The Hidden Logic of the US Occupation of Japan: Lessons from the School of Military Government

The United States’s occupation of Japan (1945-52) was an unprecedented kind of occupation at the time it occurred. Japan, with all of its government institutions intact, surrendered before Allied troops had set foot on the Japanese mainland. The Instrument of Surrender which ended active hostilities proclaimed Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied forces, but was framed as a voluntary submission to the authority of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Under the law of occupation in effect at the time, occupying forces were only supposed to undertake measures in an occupied territory which were militarily required to achieve the objectives of the occupation. Yet in Japan, General Headquarters (GHQ) under the leadership of General MacArthur introduced sweeping political, economic, and social reforms that went far beyond the confines of what the conventional understanding of military necessity allowed. Studying lectures given at the School of Military Government, established at the University of Virginia to train American officers on how to administer occupied territories, provides insights into how such an expansive understanding of military necessity became possible. A careful review of the lectures suggests that the key to understanding how MacArthur’s reforms could be conceived of as militarily necessary lies in widely-held American views of Japan. Images of Japan as feudal, militaristic, and exotic enabled an unprecedently expansive application of the doctrine of military necessity, requiring not only institutional reform but also the transformation of the Japanese people themselves.