Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's hawkish policies, historical revisionism, and heavy-handed efforts to manipulate domestic and foreign media have infuriated critics in Japan and its neighborhood. They might want to reserve some of that anger for U.S. super-diplomat George F. Kennan.
During the early years of the U.S. postwar occupation, an ungainly mix of idealistic New Deal reformers and right-wing satraps of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, launched a radical attempt to liberalize Japan's economy and society — prosecuting war criminals, busting up industrial combines, imposing land reforms and nurturing a labor movement, among other changes.
A new Constitution largely drafted by U.S. lawyers and civil servants dramatically expanded citizen rights, giving Japanese women what the historian John Dower called "one of the strongest equal-rights provisions in modern constitutional law." (Dower's Pulitzer-winning "Embracing Defeat" covers the period brilliantly.) The Constitution also formally committed Japan to pacifism under Article 9, in hopes of turning the country into what MacArthur, with typical bombast, called the "Switzerland of the Pacific."
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