Preparation for the Occupation of Japan
In the twenty years since Japan's surrender, new materials and greater perspective allow for more effective probing than heretofore of American policies on the occupation of Japan. This study aims to further this task by posing and answering—at least in part—several questions which underlay these policies.
The Commission on the Constitution and Prospects for Constitutional Change in Japan
Ever since its first draft was written by a small group of Americans and presented to the Japanese Government in February, 1946, the present constitution of Japan has been a source of political controversy. Even under “normal” circumstances the enactment of a new constitution in modern democratic societies is almost certain to exhume and revivify all sorts of latent political conflicts and to add to these its own measure of new dissensions. Controversy is even more probable in the case of a constitution drafted by aliens and conquerors for a nation completely subject to their occupation and control and, in the Japanese case, the nature of the document itself still further increased this probability. The American-authored constitution of 1947 was in spirit and provisions almost a complete inversion of its predecessor, the Meiji Constitution of 1889. Where the latter did its brilliant best to protect the legal and political heartlands of the imperial system and a traditionally oligarchic and authoritarian form of government against popular encroachments, the former uniformly espoused concepts and institutions that are among the world's most democratic and progressive. It is difficult to conceive of two modern constitutions more diametrically opposed in spirit and in basic mechanics. The new constitution thus labored under the dual handicaps of alien authorship and of a radical departure from the traditionally ascendant norms and institutions of Japanese politics. It provided ample substance for bitter controversy.
The Origins of the Present Japanese Constitution
Throughout the years when the Meiji Constitution served for most purposes as Japan's basic law (1890–1947), it was always a matter of considerable value to the nation's constitutional scholars to have readily available an authoritative statement of the intent of the framers of that document. This was Itō Hirobumi's Kempō Gige (Commentaries on the Constitution). It played a role somewhat analogous to that of Madison's journals in our own annals of constitutional, legal and historical scholarship, but was even more definitive. It is interesting therefore to speculate just where present or future Japanese scholars might find a similar source for their present constitution. The facts presently available would indicate the necessity of a pilgrimage to New York's Waldorf Tower. There or in its immediate environs are to be found the most notable of the “founding fathers” of the present Japanese Constitution. That one should have to seek on foreign shores for the author of the fundamental law of a great modern state is in itself a phenomenon unique in recent history. Even stranger perhaps is the fact that some nine years after its promulgation and four years after the end of the military occupation which made it possible in the first place, this constitution remains formally intact and unamended.