Under a mildly misleading title, a superb analysis of the
development, directions and confusions of US Pacific-basin policy
toward Japan, the Soviet Union, China and Southeast Asia in the era
immediately after WW II and later. Schaller lays out in detail the
almost unbelievable factional squabbles over the policies that
should prevail toward post-occupation Japan. The White House, the
State Department, MacArthur's headquarters, and the Joint Chiefs
engaged in byzantine bureaucratic infighting about what direction
Japan should be pointed toward. The fighting was not always done in
the polite circumlocutions common in bureaucratic memoranda - as
when State's George Kennan wrote "how he recoiled at the
'stuffiness' and 'degree of internal intrigue' around MacArthur,
which reminded him of 'nothing more than the latter days of the
court of the Empress Catherine II'. . ." But underneath the
thickets of contradictions that lay between the principal players,
the great engine of anticommunism was driving the US inevitably
toward an essentially negative policy of containment of Russia and
China. The Korean War was the catalyst that set everyone marching
to the anticommunist, containment beat. At the start of that
conflict, the Japanese economy was in dire straits, possibly facing
collapse. American war orders - not for munitions, but for trucks,
clothing, binoculars and similar items that also had a civilian use
- began the economic miracle. "The war-related orders stimulated a
boom that was critical to subsequent growth and prosperity. The
governor of the Bank of Japan captured the sense best by describing
the procurement as 'Divine Aid.' " The process of turning Japan
into the industrial giant of today was completed by the orders that
flowed from the US during the Vietnam War. US planners were
delighted to help the Japanese economy so handily, for the
administration viewed Japan as the final domino in the domino
theory that underlay US involvement in Vietnam. Schaller has
written the best kind of history, the kind that has great scope,
supported by solid scholarship. But, better yet, he shows how
present predicaments - like the current export-import problem with
Japan - have grown directly out of past policies and events. The
last two sentences of the book send forth a particular chill for
American readers: ". . .Perhaps Yoshidu Shigeru spoke a truth (if
not the [emphasis in original] truth) when he predicted in 1950,
that, like the changing balance between the American colonies and
imperial Britain more than a century before, if Japan temporarily
became a 'colony of the US it [would] also eventually become the
stronger.'" (Kirkus Reviews)
'A fascinating account... This volume will be indispensable to all who seek to understand the more recent chapters in the historic struggle between the two superpowers.' New York Times
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