Japan was occupied and administered by the victorious Allies of World War II from the surrender of the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945 at the end of the Second World War until the Treaty of San Francisco took effect on April 28, 1952. The occupation, led by the American military with support from the British Commonwealth and under the supervision of the Far Eastern Commission, involved a total of nearly one million Allied soldiers. The occupation was overseen by the U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers by the U.S. President Harry S. Truman; MacArthur was succeeded as supreme commander by General Matthew Ridgway in 1951. Unlike in the occupation of Germany and the occupation of Austria, the Soviet Union had little to no influence over the occupation of Japan, declining to participate because it did not want to place Soviet troops under MacArthur's direct command.
Nobusuke Kishi was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who was prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960.
Hayato Ikeda was a Japanese bureaucrat and later politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1960 to 1964. He is best known for his Income Doubling Plan, which promised to double Japan's GDP in ten years.
The Shōwa era, [ɕoːwadʑidai] was the period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa from December 25, 1926, until his death on January 7, 1989. It was preceded by the Taishō era and succeeded by the Heisei era. The pre-1945 and post-war Shōwa periods are almost completely different states: the pre-1945 Shōwa era (1926–1945) concerns the Empire of Japan, and post-1945 Shōwa era (1945–1989) concerns the State of Japan.
The Reverse Course is the name commonly given to a shift in the policies of the U.S. government and the U.S.-led Allied occupation of Japan as they sought to reform and rebuild Japan after World War II. The Reverse Course began in 1947, at a time of rising Cold War tensions. As a result of the Reverse Course, the emphasis of Occupation policy shifted from the demilitarization and democratization of Japan to economic reconstruction and remilitarization of Japan in support of U.S. Cold War objectives in Asia. This involved relaxing and in some cases even partially undoing earlier reforms the Occupation had enacted in 1945 and 1946. As a U.S. Department of State official history puts it, "this 'Reverse Course'...focused on strengthening, not punishing, what would become a key Cold War ally."
The Wirtschaftswunder, also known as the Miracle on the Rhine, was the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II. The expression referring to this phenomenon was first used by The Times in 1950.
International relations between Japan and the United States began in the late 18th and early 19th century with the diplomatic but force-backed missions of U.S. ship captains James Glynn and Matthew C. Perry to the Tokugawa shogunate. Following the Meiji Restoration, the countries maintained relatively cordial relations. Potential disputes were resolved. Japan acknowledged American control of Hawaii and the Philippines, and the United States reciprocated regarding Korea. Disagreements about Japanese immigration to the U.S. were resolved in 1907. The two were allies against Germany in World War I.
The Japanese economic miracle refers to Japan's record period of economic growth between the post-World War II era and the end of the Cold War. During the economic boom, Japan rapidly became the world's second-largest economy. By the 1990s, Japan's population demographics had begun to stagnate, and the workforce was no longer expanding as quickly as it had in the previous decades despite per-worker productivity remaining high.
Joseph Morrell Dodge was a chairman of the Detroit Bank, now Comerica. He later served as an economic adviser for postwar economic stabilization programs in Germany and Japan, headed the American delegation to the Austrian Advisory commission, and worked as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's director of the Bureau of the Budget.
Two global superpowers, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), rose in the aftermath of World War II. The war's aftermath was also defined by the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the creation and implementation of the United Nations as an intergovernmental organization, and the decolonization of Asia and Africa by European and east Asian powers, most notably by the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.
The 1955 system (55年体制), also known as the one-and-a-half party system, is a term used by scholars to describe the dominant-party system that has existed in Japan since 1955, in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has successfully held by itself or in coalition with Komeito a majority government nearly uninterrupted with opposition parties, other than for brief stints in 1993–1994 and 2009–2012, largely incapable of forming significant or long lasting alternatives. The terms 1955 system and the one-and-a-half party system are credited to Junnosuke Masumi, who described the 1955 system as "a grand political dam into which the history of Japanese politics surge".
