Japan's Full Story: Inside and Outside of the Cabinet

That is how history can help. Above all, the clear lesson of Asia is humility. Bilateral history is full of extraordinary misjudgments, beginning with the first accounts by Japanese of Westerners. Japanese noticed that Westerners wore heels on their shoes and concluded that this was because their heels, like those of dogs, did not quite touch the ground. Indeed, some Japanese concluded that European men lifted one leg when urinating.

Americans came up with their fair share of misjudgments, as when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles predicted that Japanese products had "little future" in America because they were just "cheap imitations of our own goods." Holding up a brightly patterned American flannel shirt and a Japanese copy on cheaper cloth, Dulles scolded his hosts for believing that Americans would ever buy the copy. It is perhaps for the best that Dulles stayed in diplomacy and did not try his hand at business consulting.

Premises that were just plain wrong have formed the basis for America's policies toward Japan (and vice versa). The United States has not done anything quite so self-destructive as Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, but the focus of American policy toward Asia from the late 1940s through the 1960s was on preventing Japan from becoming communist. Schaller makes this particularly clear. Eisenhower warned Congress in 1954 that unless the United States opened its markets to Japanese goods, America might "lose Japan." Then "the United States would be out of the Pacific and it would become a Communist lake." Eisenhower told another audience that unless the United States helped Japan and boosted trade with it, "What is to happen to Japan? It is going to the Communists."

This fear of a communist takeover of Japan was not a minor part of the equation. It was at the core of policymaking, leading Washington to its famous "reverse course" in the late 1940s. The initial impulse of the American occupation of Japan had been remarkably socialist, but fear of strikes and communism pushed the United States to go in the other direction, cracking down on communists and labor organizers and releasing war criminals who had the virtue, at least, of being conservative. Prime Minister Yoshida teased: "You Americans are very difficult. We had all the communists in jail when you occupied the country in 1945. Then you told us to release them. Now you ask us to find them and put them in jail again. A very cumbersome process."

The communist phobia prompted American officials during the occupation to encourage Japan to anoint a Ministry of International Trade and Industry as the central organ of industrial planning. This phobia explains why American officials later helped Japan send its exports to the United States. As Schaller writes, "Japan's Government-guided, export-driven economy, later described as a 'capitalist development state' or, less charitably, 'Japan, Inc.,' was nurtured by American directives."

Of course, it is easy to say in retrospect that communism was never a real threat in Japan. But it should have been pretty easy to say then, too. Japan is in many ways a deeply conservative country, hierarchical and respectful of tradition and authority, so that while feudalism or fascism were perhaps possibilities, communism was not. In Asian countries in which communism did take hold, such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam, it was fundamentally a spasm of nationalism. But Japan had nationalistic symbols, like the emperor, that were antithetical to communism.

Paradoxically, the main force that bolstered communism in Japan was not plotting in Moscow but arrogance in Washington. It was precisely because the United States kept treating Japan as its puppet in the 1950s that leftists began to gain nationalist credentials and the elected leaders began to look like quislings. The 1960 riots against the security treaty that America imposed on Japan created such upheaval that the historian John Welfield wrote, "Japan showed every indication of emerging as America's Hungary." While a communist revolution was almost unimaginable in Japan, if it had happened, Khrushchev could have sent the State Department a thank-you note.

MORE THAN THE PRIME MINISTER'S AGENDA

I have one complaint about both books. It is perhaps unfair, but it goes to the heart of what is important in Japan these days. These books, particularly Schaller's, are both diplomatic histories, and I question whether diplomacy is really as important to postwar Japan's history as most people think. The books are filled with prime ministers doing this, foreign ministers doing that, which is how most scholars approach Japan. But focusing to such an extent on politicians and diplomats is really not fruitful in the case of Japan.

Fernand Braudel and other twentieth century historians have reshaped our understanding of what history can be by emphasizing not only reigns, dates, and generals but broader trends. They look at how people live, at demographics and agriculture, and their work underscores that the best history is sometimes about peoples and not just persons. Indeed, some recent Japanese-language history books have offered this kind of broader look at the nation's social history.

Both social-economic history and also the more traditional political-military history are necessary to understand the past. But in the case of modern Japan, history books have been overwhelmingly devoted to cabinet ministers rather than the people, and I feel a twinge of regret that two more books by such fine historians should focus on what is arguably secondary. The need for a different historiography is particularly important in the case of Japan. In Europe, the centuries are full of extraordinary leaders who changed the lives of their peoples. But in Japan, the last few centuries have more often produced extraordinary people who changed their leaders.