SNA (Tokyo) — Shigeru Yoshida’s second premiership from 1948-1954 was one of the most transformative in Japanese history, taking the nation from its progressive, unstable early postwar era into a long period of entrenched conservative rule, ostensibly exercising independence but in reality functioning as a client state absorbed into the informal American empire.

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On October 15, 1948, Shigeru Yoshida returned as the prime minister of Japan.

Unlike his first stint two years earlier, Yoshida was no longer a reluctant politician; he was eager to steer the nation in his preferred policy directions.

Moreover, whereas last time his conservative outlook was jarringly out of step with both the rising labor union movement as well as the democratization policies of the US Occupation, this time the political winds were all at his back. The populist left was divided, and Washington had become consumed with fears of international communism.

Yoshida first needed to consolidate his power. His Democratic Liberal Party held only a minority of seats in the House of Representatives, making his leadership position insecure. Since much of the public had turned sour on the previous Democratic Party-Socialist Party coalition during the Katayama and Ashida premierships, Yoshida had reason to hope for an electoral advance.

When the general election came in January 1949, the results far exceeded his expectations; it was a landslide unlike anything that had yet been seen in postwar Japan. His Democratic Liberal Party won a solid majority, while the center-left parties emerged devastated and splintered. Yoshida had gained a firm mandate.

This mandate was used to move forward—in partnership with the now much more conservative US Occupation regime—with a transformation of both the politics and the economy of the nation.

This transformation would come to be called the Reverse Course, since it involved the reversal of many of the democratizing and demilitarizing reforms which had formed the core concerns of the US Occupation in its earlier years.

One part of this policy was to sharply limit war responsibility, blaming everything on a handful of senior officials.

Seven men were executed by hanging in December 1948, including former prime ministers Koki Hirota and Hideki Tojo. Sixteen others, including former prime ministers Kiichiro Hiranuma and Kuniaki Koiso, were sentenced to life imprisonment, but, in fact, they would all be released by 1958.

At the same time, thousands of conservative and nationalist wartime leaders were depurged; that is, they were allowed to reenter politics and rejoin government ministries, often at the most senior levels.

As suspected war criminals were being restored to positions of authority, SCAP used the policy tools developed to democratize Japan and free it of ultranationalism and turned them against the Japanese political left.

Tens of thousands of communists, alleged communists, and other leftists were banned from holding government posts, many private sector jobs, and teaching positions at schools and universities.

Many of the same people who had once resisted Japanese militarism and had supported the earlier democratization policies were now suffering repression under US Cold War policies.

These Red Purge policies were fully supported by Yoshida; SCAP was undermining the power of the leftist parties which had, until then, been serious competitors to conservatives in general elections.

On economic policy, Japan was being transformed into an export-focused nation.

Many economic measures were imposed on the Yoshida government by SCAP. This was the era of the “Dodge Line,” named for the conservative US banker Joseph Dodge, who was brought in to shape Japanese economic policies in accord with Washington’s new priorities.

The Dodge Line demanded that the Japanese government cut spending, balance the national budget, and reduce its intervention in the economy. The exchange rate was fixed at 360 Yen to one US Dollar to keep Japanese export prices low. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, was established in May 1949 to coordinate trade strategies and to promote Japan’s export-led development.

The immediate impact of the Dodge Line was to push the Japanese economy into recession and to cause widespread layoffs. These job losses were used by the government to further weaken the power of labor unions.

In this connection, SCAP effectively dropped its earlier concern about how the zaibatsu—the major industrial and financial conglomerates—had contributed to Japan’s prewar authoritarianism. The very same industrial magnates whom the early Occupation had viewed with suspicion were now being seen as key capitalist allies for US policy.

In June 1950, what Yoshida famously declared to be “a gift from the gods” arrived—war broke out on the Korean Peninsula between the communist regime in the north and the capitalist regime in the south.

Yoshida immediately perceived that Japan—specifically conservative Japan—would benefit enormously from the conflict.

On the political level, it would consolidate the alignment between Washington’s Cold Warriors and Japan’s conservative elite. Red Purge policies were significantly expanded, devastating any opportunity for the socialist left to make a rapid comeback.

