Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers

The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) (originally briefly styled Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers[1]) was the title held by General Douglas MacArthur during the Allied occupation of Japan following World War II. It issued SCAP Directives (alias SCAPIN, SCAP Index Number) to the Japanese government, aiming to suppress its "militaristic nationalism".[2]

The Dai-Ichi Seimei Building which served as SCAP headquarters, c. 1950

In Japan, the position was generally referred to as GHQ (General Headquarters), as SCAP also referred to the offices of the occupation, including a staff of several hundred US civil servants as well as military personnel. Some of these personnel effectively wrote a first draft of the Japanese Constitution, which the National Diet then ratified after a few amendments. Australian, British, Indian, and New Zealand forces under SCAP were organized into a sub-command known as British Commonwealth Occupation Force.

These actions led MacArthur to be viewed as the new Imperial force in Japan by many Japanese political and civilian figures, even being considered to be the rebirth of the shōgun-style government[3]:341 which Japan was ruled under until the start of the Meiji Restoration. American biographer William Manchester argues that without MacArthur's leadership, Japan would not have been able to make the move from an imperial, totalitarian state, to a democracy. At his appointment, MacArthur announced that he sought to "restore security, dignity and self-respect" to the Japanese people.[4]

Welfare programs

One of the largest of the SCAP programs was Public Health and Welfare, headed by US Army Colonel Crawford F. Sams. Working with the SCAP staff of 150, Sams directed the welfare work of the American doctors, and organized entirely new Japanese medical welfare systems along American lines. The Japanese population was in a poor state: most people badly worn down, doctors and medicines were very scarce, and sanitary systems had been bombed out in larger cities. His earliest priorities were in distributing food supplies from the United States. Millions of refugees from the defunct overseas empire were pouring in, often in bad physical shape, with a high risk of introducing smallpox, typhus and cholera. The outbreaks that did occur were localized, as emergency immunization, quarantine, sanitation, and delousing prevented massive epidemics. Sams, who was promoted to Brigadier General in 1948, worked with Japanese officials to establish vaccine laboratories, reorganize hospitals along American lines, upgrade medical and nursing schools, and bring together Japanese, international, and US teams that dealt with disasters, child care, and health insurance. He set up an Institute of Public Health for educating public health workers and a National Institute of Health for research, and set up statistical divisions and data collection systems.[5]

War crimes issues

SCAP arrested 28 suspected war criminals on account of crimes against peace, but it did not conduct the Tokyo Trials; the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was responsible instead.[6][7] President Harry Truman had negotiated Japanese surrender on the condition the Emperor would not be executed or put on trial. SCAP carried out that policy.[8]

As soon as November 26, 1945, MacArthur confirmed to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai that the emperor's abdication would not be necessary.[3]:323 Before the war crimes trials actually convened, SCAP, the IPS and officials from Hirohito's Shōwa government worked behind the scenes not only to prevent the imperial family being indicted, but also to slant the testimony of the defendants to ensure that no one implicated the Emperor. High officials in court circles and the Shōwa government collaborated with Allied GHQ in compiling lists of prospective war criminals, while the individuals arrested as Class A suspects and incarcerated in Sugamo Prison solemnly vowed to protect their sovereign against any possible taint of war responsibility.[3]:325

As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur also decided not to prosecute Shiro Ishii and all members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data based on human experimentation. On May 6, 1947, he wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as "War Crimes" evidence."[9] The deal was concluded in 1948.[10]

According to historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save the Emperor from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war."[11]

Media censorship

Above the political and economic control SCAP had for the seven years following Japan's surrender, SCAP also had strict control over all of the Japanese media, under the formation of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of SCAP. The CCD eventually banned a total of 31 topics from all forms of media.[3]:341 These topics included:

Although some of the CCD censorship laws considerably relaxed towards the end of SCAP, some topics, like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were taboo until 1952 at the end of the occupation.

End

MacArthur was succeeded as SCAP by General Matthew Ridgway when MacArthur was relieved by President Harry S. Truman during the Korean War on April 11, 1951. When the Treaty of San Francisco came into effect on April 28, 1952, the post of SCAP lapsed.

See also

References
  1. Hellegers, Dale M. (2002). We, the Japanese people. Stanford University Press. p. 360. ISBN 9780804780322.
  2. S.C.A.P. (Jan 4, 1946). "Removal and Exclusion of Undesirable Personnel from Public Office". The National Diet Library (Japan). Retrieved 2019-02-20.
  3. Dower, John W. (1999). Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-04686-1. OCLC 39143090.
  4. Manchester, William (1978). American Caesar. Little, Brown and Company. p. 472. ISBN 0-316-54498-1.
  5. Sams, Crawford F. (1998). "Medic": The Mission of an American Military Doctor in Occupied Japan and Wartorn Korea. Routledge. ISBN 9781315503714.
  6. Maga, Timothy P. (2001). Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 9780813121772.
  7. Tanaka, Yuki; et al. (2011). Beyond Victor's Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited. BRILL. pp. 149–50. ISBN 9789004215917.
  8. Ham, Paul (2014). Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath. St. Martin's Press. pp. 79–80. ISBN 9781466847477.
  9. Gold, Hal (2004). Unit 731 testimony. Boston: Tuttle. p. 109. ISBN 978-4-900737-39-6. OCLC 422879915.
  10. Drayton, Richard (May 10, 2005). "An Ethical Blank Cheque: British and US mythology about the second world war ignores our own crimes and legitimises Anglo-American war making". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 11, 2012.
  11. Bix, Herbert P. (2000). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins. p. 545. ISBN 978-0-06-019314-0. OCLC 247018161.

Further reading
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