CHAPTER 1, 1945-1954: For Prosperity, the Only Way

In the tightly controlled information climate of the occupation, this framing seeped quickly into textbooks, radio broadcasts, newspapers, and movies. Films produced under occupation oversight portrayed the “Imperial Loyalists” not merely as extremists but as almost inhuman relics of a dead ideology, ghosts in tattered uniforms snarling at the very thought of modern Japan. Editorials spoke of “the Formosans” as if they were a foreign tribe, culturally alien, spiritually toxic, a people who had amputated themselves from civilization.

This caricature was not entirely effective, and unraveled almost instantly when confronted with reality - millions of ordinary Japanese still struggled to accept surrender. The nation was exhausted, yes, but humiliation cut deeper than hunger, and the sudden collapse of everything that had defined life for generations left a psychic crater. Many refused to eat the rations prepared by the allies, and driven by information that vast numbers of Japanese soldiers were still fighting overseas and that surrender had been a mistake, between 1946 and 1947, thousands, majority women - wives, sisters, daughters, mothers - filled the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and other ruined cities and villages across Japan. Whether orderly or not, they were violently suppressed by American authorities. The largest demonstrations in early 1947 ended with beatings, tear gas, and mass arrests carried out by occupation police and Japanese auxiliaries, some of which refused to club their fellow citizens into submission. Even more harrowing was the wave of suicides that swept the archipelago during these years. Families were found hanged together, people threw themselves in front of trains, men slit their veins in public parks, while countless others died privately, silently, leaving no record except the empty tatami rooms they vanished from. For many, death seemed cleaner than enduring the shame of defeat or the spiritual dislocation of living under foreign occupation.

The unrest reached a fever pitch in March 1947, when information that Lieutenant Ei Yamaguchi and his thirty-three men, who had been hiding in the forests of Peleliu despite repeated notices that the war had ended, launched a sudden, ferocious attack on a U.S. Marine Corps detachment slipped into public knowledge. The skirmish, brief but deadly, shocked both Japan and the United States. When their hideout was finally destroyed in May, twenty were killed, four chose suicide, and nine surrendered only after being forcibly disarmed. This incident, combined with continued reports of sporadic skirmishes with Imperial holdouts in remote regions of China and the occupation’s desire for ideological hygiene, drove the Japanese government to pass the 1947 Act of Regulating Loyalty to Imperial Authority (ARLIA) that same year. ARLIA created the Special Tribunal for the Loyal Imperial Forces and declared that anyone who continued armed resistance or professed allegiance to the wartime command after January 1st, 1948, would be prosecuted, not as a soldier following outdated orders but as an enemy of the new Japan. It was a law designed not to punish past crimes, but to sever the psychological thread connecting postwar Japan to its own military legacy..

These events only reassured MacArthur’s administration that Japan could not simply be democratized - it had to be remade. Repression alone would not suffice. The country needed a new moral vocabulary, an alternative purpose to replace the Imperial Cult that had defined its wartime identity. The Americans moved with unprecedented speed. State Shinto was abolished, shrines were stripped of militarist iconography, and tens of thousands of officers, bureaucrats, and nationalist educators were purged. Soldiers returning from the front, particularly those who had fought bitterly until the very last day, were processed with suspicion, interrogated, and, in many cases, barred from public life. Whole libraries of schoolbooks vanished, replaced with texts emphasizing individuality, human rights, and civic responsibility. Where Japanese classrooms had once demanded silence and obedience, teachers encouraged children to speak freely, laugh openly, and question authority. Community centers became laboratories for social reengineering. American social workers, psychiatrists, and educators held workshops disguised as “discussion clubs”, where ordinary Japanese citizens were taught to voice opinions, articulate emotions, and confront trauma without collapsing back into fatalism.

The suicide epidemic slowed gradually, but the real transformation was only about to begin. What truly reshaped Japan during these years was the collapse of the old political class. The conservative factions that tried to reorganize were tainted by association with the wartime government, and the pervasive belief that the old elite had orchestrated not only the war but the nation’s destruction. When a coalition of prewar conservatives attempted to form a party in 1949, it got pushed to the margins, and newspapers ran front-page editorials warning accused that the party would only revive the ghosts of fascism. The result was that the conservative movement never regained coherence. Its leaders were too discredited, too fragmented, too haunted by their own complicity in national catastrophe.

Into this vacuum poured a chaotic mosaic of new political forces. Social democrats, liberals, agrarian reformists, Christian democrats, labor syndicalists, pacifist intellectuals, groups that had been marginal or suppressed before the war, now dominated the Diet. Coalition governments formed and collapsed with dizzying rapidity, but the instability itself became a kind of proof that Japan had finally broken free from the rigid hierarchies of its past. Democracy was loud, messy, improvisational, and, above all, alive. Japanese embraced this turbulence as evidence that their society was no longer ossified under a single will. The Americans, still wary from the experiences in the previous years, reluctantly accepted the new government, as long as it cooperated.

From 1950, the transformation only accelerated. Women surged into universities, workplaces, and public office, reshaping social norms at a pace unimaginable during the prewar era. For the first time in years, open expressions of artistic experimentation, political satire, and even nascent queer communities were allowed. Jazz clubs, poetry circles, and grassroots newspapers flourished. The press became fiercely independent, exposing corruption within occupation agencies and Japanese ministries alike. Orphans raised by the war, hungry, traumatized, fiercely individualistic, grew into the what came to be called the “Westernized” generation by their elders: young people who rejected fatalism, ritualized obedience, and national self-sacrifice in favor of personal autonomy and modernity.

The war, as presented to a generation growing up in the 1950s, was less a crime than a tragedy, a calamity that fell upon the Japanese people rather than one they had helped unleash. Scholars who tried to highlight the mainland's role in brutality were ignored or pushed aside, Japanese survivors who spoke too plainly about what they had witnessed in China or Korea found their testimonies unwelcome.

The Emperor, once a living god, faded into the background. Hirohito’s public appearances were met with politeness, rather than reverence. Many viewed him as a distant, but respected relic, neither hero nor villain, simply a man who had guided the nation over an era of national delusion, and according to official narrative, the one who ended it.

By 1954, a decade after surrender, Japan had become a society that barely resembled the one that had marched out of war. The transformation was not smooth or painless. It was born out of trauma, grief, and a sense that the old nation had spiritually died in the fires of the Pacific War. But from that death emerged something unprecedented: a pluralistic democracy driven not by elite control but by relentless public engagement. The nation no longer lived in the shadow of the Rising Sun, it had stepped, haltingly and uncertainly, into a world where its identity was no longer dictated by myth, but constructed by its people.

And Formosa? While Tokyo was paving streets and teaching its children about peace, it was reduced to a distant tale of what Fanaticism leads to. This allowed Japan’s economic miracle and social transformation to proceed without ever truly confronting the uncomfortable questions of responsibility or remorse. Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the central symbols of national suffering, overshadowing Nanjing, Manila, Bataan, or the innumerable massacres across China and Southeast Asia. After all, it was the Formosans who bore the responsibility for these, or at least that's what everyone was led to believe.

CHAPTER 2, 1954-1975: Long Rays of the Setting Sun