The administration of any defeated country is, of course, difficult, no matter how much good sense the accepted policy shows. In Japan the problems of food and shelter and reconversion are inevitably acute. They would be at least equally acute under an administration which did not make use of Japanese governmental personnel. The problem of demobilized soldiers, which was so much dreaded by American administrators before the war ended, is certainly less threatening than it would have been if Japanese officials had not been retained. But it is not easily solved. The Japanese are aware of the difficulty and their newspapers spoke feelingly last fall about how bitter the brew of defeat was to the soldiers who had suffered and lost, and it begged them not to let this interfere with their ‘judgment.’ The repatriated army has in general shown remarkable ‘judgment,’ but unemployment and defeat throw some soldiers into the old pattern of secret societies for nationalistic goals. They can easily resent their present status. The Japanese no longer accord them their old privileged position. The wounded soldier used to be clothed all in white and people bowed to him on the street. Even a peacetime Army recruit was given a send-off party and a welcome-home party by his hamlet. There were drinks and refreshments and dancing and costumes, and he sat in the place of honor. Now the repatriated soldier gets no such attentions. His family makes a place for him, but that is all. In many cities and towns he is cold-shouldered. It is easy, knowing how bitterly the Japanese take such a change of behavior, to imagine his satisfaction in joining up with his old comrades to bring back the old days when the glory of Japan was entrusted to soldiers’ hands. Some of his war comrades will tell him, too, how luckier Japanese soldiers are already fighting with the Allies in Java and in Shansi and in Manchuria; why should he despair? He too will fight again, they will tell him. Nationalistic secret societies are old, old institutions in Japan; they ‘cleared the name’ of Japan. Men conditioned to feel that ‘the world tips’ so long as anything is left undone to even scores were always possible candidates for such undercover societies. The violence which these societies, such as the Black Dragon and the Black Ocean, espoused is the violence which Japanese ethics allows as giri to one’s name, and the long effort of the Japanese Government to emphasize gimu at the expense of giri to one’s name will have to be continued in the coming years if this violence is to be eliminated.
It will require more than an appeal to ‘judgment.’ It will require a reconstruction of Japanese economy which will give a livelihood and ‘proper place’ to men who are now in their twenties and thirties. It will require improvement in the lot of the farmer. The Japanese return, whenever there is economic distress, to their old farm villages, and the tiny farms, encumbered with debts and in many places with rents, cannot feed many more mouths. Industry too must be set going, for the strong feeling against dividing the inheritance with younger sons eventually sends all but the eldest out to seek their fortune in the city.
The Japanese have a long hard road before them, no doubt, but if rearmament is not provided for in the State budget they have an opportunity to raise their national standard of living. A nation like Japan which spent half its national income on armament and the armed forces for a decade before Pearl Harbor can lay the foundation of a healthy economy if it outlaws such expenditures and progressively reduces its requisitions from the farmers. As we have seen, the Japanese formula for division of farm products was 60 per cent for the cultivator; 40 per cent he paid out in taxes and rents. This is in great contrast to rice countries like Burma and Siam where 90 per cent was the traditional proportion left to the cultivator. This huge requisition upon the cultivator in Japan was what ultimately made possible the financing of the national war machine.