On the economic level, the US military used Japan as a logistical base for the conflict, meaning that American spending poured into the country, quickly snapping Japan out of its recession. Among other things, the US military’s escalating demand for automobiles helped the country reenergize industries that had been devastated by the war.

Japan’s economy rose from the ashes, and the political terms strongly favored the conservative elite.

Washington also reversed its position on the rearmament of Japan.

As best exemplified by the new Constitution, in the first couple of years after the war there had been a consensus that Japan’s wartime aggression and brutality necessitated that the nation must be permanently disarmed and never allowed to rise as a military power again.

However, with the onset of the Cold War and now the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, many Washington policymakers concluded that this earlier consensus had been a mistake. Not only should Japan be allowed to rearm, but some advocated the creation of a new Japanese military—subordinate to US authority—which could assist them in what they believed to be the defense of the free world against communist aggression.

Only a month and a half after the Korean War began came the first major step toward rearmament. The Yoshida government ordered the creation of the 75,000-man strong National Police Reserve with a mission to preserve order at home while US military forces were focused on the Korean Peninsula.

These so-called police units were trained and equipped as light infantry, even possessing light tanks. To instill discipline for this new force, some lower-ranking officers from the now-defunct Imperial Japanese Army were brought in to provide training and given command positions.

Yoshida himself was cautious about this particular dimension of the Reverse Course. While he was willing to dismiss the strict pacifism of the Constitution and to permit limited rearmament, he was worried that many conservatives both in Washington and at home wanted to move too far, too fast.

Yoshida had personally experienced political repression at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army, and he had absolutely no desire to recreate the prewar militarist regime.

While the term was not used during his own lifetime, this basic policy of forming a conservative political alliance with the United States, focusing on Japanese industrial development, but permitting only limited military rearmament, would eventually come to be called the “Yoshida Doctrine.”

Not all Japanese conservatives were on board with the spirit of the Yoshida Doctrine, and the one who posed the most direct political threat to the prime minister was unleashed in August 1951. It was at this time that Ichiro Hatoyama was finally depurged by the US occupation authorities. From Hatoyama’s point of view, Yoshida remained obligated by his promise back in May 1946 to restore his leadership. Yoshida, on the other hand, had no intention of honoring the five-year-old promise to hand power back to Hatoyama. So much had changed in the meantime.

Conservative politics were fractured, therefore, between adherents of Prime Minister Yoshida with his focus on economic development, and those who backed the aggrieved Hatoyama, including his view that the Constitution must be revised and Japan fully rearmed.

But first, there was a bit of business which united the conservative forces—the restoration to Japan of its formal, legal independence as a sovereign state.

On September 8, 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco was signed. This agreement restored diplomatic relations between an ostensibly independent Japan and most of the wartime Allies. The exceptions were the Soviet Union, which opposed the treaty based on several major issues; and the newly-formed People’s Republic of China, which was not invited to participate in the wake of Washington’s refusal to recognize Beijing’s victory in the Chinese Civil War.

The Treaty of San Francisco did not include Okinawa and its surrounding islands, which would remain a US military colony for many years. It was left to the future to decide what would be done with Okinawa.

But the same day the treaty was signed, Japan was also compelled to agree to the US-Japan Security Treaty. This document allowed the United States to base more than a quarter-million troops on Japanese soil and to maintain control large swathes of land and airspace. There was no mechanism within this treaty for Japan to withdraw from the arrangement.

Once these two treaties came into legal force on April 28, 1952, Japan effectively became a US client state. It functioned with legal independence and diplomatic representation, but it was, in reality, absorbed within the informal American empire.

Yoshida and most other Japanese conservatives happily accepted this arrangement. Not only did it secure the nation from outside threats, but it also buttressed their own political control of Japan. Indeed, for all of the remaining decades of the Cold War, the conservatives would never lose control of government administration.

Japan’s political left, though divided and burdened by increasing legal disadvantages, opposed the new arrangements to the extent that it could. On May Day of 1952, leftist protesters engaged in running street battles with Tokyo police. Hundreds of people were injured, hundreds more arrested, and police shot dead two of the demonstrators.

