Play as · Cold War 1947 · L2 · Occupied · SCAP

Occupied Japan - 1947

Japan in 1947 is a nation being remade by the men who defeated it. Since the surrender aboard the Missouri in September 1945 the country has had no sovereignty of its own: real authority rests with the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, whose headquarters in Tokyo governs through the surviving Japanese ministries like a viceroy issuing directives. The empire is gone - Korea, Formosa, Manchuria, the Pacific islands all stripped away - and what remains is the home archipelago, its cities burned by firebombing and two of them by atomic bombs, its people short of food, its economy at a fraction of pre-war output. Yet 1947 is also the year the occupation's great experiment takes hold: on the third of May a new constitution comes into force that renounces war forever, strips the Emperor of sovereignty and hands it to the people. The strategic identity is the disarmed patient of a foreign surgeon - a former great power held in suspension while its conquerors decide what kind of country it is permitted to become.

Starting position

The starting position is occupation government in full flow. SCAP has purged the wartime leadership, dissolved the armed forces, and put the surviving leaders on trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, still sitting in 1947. The great reforms are landing one after another: the zaibatsu combines are being broken up, a sweeping land reform is transferring fields from absentee landlords to the tenants who work them, labour unions are legalised and growing fast, women have voted for the first time. The Emperor has renounced his divinity and become a symbol. But the country cannot feed itself - the cities live on rationing and American relief grain, the black market is the real economy, and industrial production is still crippled. Japan holds no foreign policy, no military, and no seat at any table; every external decision about it is made in Washington or in MacArthur's headquarters, and the Japanese government administers what it is told to administer.

What turns the campaign

What Japan's occupiers want in 1947 is a demilitarised, democratised country that can never again threaten the Pacific - and, increasingly, one that can pay its own way rather than living on American subsidy. What ordinary Japanese want is food, work, and the return of the millions of soldiers and settlers still stranded across the lost empire. The tension that will turn the campaign is only beginning to show: as the civil war in China goes against the Nationalists and the Cold War hardens, the logic of a punitive occupation starts to give way to the logic of a stable, recovering Japan as an anchor of American power in Asia - the 'reverse course' that lies just ahead. In 1947 the two impulses coexist uneasily: reform and dismantling on one hand, the first hints of reconstruction and rehabilitation on the other. Whether Japan emerges pacifist and neutral, or rearmed and aligned, is a question the occupiers have not yet answered and the Japanese have no vote in.

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