SNA (Tokyo) — Conservative diplomat Shigeru Yoshida was thrust into the premiership in 1946-1947 after the US occupation forces blocked the ascendance of general election-winner Ichiro Hatoyama. Yoshida proved to be ill-prepared to cope with the rising force of labor militancy which had been set loose by the democratizing reforms.

Transcript

On May 22, 1946, Shigeru Yoshida became the prime minister of Japan.

He was a conservative career diplomat, known as an Anglophile, who had a distaste for electoral politics. While he reluctantly agreed to replace Ichiro Hatoyama and become premier, this was understood to be a temporary arrangement. Yoshida would hand back leadership to Hatoyama when his public office ban was lifted. Unlike most Japanese, Yoshida was strongly individualistic and not given to consensus decision-making.

Yoshida headed a coalition of the two main conservative political parties. Tanzan Ishibashi was tasked with the challenge of reviving the devastated national economy. He had his work cut out for him; just three days before the Cabinet was formed, about 200,000 people held a protest march against food shortages.

In the coming months, SCAP leveraged such pressures to force the Yoshida government to agree to sweeping land reform, expropriating the farmland held by absentee landlords. Although not immediately apparent, in time these reforms proved to be the antidote to rural militancy and turned much of the countryside into the strongholds of conservative politics.

For now, however, it was clear that the Japanese people had quickly begun to embrace politics from below. Labor unions and peasant associations grew dramatically in membership and in their willingness to make demands.

The deeply conservative Yoshida and his Cabinet were ill-prepared to cope with the rising spirit of labor militancy. Yoshida himself tended to make things worse by publicly condemning strikers as political subversives, and without the firm backing of the US occupation forces, it is quite likely that his government would have lost control completely.

Japan’s conservative establishment was under assault from various directions, including ideologically. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was examining its many prewar and wartime failures, and highlighting its record of war crimes and the suppression of democracy.

On November 3, the radically progressive new Constitution of Japan was promulgated, promising a new era of pacifism and the robust protection of human rights. The Japanese people as a whole embraced their new freedoms and elevated social status as citizens of the nation.

Finding themselves less subject to police repression, labor strikes which once involved hundreds of people were growing into hundreds of thousands of people.

While all of this arguably represented a flowering of the democratic spirit which SCAP had been encouraging, once the Japanese people were truly embracing politics from below, the US authorities were not sure they liked the looks of it. Perhaps, some argued, they had gone too far in undermining the conservative establishment. A fully democratic Japan, they began to realize, would not necessarily be a Japan willing to follow the American lead.

This concern seemed to gain more urgency as relations between the Harry Truman administration and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union—Allies during the war—were beginning to fray. Each side grew more suspicious about the intentions of the other. Within Japan, this meant that US occupation officials were becoming more cautious about the activities of the Japan Communist Party, socialism more generally, and labor union activism.

General Douglas MacArthur signaled his administration’s changing priorities publicly on February 1, 1947, when he banned a general strike that was likely to put a million workers on the streets. This ban was a morale booster for conservatives such as Yoshida and an alarming signal for the political left.

There was still ambiguity at this time, however, because SCAP still went forward with some progressive reforms, as seen in the new education law and the establishment of the Fair Trade Commission.

Also, now that the new Constitution becoming the law of the land, it was decided that new elections should be held in late April. The results demonstrated both the advances of the left, as well as SCAP’s recent shift to a more ambiguous policy.

The three leading political parties each gained more than a quarter of the popular vote, but the Japan Socialist Party won the most seats.

Despite the ideological gap, Yoshida believed that in Japan’s new three-party system, the party which gained the most seats should be permitted to have its leader become prime minister.

Shigeru Yoshida resigned as prime minister on May 24, 1947. He had served for 1 year and 3 days.

Shigeru Yoshida will return.

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