Name this country: Its modern history has been decisively shaped by the United States; it’s officially an independent democracy but actually an American protectorate and one-party state; and it’s among the world’s most prosperous societies.
Japan has beaten the odds. When a big power crushes a smaller one and then effectively seizes it, the results are usually awful. Not in Japan. Blending their own rich culture with Western ideas that Americans originally forced on them, the Japanese have built a highly successful nation. Japan is a rare exception in the world: a country that has lived through generations of foreign intervention and come out well.
Today Japan is the world’s third-largest economy. Poverty, homelessness, and street crime are all but unknown. No one litters or jaywalks. Private ownership of firearms is unthinkable. Young children walk the streets alone and take subways by themselves. It’s a cliché to say that Japanese trains fill American visitors with envy, but it’s true. During my recent month-long stay, I wanted to take a video of the bullet train, which has a top speed of 200 miles per hour. Every time I heard one approaching and whipped out my cellphone, though, it had already raced past me.
Japan’s remarkable national achievements are in part the product of tradition. Centuries of craftsmanship laid the basis for today’s industrial power. Confucian and Buddhist beliefs created a communal ethos that places the good of society over individualism. Order, stability, and respect for hierarchy are prized values.
Yet it is impossible to imagine Japan without the overwhelming impact of American intervention over the last 170 years. For better and worse, at times with Japan’s cooperation and at times against its will, the United States has repeatedly sought to reshape this once-mysterious land. It has largely succeeded, although sometimes at an excruciatingly high price.
In 1853 a fleet of American warships anchored near today’s Tokyo. Commodore Matthew Perry presented Japan’s rulers with a demand: They must end their country’s two centuries of isolation and agree to trade with the rest of the world. Recognizing the implicit threat — Perry’s fleet alone had more firepower than the entire Japanese navy, and rapacious foreign powers were already carving up nearby China — Japan had no choice but to agree.
Perry’s arrival shocked the Japanese into realizing how weak their country had become. Rule by samurai clans gave way to a new regime, the Meiji Restoration, which over the next few decades radically transformed the country. The Meiji Emperor proclaimed succinct goals: “Enrich the country, strengthen the army.”
Japan’s rapid modernization persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt that the Japanese were superior to other Asians and deserved to rule them. In 1905 he told a Japanese envoy that Japan should establish “an Asiatic Monroe Doctrine,” and that the “future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States toward her neighbors on the American continent.”
Months later, the Japanese seized Korea. In the following decades they carried out military rampages across Asia that took millions of lives. The conqueror mentality that Roosevelt had pressed upon them culminated in their 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the US-Japan war in the Pacific.
In his groundbreaking book “The Imperial Cruise,” the author James Bradley, whose father fought the Japanese at Iwo Jima, set out to learn why that war happened. He concluded that Roosevelt’s secret — and, arguably, unconstitutional — encouragement of Japanese aggression decisively triggered Japanese militarism.
“Teddy’s impact was staggering and disastrous,” Bradley wrote. “Here was the match that lit the fuse.”
World War II ended with a uniquely horrific barrage, the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new book about those attacks, “The Road to Surrender” by Evan Thomas, reaches a heart-wrenching conclusion: that the nuclear attack saved not only the lives of many American soldiers but also the lives of countless Japanese whose fanatic leaders were demanding that every citizen fight to the death.
For six years after Japan surrendered, General Douglas MacArthur was the country’s absolute ruler. Although he was famously vain and reclusive, MacArthur seems much admired by today’s Japanese. He wrote a new constitution for the defeated country, reshaped its society, largely wiped away its militarism, and transformed Emperor Hirohito into a figurehead instead of having him executed. He also chose an imprisoned official charged as a Class A war criminal, Nobusuke Kishi, to form a new political party that would keep Japan loyal to the United States. That party, the Liberal Democrats, was for decades subsidized by the CIA and remains dominant to this day.
“We ran Japan during the occupation, and we ran it in a different way in these years after the occupation,” a former chief of the CIA station in Tokyo later recalled in “Legacy of Ashes,” Tim Weiner’s 2007 book about the agency. “General MacArthur had his ways. We had ours.”
Today the United States guarantees Japanese security through a defense treaty. In return, Japan faithfully supports US policies in Asia and elsewhere. Japan’s position on the front line of the US-China confrontation makes it an even more valuable ally. So does its role as a supplier of weapons to Ukraine. The American military presence in Japan — 63,000 troops at more than 100 bases — is larger than in any other country.
Long imperial intervention usually ends badly. Japan stands as a sterling exception. Its success as a nation is built on its own traditions but also on generations of guidance from Washington.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
