Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949)
Rewriting History: The Scope
In attempting to foster a pacifist, democratic government and national body in Japan, the occupation commenced the greatest reorganization of educational policy, procedure, and content that either Japan or the United States had previously witnessed. By removing previously accepted histories and supplanting them with new ones, the occupation authorities succeeded in rewriting the canon of history after the war, from the elementary school level through the university system. The primary goal of educational reform, especially that of history (which subsequently was reorganized and renamed “social studies”), was liberalization. This was accomplished by expunging all feudalistic, nationalistic, militaristic, authoritarian, Shinto-religious, or anti-American discourses from textbooks and classrooms.
Arguably the most impressionable example of this removal was the “blackening-over” (suminuru) of passages that contained material of this kind. On August 26, 1945, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) ordered the deletion of militaristic and other propaganda in school textbooks. Class time was relegated to the inking out of militaristic propaganda, nationalistic fervor, and traces of Japanese feudalism. For many Japanese, the psychological impact of using ink to erase their former understanding of the past was traumatic. Kurita Wataru, a student during the occupation recalled: “We held the splotched pages up to the sunlight and if the words could still be read, we applied a fresh coat of ink. That day, for the first time, I felt besieged by a jumble of contending values, a feeling that persisted ever since.” Suminuru remained the primary means of educational reform until the Ministry of Education, in tandem with the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) could produce newly fashioned narratives of Japan’s history.
The scratching out of Japan’s wartime textbooks was supplemented by a new canon of history, represented by nationally used texts such as Kuni no ayumi (Footsteps of the Nation), Nihon rekishi (Japanese History), and Minshushugi (Democracy). The variety of occupation texts was limited (as opposed to the volume of these texts published, which according to MacArthur reached over 250 million copies) . This served to standardize education throughout the archipelago. Nuance was hard to come by in these official narratives—each decried Japan’s past aggression and exalted American customs, values, and institutions, especially democracy. The “peace education” introduced by the occupation became omnipresent and seemingly irreversible until the occupation ended April 1952.
The reach and magnitude of the occupation’s commission and omission of history resulted in part from the sheer force dedicated to the reformation of postwar Japan. The Civil Information and Education Section, which oversaw the “blackening-over” of textbooks and the dissemination of democratic propaganda and philosophies, employed 563 people, most of whom were American-trained Japanese who served as translators, editors, and researchers. From October 1945 until the end of the occupation, the CI&E Section underwent three distinct reorganizations, which added and shifted its divisions to more comprehensively monitor information sharing in Japan. The CI&E Section’s jurisdiction ranged from “Education and Religions,” “Press and Publications,” and “Radio,” to “Motion Picture,” “Arts and Monuments,” and “Theater.”
The more notorious Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) was even larger. By 1947, it employed over six thousand people, again the majority of whom were English-speaking Japanese . The CCD’s prepublication censorship of books, magazines, newspapers, movies, and even Kabuki plays was the base from which popular discourse on Hirohito’s war responsibility and the effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were effectively extracted, and thus quieted. In September 1949, the occupation secretly dissolved the CCD, but by then the latter had confiscated and read hundreds of millions of private letters and monitored nearly 100,000 private phone conversations.