An Inoffensive Rearmament by Frank Kowalski Page B

spirit of militarism and aggression will be vigorously suppressed. Japan is not to have any Army, Navy, Air Force, Secret Police organization or any Civil Aviation.
    The instructions were specific and clear and formed the basis for an unrelenting program designed to uproot every vestige of militarism in Japan. All regular career officers of the Imperial Army and Navy were purged. The highest military policy makers were executed as war criminals, and most significant, all propaganda agencies of the occupation forces and the Japanese government were concentrated on an inspired peace campaign within the country. The national slogan became “peace based on justice and order.”
    In October 1945, General MacArthur directed Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, an uncle of the emperor who served as prime minister immediately following the surrender, to revise the constitution of the nation in line with occupation forces’ policy announcements. Prince Higashikuni selected Prince Fumimaro Konoe, a former prime minister, to take the lead in democratizing the constitution. Prince Konoe and his advisers held several conferences with Mr. Atcheson and other State Department officials in Japan. Before Konoe could reduce his views to writing, though, the Higashikuni government fell and General MacArthur directed Mr. Atcheson to cease negotiations with Konoe. The Konoe recommendations, which were reported to the throne, contemplated eventual rearmament and subordination of the military to the civil elements of the government. SCAP announced that it was not sponsoring Prince Konoe’s recommendations and his proposals had no impact on the constitution.
    About the middle of October 1945, after Baron Kijurō Shidehara became prime minister, General MacArthur again issued instructions to the Japanese government to reform the constitution. Baron Shidehara promptly appointed state minister Jōji Matsumoto to head a group known as the Constitutional Problem Investigation Committee to determine whether or not the constitution needed to be revised and if so to what extent. 3
    After several months’ delay, during which time it became evident that the Japanese were making little progress on their new constitution, General MacArthur called Prime Minister Shidehara into a conference on January 21, 1946. The men talked privately for two hours. General MacArthur, in the following account of the meeting reported in the May 8, 1951, edition of U.S. News and World Report , endeavors to show how the idea of Article 9 was born at this conference:
    The Japanese people, more than any other people in the world, understand what an atomic warfare means. It wasn’t academic with them. They counted their dead and buried them. They, of their own volition, wrote into their Constitution a provision outlawing war. When their Prime Minister came to me, Mr. Shidehara, and said, “I have long contemplated and believed,” and he was a very wise man—he died recently—“long contemplated and believed that the only solution to this problem is to do away with war.” He said, “with great reluctance I advance the subject to you, as a military man, because I am convinced that you would not accept it, but,” he said, “I would like to endeavor in the constitution we are drawing up, to put in such a provision.” And I couldn’t help getting up and shaking hands with the old man, and telling him that I thought it was one of the most constructive steps that could possibly have been taken. I told him that it was quite possible that the world would mock him—this is a debunking age, as you would know—that they would not accept it. That it would take great moral stamina to go through with it, and in the end they might not be able to hold the line, but I encouraged him and they wrote that provision in. And if there was any one provision in that Constitution which appealed to the popular sentiment of the people of Japan,