Sucker Nation and Santa Claus

This chapter focuses on the wartime congressional experience, which reflected an important shift in American foreign policy. During the Second World War, support for deep American engagement with the world, once confined to a narrow circle of internationalist elites, replaced isolationism as the dominant paradigm in American political discourse. The long debates and introduction of bills on postwar foreign policy in Congress during the summer and fall of 1943 revealed a sea change toward congressional support for an active postwar foreign policy and extensive commitments around the world. This change in Congress reflected the shift in American opinion as the isolationists and noninterventionists lost the national debate on the country's future.

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

This concluding chapter argues that American wartime planning aimed to identify and serve U.S. interests in East Asia. The early postwar period would be marked by harsh military occupation and forced disarmament, but in the longer run Japanese cooperation was tied to hope and prosperity through the promise of international trade. This offered a solution to end Japanese aggression and imperialism, to the benefit of Japan's neighbors. However, that solution was influenced by Anglo-American imperial rhetoric and effectively replaced Japanese hegemony in East Asia with American. Given that plans were made during a brutal war that Japan had started, the attempt to find shared American and Japanese interests was practical but also generous.

Information and Ignorance

This chapter examines the role of media in postwar planning on Japan. Public relations and popular opinion are only a part of the story of how the media influenced American policy toward Japan. During World War II, the journalists, editors, politicians, and bureaucrats who published on this question were influential not just because of their connection to the reading public but also as a result of their ties to policymaking circles. As such, wartime publications—popular newspaper opinion columns, specialist book series, and journal articles—provided a source of information and analysis to policymakers. However, published material was not the only, or even the most important, connection between opinion leaders and policymakers on the Japan question. Media elites, bureaucrats, and politicians also shared ideas informally through telephone conversations, over dinners, and at social events.

Unofficial Officials

This chapter looks at the think tanks of policymaking. In the early wartime period, official long-range planning was stunted by a lack of government resources and interest in the subject. The bureaucrats in charge of American foreign policy came to rely on information and expertise from outside the government as they formed their views. Specialist research organizations, later known as “think tanks,” leaped to fill gaps in official expertise. Eventually, think tank staffs became unofficial officials, taking full part in the development of policy. They provided reports, recommendations, and accessible information, informed by their specific institutional viewpoints. They also maintained personal networks between members and policymakers and created space for officials and private experts from the business and scholarly communities to discuss ideas.

Behind the Curtain

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Allied occupation of Japan. Between 1939 and 1945, American policymakers decided to reorient rather than punish postwar Japan. They hoped to transform the current enemy into a “responsible” international actor through a short American-led military occupation. The political, religious, and even linguistic makeup of an ancient and deeply patriotic nation would be changed; Imperial Japan's colonial possessions would be liberated or redistributed. American intervention was expected to remake Japan into a pacifist economic power supportive of a postwar American order. However, President Franklin Roosevelt, congressmen, popular media figures, and high-level officials all opposed the plan at different points.

Flip-Flopper With the Final Say

This chapter examines Franklin Delano Roosevelt's postwar foreign policy intentions. President Roosevelt showed little interest in the work of official experts working on postwar issues, preferring to find analysis from outside official channels. As a result, planners sometimes worked in a vacuum, without a voice in wartime agreements and uncertain of their president's plans. Indeed, lack of communication between the president and bureaucratic planning groups led to divergence between the president's aims and policy drafts. However, Roosevelt supported the planner's work to provide him with a diverse set of options, and in so doing he allowed for the development of a policy-creating network during the war.

Ready or Not

This chapter looks at Harry Truman's administration during the postwar period. The major development of this period was the widespread acceptance within the administration of the policy planners' ideas and aims. This was true even though the plans were altered in response to events and new voices in summer and fall of 1945. The course of events in the early Truman administration opened the door for the recommendations of a small group of Japan specialists in the State Department to become American policy. In the transition from war to victory, these recommendations were approved as SWNCC 150/4, the document that was sent to occupation administrators to guide American actions in defeated Japan.

Elbow Patches and Orientalists

This chapter discusses postwar planning on Japan, which was dominated by the State Department. Key figures in that process disagreed about the causes of Japanese militarism and the potential of peaceful cooperation. Asia specialists and the senior officials who approved policy drew different conclusions based on their own experiences with Asia, a sense of connection to either Japan or China, and the information they had access to. Eventually, policy planner's recommendations evolved during the war and finally formed the document entitled United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan (SWNCC150/4), which became official policy in September 1945. This document, authorized by President Harry Truman, offered a broad vision for the treatment of Japan, which occupiers could use to frame responses to problems as they emerged.