Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor Hiroshima 9-11 Iraq by John W. Dower

Author:John W. Dower [Dower, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

88. An astonished American photographer came upon this Japanese musical revue shortly after New Year’s Day of 1946. Such Western-style productions were prohibited after Pearl Harbor. Their swift reappearance reflected both a sense of liberation and a light form of escapism from the hardships of daily life that continued, for most Japanese, for years after the surrender.

Additional reforms were introduced in the next few months. Holding companies of the great zaibatsu conglomerates were ordered dissolved in November, for example, while December saw directives disestablishing “state religion” (State Shinto) and introducing a sweeping land reform that essentially appropriated property held by large landlords and redistributed it among a rural population that until then had high rates of tenancy and low levels of subsistence. The first postwar general election in April 1946 attracted over three hundred largely new (and ephemeral) political parties and saw the election of thirty-nine women to the lower house of the Diet. The ensuing session of the legislature spent many months discussing and tinkering with the radical constitutional revision that an impatient SCAP headquarters pressed on the Japanese government in February. (The new constitution was promulgated in September, came into effect in February 1947, and remained unrevised when the invasion of Iraq took place fifty-six years later.)

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