Sanbetsu (産別) was a Japanese trade union centre between 1946 and 1958. When it was founded in 1946 it emerged as the main force in the Japanese post-war labour movement and led a campaign of militant strikes. However, it suffered a major backlash after only a few months in existence when a planned general strike was aborted. Internal divisions followed, and the organization was never able to recover its initial strength.
Eleanor Martha Hadley was an American economist and policymaker. Because of her relatively rare research specialization in Japanese economics, during World War II Hadley was recruited first into OSS and then the State Department to support the United States' war effort while she was a doctoral candidate in economics at Radcliffe College. Hadley helped draft the United States' plans for dissolving zaibatsu business conglomerates as part of a planned effort to democratize Japan after the war, and she participated in implementing this economic deconcentration program when the postwar occupation brought her to Japan to work for SCAP as an economist.
Following Japan's defeat in World War II, the Allied Occupation of Japan ordered the purge of tens of thousands of designated persons from public service positions. Individuals targeted in the purge included accused war criminals, military officers, leaders of ultranationalist societies, leaders in the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, business leaders involved in Japanese overseas economic expansion, governors of former Japanese colonies, and national leaders involved in the decisions leading Japan into war. Ultimately, SCAP screened a total of 717,415 possible purgees, and wound up excluding 201,815 of them from holding public office. However, as part of the "Reverse Course" in Occupation policy, most of the purgees would be de-purged and allowed to return to public life by 1951.
The Mountain Village Operation Units were underground paramilitary units organized by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in the early 1950s for the purpose of carrying out Maoist-inspired guerrilla operations against the Japanese government and the Allied Occupation of Japan. The units were formed under the guidance of the Interim Central Directorate of the JCP, an informal group created by the party’s majority Shokanha faction, and sought to foment a nationwide communist revolution in emulating Mao Zedong's strategy of forming a base of operations in rural villages, but the operations achieved no successes and proved a disaster for the party's political prospects going forward.
John Kenneth Emmerson was an American diplomat, and specialist on Japan and Northeast Asia.
The history of Japanese foreign relations deals with the international relations in terms of diplomacy, economics and political affairs from about 1850 to 2000. The kingdom was virtually isolated before the 1850s, with limited contacts through Dutch traders. The Meiji Restoration was a political revolution that installed a new leadership that was eager to borrow Western technology and organization. The government in Tokyo carefully monitored and controlled outside interactions. Japanese delegations to Europe brought back European standards which were widely imposed across the government and the economy. Trade flourished, as Japan rapidly industrialized.
The Red Purge was an anticommunist movement in occupied Japan from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. Carried out by the Japanese government and private corporations with the aid and encouragement of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the Red Purge saw tens of thousands of alleged members, supporters, or sympathizers of left-wing groups, especially those said to be affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party, removed from their jobs in government, the private sector, universities, and schools. The Red Purge emerged from rising Cold War tensions and the Red Scare after World War II, and was a significant element within a broader "Reverse Course" in Occupation policies. The Red Purge reached a peak following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, began to ease after General Douglas MacArthur was replaced as commander of the Occupation by General Matthew Ridgway in 1951, and came to a final conclusion with the end of the Occupation in 1952.
The Japan lobby are a group of advocacy organizations influencing American policy towards Japan. The lobby has persisted since the Allied Occupation of Japan following the Pacific War. The Post-occupation lobby has been organized and headed since the occupation by Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Foreign Ministry. The purpose and political influence of the lobby has shifted over time from journalists and American interest groups advocating for land reform and corporate restructuring in the occupation period to multinational groups employing over 1,000 lobbyists.
The February 1 General Strike was a general strike planned by Japanese labor unions for February 1, 1947, with the goal of fighting for the implementation of the ten demands proposed in last December, including the abolition of the income tax. The strike was eventually stopped by order of SCAP.
