Arguments Emerging from Criticism of Etō’s Position

Arguments Emerging from Criticism of Etō’s Position

Firstly, as several critics note Etō disregards prewar suppression by the Japanese government.³⁶ This major oversight stems from the fact that Etō considered American censorship to have been a “completely different in nature” from prewar Japanese suppression because the Americans ultimately aimed to change Japanese people through a paradigm change of thought and language. He also believed that part of this plan involved making the mass media a “new fount of danger” that would operate within paradigms and restrictions set up by the occupation. Etō also held that prewar suppression was no longer an issue after 1945, when a new regime came in and a new group of suppressors took over.³⁷

What he also emphasizes is that American occupation censorship largely distorted the “Japanese linguistic space,” because the Americans held up “freedom of speech” as their principle slogan.³⁸ The American military government tried to hide their censorship not only from Japanese but also from ordinary Americans in the U.S. He insists that the trick has worked on Japanese people to believe articles in newspapers and the propaganda of War Guilt Information Program.³⁹ As a result, the program achieved replacing the war between Japan and the U.S. with the nonexistent war between ex Japanese military authority and the ordinary Japanese people.⁴⁰

I strongly agree with Etō’s argument that there was a fatal contradiction between the slogan and the reality of “freedom of speech” during the Occupation, and American censorship helped ordinary Japanese people think themselves as victims of the war. I agree, however, with the criticism that it is not appropriate to ignore the influence of prewar censorship. Prewar censorship must have remained an influence on Japanese people’s ambivalent reactions to occupation censorship; the feeling of release and of suppression, as Dower says. In addition, there is much evidence to present that many people actually knew or perceived American censorship and propaganda.⁴¹ People were sensitive to take notice of the “new” taboo, because of their experience in the past.⁴² American censorship most likely reminded them of the fear of the prewar suppression. As a result, Etō's neglect of the prewar suppression would more mislead the current people into realizing that ordinary Japanese at the time were always the passive existence.

The second factor, which is strongly related to the first one, is that Etō attributes the distortion of the Japanese linguistic space solely to the American occupation policy, and subsequently does not take up information control by the Japanese themselves, not only by the government, but also by the mass media. It was true that the Americans wrote the script for the radio program “Truth is like this,” but it was also true that the Japanese drafted almost all newspaper articles, radio and movie scripts, which reflected their thought.

Takumi Satō, a Japanese historian who researches the suppression of speech pre/during World War II, insists that the Japanese government and the mass media were “more than accomplices” to control information and make propaganda.⁴³ The suppression before the war was born from multiplication of bureaucratic control and the self-censorship of the mass media, rather than the upsurge of militaristic pressures. Yamamoto also asserts that, during the war, national newspapers reported the announcement of Imperial Headquarters as it was, though they knew it had not been a fact.⁴⁴ Members of the postwar Japanese government were often part of the ex-Japanese establishment, and the postwar journalists of the mass media also did not change. Thus, the relevance between the Japanese government and mass media should be noticed. The press clubs were once ordered to dissolve by GHQ but survived the crisis, as I will mention in 4.1.2. The survival of the press clubs could show the absence of the disconnection between the Japanese establishment and the mass media.

In this regard, Dutch journalist and political scientist Karel van Wolferen maintains that the pre/during wartime the mass media, especially big national newspapers, developed a technique of self-censorship. He emphasizes that “the tradition of self-censorship” has continued until now and it is outstanding among the characteristics of the current Japanese mass media.⁴⁵

Thirdly, I have to point out the bias of Etō’s analyses. He takes up extreme examples to make his cases. It is not only Etō’s attitude, but also other nationalistic critics as well as leftist intellectuals. These do not, however, help us understand what kind of information was actually being reported. In reality, there were in fact articles expressing free political opinion in newspapers during the occupation.

Norihiro Katō, who is a Japanese literary critic, criticizes both conservative and leftists' attitudes. He argues that conservatives criticize the interference of American occupation harshly, especially the censorship, propaganda, and forcing a constitution, but simultaneously they cannot deny the US-Japan Security Treaty and the American military presence in Japan.⁴⁶ On the other hand, leftists criticize American military involvement of the world and the military presence in Japan, at the same time support the new constitution as a symbol of peace and overlook on the dark side of the American occupation. Katō argues that this has resulted in ‘twisting’ of historical reality in postwar Japan, and these two groups could not make substantial debate.⁴⁷ In this context, Etō’s dispute produced the third group of anti-Americanism nationalists, which has grown up recently. The group is sometimes called as “grass-roots conservatives.”⁴⁸ However, this group did not work as a bridge between the previous groups. They intently scatter their opinion in Internet anonymously, by wasting the Etō’s advocacy. It could be said that his argument fell into the space between the “twist.”

Now it has been sixty years passed since the end of the war. For untangling the twist and crossing their arguments, they should see the evidence of each other. Simultaneously, academic researcher should take a distance from these arguments one, and offer he analyses of historical facts and a new perspective.

De-classification of GHQ/SCAP documents that has proceeded year by year will allow us to examine the issue of censorship more broadly and deeply. Since the research of occupation period has been so far inclined to discover and then introduce new documents, a full-scale analysis from several certain perspectives or comparative approaches will be explored hereafter.⁴⁹

In this thesis, I do not access the new evidence, but at first will employ the extant extensive accumulated studies, whether it is right, left, or others to draw a new picture of the occupation censorship. I will then consider what has defined the current Japanese linguistic space, keeping Etō’s argument in mind.

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