Iain MacGregor
When General Douglas MacArthur’s C-54 transport landed at Atsugi Military Aerodrome near Tokyo on 30 August 1945, the scene before him was almost without precedent in modern history. Japan’s industrial output had collapsed to just 27.6 per cent of its prewar capacity, and the country teetered on the brink of famine. Tokyo was, like dozens of cities across the Home Islands, a smoking ruin; in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, twisted steel and scorched earth stretched as far as the eye could see. Entire neighbourhoods had been erased, their residents either dead or displaced. Food production lagged far behind demand, forcing millions to live on rations often providing fewer than 1,500 calories a day. Typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis stalked the population. For the Allies, the situation posed a monumental challenge: restore order, prevent starvation, dismantle the machinery of war, and replace it with the architecture of peace.
MacArthur moved swiftly, proceeding to Yokohama to set up his headquarters as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). He would oversee a transformation of the country as he set about enforcing the terms of surrender, but also to work with the existing Japanese government to demilitarise, democratise, rebuild the shattered economy and save the population from potential starvation. In rural Japan, he orchestrated a land reform that, in both scope and speed, rivalled the most radical agrarian revolutions of the 20th century.
Within three years, six million acres – about one third of Japan’s farmland – was expropriated from 2.3 million landlords and sold to 4.7 million tenant-farmers at prices so low that inflation often made payments symbolic. By 1950, tenancy had plummeted from nearly half of all cultivated land to just ten per cent. Villages administered their own redistribution through committees dominated by tenants, shifting the balance of power from landlord to farmer. British sociologist Ronald Dore later wrote: ‘In place of the old paternalist order… I detected a sense of empowerment’, as those who had laboured in dependency learned self-government. This was not just an economic shift – it was a social and political earthquake, creating a class of independent smallholders with a vested interest in stability.
No comments:
Post a Comment