Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (401 page)

C
HAPTER
17
T
HE
Q
UIET
Y
EARS AND THE
L
EGACIES OF
S
H
O
WA

1.
James J. Orr, “The Victim as Hero in Postwar Japan: The Rise of a Mythology of War Victimhood.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of East Asian Studies, Bucknell University, Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, p. 230–31. Japanese opinion polls show that the majority of the public turned against the Security Treaty only during the 1960 crisis over its renewal. By the early 1970s, a national consensus in support of the treaty had nearly been restored. The percentage favoring the treaty rose from about 41 percent in 1969 to 69 percent in 1984. On the eve of Hirohito's death, 67 percent supported it.

2.
Watanabe Osamu, “Tenn
,”
Nihonshi daijiten, yonkan
, p. 1248; Watanabe Osamu,
Nihonkoku kenp
“kaisei” shi
(Nihon Hy
ronsha, 1987), pp. 236–37, 245. Early pressure for constitutional revision also came from Vice President Richard Nixon, who visited Japan on Nov. 19, 1953, and declared that the war-renouncing constitition was “a mistake.”

3.
Asahi shinbun
, Jan. 6, 1999. The document (“Gist of What I Heard From Grand Chamberlain Inada on April 24, 1968, Concerning the Problem of Abdication”) was discovered in papers attached to the unpublished diary of former Grand Chamberlain Tokugawa Yoshihiro. Twenty-three years after the surrender, Hirohito had conveniently blocked out three occasions—mid-August 1945, right after the Tokyo trial in 1948, and at the end of the
occupation in 1952—when he had indeed contemplated stepping down. In Dec. 1945, Tokugawa Narihiro communicated Hirohito's intention to abdicate to George Atcheson, Jr., the State Department's political adviser to MacArthur [POLAD]. See It
Satoru, ed.,
Sei, kan, shikisha kataru sengo k
s
(Azuma Shuppan Kabushiki Kaisha, 1995), p. 157.

4.
Shimizu Ikutar
, “Senry
ka no tenn
sei,” in
Shis
348 (June l953), pp. 640–41.

5.
Takushi Ohno,
War Reparations and Peace Settlement: Philippines-Japan Relations 1945–1956
(Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1986), p. ix. Although mainland China sustained the greatest loss of life and property from Japanese aggression, the Kuomintang received only trifling reparations down to mid–1949; the CCP received nothing. In negotiations among the Allied powers prior to the San Francisco Peace Conference, Taiwan was forced to accept the U.S. position waiving claims against Japan. Seven hours before signing the peace treaty, Chiang Kai-shek also approved a “Normalization Treaty” with Japan that, at Tokyo's insistence, omitted reference to any Japanese obligation to pay war reparations, even though it was the wish of nearly all Kuomintang officials, not to mention the Taiwanese people, that Japan pay for the damage it had caused. To this day the complicated issue of reparations payments to China remains unsettled. See In En-gun, “Nihon no sengo shori: Nitch
, Nittai kankei o ch
shin ni,”
Nenp
Nihon gendaishi
, No. 5 (1999), pp. 85–116; Nishikawa Hiroshi, “Sengo Ajia keizai to Nihon no baish
mondai,” in ibid., pp. 11–15.