Control of Speech in Japan and Germany Censorship under the American Occupation



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Main Arguments in this Thesis


My central question in this thesis is what happened to linguistic space in Japan and Germany during the American Occupation. Was it American censorship that chiefly changed Japanese linguistic space? To answer these questions, I would like to examine empirically and analytically what happened during the occupation period to verify what the suppression of freedom of speech brought about in Japanese and German linguistic space afterwards.

First of all, in the second chapter, I shall pursue this question by considering how the occupation policies and censorship policy were planned and carried out. Were the planning of a blueprint of a post war world, and drafting of occupation and censorship policies connected to each other? While popular argument contends that the occupations aimed at the democratization of both countries, the purpose of it was not self-evident. Were the American policy makers aware of the inconsistent between the slogan of democratization and actual policy of information control?

In the third chapter, the basic organization and American officials in the local site in Germany and Japan will be described. There were in fact any conflicts among the American officials about implementation of censorship. In order to show this contradiction between the slogan and the reality of freedom of speech, I will point out upon the activities of the American media in both Japan and Germany during the occupation.

Chapter four will pay attention the native journalists of both countries. In Japan, almost all ex-journalists generally survived after the war, while in German, the Americans issued licenses only to the people who were considered appropriate. Additionally, I will examine how the Japanese press clubs maintained and developed after the war. The issue of continuity/discontinuity between wartime and postwar will thus be treated in this chapter.

The concrete enforcement of censorship during occupation will be depicted in chapter five. In Japan, American military authority employed pre-publication censorship on the major media, while a licensed press system and post-censorship already existed in Germany. What brought about these differences, and what effect did these have upon future conditions in both countries?

In chapter five, I will examine what happened in the spot where the democratization process and information control crossed, by analyzing the several examples of democratization and the control of information, such as in making the new constitution. In this process, were the rights of people trampled by censorship? Here, I should depict Japanese cases in more detail rather than German cases, for I will focus on the problems of the American censorship in Japan, in making a striking contrast with German case.

Finally, I will look at exactly who stood to gain from this information control during the occupation. Although information control targeted not only the public but also the current political, economic leaders and journalists of these defeated nation, was this system not also useful for elites and journalists who were the actual targets of government censorship?

  1. U.S.: Planning Policies during World War II


Before joining the war, Roosevelt was nervous about anti-war public opinion in the U.S. The occupation program for Germany and Japan was commonly understood to be rooted in the popular concepts of demilitarization and democratization, which were subsequently important aspects to the Potsdam Declaration in August 1945.

By the end of 1942, it was still not clear whether the U.S. wanted to occupy Germany and Japan and rebuild their societies completely. In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt noted that he and Churchill “were determined to accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan and Italy.”50 The question was whether this was actually U.S./U.K. policy and, if it was, whether this would require a complete demilitarization and reformation/ nation building of Germany and Japan51

In this chapter, I shall review how the occupation policies and censorship policy were planned and prepared to realize, asking who think out the policies. Were there any differences between the people in charge for Japanese or German occupation? Did the preparation complete before the end of the war?

    1. General Planning


Immediately after the Pacific War broke out, the State Department moved toward postwar planning. On 28 December 1941, President Roosevelt, who had been reluctant to discuss postwar matters, finally signed a proposal for making organizations to create a blueprint for a new order for the postwar world.

The State Department regarded itself as the leader for this project. In early 1942, it established the Division of Special Research and began basic studies forward to the preparation of policy papers on the occupation of Japan, Germany, and Italy. This organization, however, consisted of only higher-ranking officials without area specialists, and therefore their progress was slow. They gradually moved from broad discussions of postwar matters to more specific issues of the postwar status of particular powers, and the planning for both nations became separate and largely independent of each other. Their language, culture, political history, and international circumstances of the prospective occupied countries were each different, not only from each other but also from the U.S.52

Memoranda (JCS 873/1) of June 1943 between the director of Civil Governance of the Army and Byron Price, who was the director of the Office of Censorship in Washington, delegated responsibility for civil censorship in occupied regions to the Supreme Commander of the Army, both in Europe/ African and Pacific/ Asian Theater. The documents became a basis to order censorship from the U.S. government to the American military government in the occupied countries. Byron Price, however, had a long career as a journalist. He said that every deed of press censorship contradicted the democratic principles. He saw that the security required some kind of censorship in wartime, but not in peacetime. As a result, 15 August 1945, the next day of the Japanese surrender, he closed the Office of Censorship in the U.S. home country.53 Thus, this episode indicates that Price ordered at the time the minimum level censorship to secure the American forces and the social order in the occupied countries.

On 2 April 1942, the War Department issued an order to create “the School of Military Government” at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.54 Nevertheless, this school could not obtain an fully understanding of the upper level policy makers in Washington, and it had trouble recruiting enough candidates and providing them with an education owing to budget problems and a shortage of teachers in the early days.55 As a result, toward the end of the war the school did not have enough time to instruct a large number of prospective civil governance soldiers.56

On 8 November 1942, when U.S. and British troops landed in Africa and began their worldwide program to fulfill the promises of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Declaration, Roosevelt found that America had underestimated the requirements of military government.57 The problem of the shortage of desirable candidates remained. With the fall of Italy in 1943, the number of civil affairs officers needed had increased and the War Department rapidly recruited candidates from the civilian population.58 Among these, there were some second generation German and Japanese-Americans, the latter were now being confined to concentration camps in the U.S.



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