How the World Was Won by Peter Conrad

Author:Peter Conrad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

12 | Little America

Europeans adjusted to America in their own time, absorbing its culture without having to renounce their political arrangements and ingrained social habits. Japan’s case was more drastic: after 1945 it was transformed by decree into Little America. With General MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the occupying forces administered the country until 1952, imposing a new constitution that required the Emperor to forfeit his divinity, prohibited rearmament, established parliamentary government, broke up business conglomerates, changed the menial status of women, and improved the lot of tenant farmers. MacArthur licensed a free press, although it was forbidden to publish criticism of the occupation; among other petty acts of censorship, Citizen Kane – which started the young Truffaut’s love affair with American culture – was banned, because it gave an unflattering account of plutocracy at home.

Donald Richie first visited flattened Tokyo in 1947 as an employee of the occupying American shogunate, and except for the years from 1949 to 1953, during which he was enrolled at Columbia University, he lived there until his death in 2013. His first house had no running water or gas, with a pit outdoors instead of a flush toilet. He pronounced these rudimentary arrangements ‘ideal – so different from the comforts with which I grew up’; it was his choice to live in a ‘poor, defeated island’ where, for the time being, spirit mattered more than making and spending money. The Japanese, like Arthur Miller’s Chinese actors ogling the fridge, did not understand such self-spiting acts of renunciation, and Richie’s high-mindedness soon came to seem perverse. By the end of the 1950s, the free market set up by the Allied Powers enabled the Japanese to buy the imported amenities Richie eschewed, and Yasujiro Ozu’s film Good Morning records the unstoppable advance of Americanization in a modest suburb outside Tokyo. A door-to-door salesman distributes leaflets that advertise such untranslatable appliances as toasters and blenders, along with pencils and brushes. One householder has acquired a washing machine on the instalment plan, and in another family a debate rages about investing in a television set. The children clamour for it so they can watch baseball, but the father worries that it will produce a nation of idiots. He finally gives in to this latest foreign intrusion, which acclimatized itself rapidly: a few decades later, everyone in the world coveted sets made by Sony or Yamaha.

The Japanese learned their economic lesson only too well, and in the late 1980s, when they began buying up American corporations, there were hints of revenge on the complacent West. A Japanese trade minister, according to Gore Vidal, privately predicted that in the near future the United States would be his country’s granary and Europe its boutique. Retaliating, Americans took to what Richie called ‘Japan-bashing’, and in 1992 the United States Postal Service planned to issue a stamp with an image of the atomic blast at Hiroshima, commemorated, according to the inscription beneath the mushroom cloud, because it hastened the end of the war and thus saved American lives.

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