Dower's _Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of WWII_.
Michael