© The Postil MagazineGeneral MacArthur’s GHQ for the Far East Command in Tokyo, Japan; photo ca. 1952.
The United States advertises itself as the "land of the free." When it fights wars, it boasts of bringing to others the freedom its citizens enjoy. But does this hold true in reality? When the United States fought the Empire of Japan in the middle of the twentieth century,
Washington brought, not freedom to an unfree country, but unfreedom to the free. It accomplished this, in part, through the censorship regime which Washington imposed on Japan in the postwar (Yamamoto Taketoshi 2013). One aspect of this censorship regime was the press code.
Intellectual and author Eto Jun declared Japan under the control of GHQ occupation to be a "closed-off discursive space." (Eto 1994) The hatch closing off Japan discursively, and by extension epistemologically, was the September 19, 1945 directive, "SCAPIN-33 Press Code for Japan."
(One of the main objectives of the Americans in imposing the press code was to conceal their own war crimes. (Kawasaki Kenko 2006, 38-40)) The press code banned discussion, in print or other media, of thirty topics.
There was to be no criticism of the victors in the Greater East Asia War, no mention of the term "Greater East Asia War" (the term "Pacific War," although historically inaccurate, is used even today instead), no mention of the black market in occupied Japan, no mention of rapes by American GIs of Japanese women, and no criticism of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus was born Washington's censorship regime in Japan (Hirai Kazuko 2023, Monica Braw 1991).
Washington's press code was urgent business, for Washington had many sins it needed to conceal, many crimes for which it desired to blame the Japanese. Many brave truth-tellers in Japan fought back. One such soul is Ishikawa Koyo, a photographer who documented the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945. GHQ tried to confiscate the negatives of the photos Ishikawa took, but Ishikawa refused. GHQ eventually relented, only forbidding Ishikawa to display his photos in public (Ishikawa 1974, 17-21, Richard Sams and Saotome Katsumoto 2015, Mark Clapson 2019, 219-221). But Ishikawa's bravery seems lost in the onslaught of disinformation. The War Guilt Information Program (WGIP) was a psy-op designed to convince both Japanese and Americans alike (for both knew the truth equally well, and Americans probably needed more convincing of that truth's opposite than did Japanese) that the war in Asia had been entirely the fault of Japan (Aoyagi Takehiko 2017, Takahashi Shiro 2019, Sekino Michio 2015). Americans were also directly subject to GHQ suppression. Helen Mears, for instance, an insightful critic of Occupation policy and Washington behavior, found publication of her book on the Occupation, Mirror for Americans: Japan, temporarily forbidden anywhere outside the United States (Kevin Y. Kim 2019, 145).
Comment: Other research suggests that, indeed, this certainly was an interesting period:
- Skull shaping immigrants integrated into Hungarian village as Roman Empire fell
- Secrets of the exceptional diatretic vase revealed, recently discovered at 4th century Paleo-Christian necropolis in Autun, France
- 536 AD: Plague, famine, drought, cold, and a mysterious fog that lasted 18 months
- 'Intriguing' evidence of female mobility during the 630AD Christian Conversion Period
- Archaeologists puzzle over mystery woman in early Christian cemetery period
And check out: In Search of the Miraculous: Holy Grail Symbolism & Early Christian Mystery, with Laura Knight-Jadczyk