The national and international media blamed the violence on communist agitators and anti-foreigner bigotry, rather than acknowledging it as the product of a postwar political settlement which had restored the prewar conservative elite to power, and had bound the nation in service to US Cold War objectives rather than permit the full exercise of the promised freedom and democracy.

By the late summer and fall of 1952, Yoshida had served as prime minister for four years, and the transformation of the nation during his tenure had been among the most profound in modern Japanese history.

Having already achieved so much, many Japanese conservatives felt that the time had come for Yoshida to step aside and hand over the reins of power to another leader.

But Yoshida—long noted for what was called his “One-Man” character—was absolutely unwilling to exit the stage. He would battle to remain in command.

His chief opponent remained Hatoyama, a member of his own Liberal Party, the name which by now the ruling party had readopted. The Yoshida faction grappled fiercely with the Hatoyama faction for the upper hand.

Amidst this political struggle, Yoshida called general elections for October 1952. Although the results were not as decisive as the January 1949 election, the ruling party retained its narrow majority, and no opposition party posed much of a threat. Yoshida had clearly reaffirmed his position of leadership.

But early the next year, Yoshida made a major misstep that unraveled his latest mandate. It began when he called a socialist lawmaker an “idiot” in the course of a House of Representatives debate. The dispute over Yoshida’s rude behavior escalated to the point that the Hatoyama faction deserted the ruling party, and a No Confidence motion against the Yoshida Cabinet narrowly passed the chamber.

This forced Yoshida to call the otherwise unnecessary April 1953 general election, and its results were not good for the prime minister. The Liberal Party lost its majority.

Theoretically, Yoshida might have been ousted as national leader at this point, but this would have required an unlikely degree of cooperation between conservative and socialist opposition parties.

Yoshida was thus able to hold on to his premiership by making an agreement with convicted war criminal Mamoru Shigemitsu and his Reformist Party. While Shigemitsu’s party did not join the Cabinet, it offered parliamentary support that kept the Liberal Party in charge of the administration.

By the autumn, the controversy began to settle down, and Yoshida’s position received a boost when a somewhat humbled Hatoyama and his faction rejoined the ruling party.

At the policy level, the biggest issue in this period was the extent to which Japan would rearm. The US government was pushing for Japan to go further, even after the Korean War had concluded in a stalemate. Yoshida was willing to compromise with the military hawks, at least to a certain degree.

This involved so-called “reinterpretations” of the pacifist Constitution that clearly contradicted the original intent and common-sense readings of Article Nine, which mandated that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as another war potential, will never be maintained.”

Nevertheless, Japanese land, sea, and air forces were in fact reestablished by the Yoshida government in July 1954. These so-called “Self-Defense Forces” were a military in all but name. It was a legal fiction that would endure for decades, and it became a key political and cultural fault line between the Japanese right and left.

But throughout 1954, Yoshida’s firm grip on power was finally being pried loose. At the beginning of the year, prosecutors conducted raids in connection with suspected bribery of senior government officials. Among those arrested was a key Yoshida protege, the future Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. The reputation of the administration was damaged as corruption cases went forward.

In the autumn, Yoshida embarked on a tour of Europe and North America to highlight Japan’s transformation into a peaceful, pro-Western nation. No Japanese prime minister had ever done anything like it before. It was a major step toward easing the bitterness of the war years and improving Japan’s reputation in the West.

Yoshida’s world tour, however, was not enough to save his position at home. The coup de grace came in late November 1954 when the Hatoyama faction bolted from the ruling Liberal Party once again, but this time it joined with Shigemitsu to create the Japan Democratic Party. This move deprived Yoshida of majority support in the House of Representatives, and he faced another “No Confidence” vote which he was certain to lose.

Rather than wait to be thrown out of office, Shigeru Yoshida resigned as prime minister on December 10, 1954. He had served for 6 years and 57 days. This was by far the longest premiership until this point, and it was among the most consequential.

While he never returned as prime minister, Yoshida remained influential, keeping his seat in the Diet until his retirement in 1963. For years, many politicians and others would pay their respects to him at his home in Oiso.

Yoshida died in October 1967 at age 89. He was given a state funeral at the Nippon Budokan in recognition of his unique role in shaping postwar Japan.

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