Breaking the Seal on the GHQ Burned Books

Breaking the Seal on the GHQ Burned Books

by
Nishio Kanji

Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact

Copyright ?2010 by Nishio Kanji
Originally published as GHQ ensho tosho kaif?
by Tokuma Shoten, Tokyo, Japan 2008.
English language copyright ?2010 by Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
All rights reserved, including the rights of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Japanese personal names have been rendered surname first, in accordance
with Japanese custom.

Contents

Chapter One: What Were the “GHQ’s Burned Books”? 1
? “Banning books” and “censorship” are different things 1
? Participation by the Tokyo University Faculty of Letters 3
? The crafty “confiscations” conducted in secrecy 4
? Secret meetings in the office of the director of the Imperial
Library and the official residence of the Prime Minister 6
? Odaka Kunio, Kaneko Takez?, and Makino Eiichi 8
? Separating the good from the bad by those who drew up the
occupation forces’ list of books for confiscation 10
? Nation-wide expansion of confiscation with the deputy minister of education’s directive 12
? The occupation forces had a sense of having blundered 13
? The whereabouts of the large number of works sent to America 14
? The possibility of a connection with the Tokyo Trials 17
? A sampling of the confiscated books 19

Chapter Two: Disobedience at the Heart of Japan’s Serenity
as the Occupation Began 23
? “The post-war war” of words and schemes 23
? The dreadful system where private messages were censored 25
? The Japanese society’s eerie silence 28
? Several reasons Japan became instantly docile after the war 29
? The fighting was over but the war went on 31
? Japan’s quiet determination during the war against the ABCD Line 33
? What was it that was the strength of Japanese back then? 35

Appended Supplementary Materials 37
Supplement One: Memorandum from the SCAP GHQ (copy of original) 39
Supplement Two: Memorandum from the SCAP GHQ 41
Supplement Three: Textual materials drawn up for selecting publications to be
seized by the GHQ civilian censorship task force department 45
Supplement Four: Directive from the Vice-Minister of Education
concerning the confiscation of publications 47
Supplement Five: Summary of the number of books confiscated by the
Japanese government on GHQ orders 51
Supplement Six: Publications targeted for seizure during the occupation and
stored in the United States Library of Congress 53
Supplement Seven: Ranking of GHQ-confiscated works by author 55
Supplement Eight: History of the occupation and government of the South Sea Islands 63

Chapter One:
What Were the “GHQ’s Burned Books”?

“Banning books” and “censorship” are different things

I suspect there are many people who would say that this is the first time they have heard the phrase “GHQ burned books.” It goes without saying that the GHQ (General Headquarters) refers to the occupation army that was stationed in Japan after the close of the Second World War. The GHQ banned books. Book-banning1 is stopping books in circulation, and recalling them. There was a famous incident in the third century BC when the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi burned Confucian texts and buried Confucian scholars alive. This was the origin of the term “book burning.” Today it is the recall of books so people will not be able to read them.
Surprisingly, it is not widely known that the American army perpetrated just such a barbaric act in post-war Japan. From the start, America, treading roughshod over international law against an occupying army writing the constitution of the country they occupy, should not have conducted censorship of newspapers, magazines, the content of broadcasts, or opened private correspondence. Likewise, it is only right that they should not have erased the history of the country they occupied, proscribing books and “burning books.” The post-war constitution expressed “freedom of thought” and “freedom of the press,” but it was America who violated this in occupied Japan on a grand scale.
That being the case, when and how was it done? Did the occupation army actually achieve what they wanted politically? And was “book burning” the term used by the American army?
Of course, the American army used the word “confiscation” rather than “burning” and referred to it as “the confiscation of propaganda publications.”
Works that in Japan had only the day before been called “history books” or “thought books” were now coolly being called “propaganda publications.” This was the year after the war ended. There’s nothing to be done about an enemy calling them that, but that my own country and my own countrymen may have been able to just drop in an instant the ideas and sentiments and convictions that had been brought up in that war, and that the Japanese government should knuckle under so readily to meet the old enemy’s demands that we they should now call it all propaganda ― it was too much. Such a waste. It was wrongful thinking jumping in and saying all of it was evil propaganda “so therefore we should seize it all.” The occupation forces confiscated what they could get their hands on ― over 7,000 different books ― from all over Japan, including those bookstores, second-hand book sellers, government offices, warehouses, and in the distribution centers. Those responsible for the confiscation were selected by the governors of all the prefectures. The authority of the police was used against those who opposed the seizures of these books.
That such things took place belongs to a secret part of postwar history that has been totally unknown until now. It is now clear just how far the government went in changing Japan’s direction to stay in line with the wishes of the occupation forces. It is my belief that in reading this book, one will come to understand the extent of those results.
This is unlike the GHQ’s censorship starting in September of 1945 of all manner of publications ― newspapers, magazines, films, broadcasts ―that took place throughout the occupation, which is well known. Everyone working in the media made two copies of everything they did and had to send them to the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of the GHQ. I have read that before Kawada Masako’s children’s song “Mikan no hana saku oka” (“The hill of blooming mandarin oranges”) was broadcast on the radio, the lyrics were censored.
What I am bringing up here, however, is the “book burning” (that is, the confiscation of prewar and wartime books), which clearly a different matter than the postwar censorship. From 1 January 1928, to 2 September 1945, approximately 220,000 titles were published in Japan. Of those, 9,288 were selected for examination, and 7,769 of those were taken and designated as “confiscated propaganda publications.” This is what I am talking about when I refer to “book-burning.”
The occupation army created the master list of 7,769 titles, but it was the Japanese government who actually carried out the confiscations throughout the whole country based on that list.
This was the expression of a great amount of the intellect of the time that was decisively useful in forming Japan’s fighting spirit in the Greater East Asian War, so I suppose it was only natural that the occupation forces should set their sights on it. If one were to eliminate something just “because it was from Japan,” one would no longer be able to see history’s true picture. I imagine it could be said that this included enthusiastic works that exalted the fighting spirit, but was this enthusiasm not a part of history?
The seizure of books was not just a separate incident from the censorship, as I have said. Surely it would not be an exaggeration to say that, as a question of the continuation of a nation’s history, it is comparatively speaking a much more significant topic.
Why is it that this has still not yet been taken up in earnest? This, itself, is a question that should be addressed. I feel that the impetus to investigate the matter has been lost because the actual books themselves have disappeared from the awareness of Japanese readers. This is the principal reason for the lack of desire to examine the issue. The “book burning” was successful. The whole country was thoroughly taken in by the policies that the occupation authorities saw through ― the policy of erasing the history of opposition to the country then occupying Japan, led by the occupation forces ― and it continues to this day.

Participation by the Tokyo University Faculty of Letters

There is one troubling point that must needs be made on this matter. Investigation is only now getting started into by what procedures the “book burning” was carried out, and by whom, and how their assessments were made. Though it is something from more than sixty years ago, the whole story of the process for designating books for confiscation is even now difficult to ascertain at this stage of writing this work.
The political intentions of the American army are clear. We are now examining the army’s orders during the occupation and the Japanese government’s responses to those orders. We have come to know to an extent the locations where books were designated for confiscation (though we can not yet verify that it was a single place), their quantity, the time period, and the process. We know the method of disposing books after their seizure and the approximate whereabouts of the remainder. The titles of the over seven thousand works has long been known. What we just can not fathom, however, is that it has not been really understood that this was not something that could be undertaken only by civilians in the employ of the GHQ and administrative officials of the Japanese government; rather, it was a type of feat that could only have been accomplished with the cooperation of someone in the intelligentsia ― academics and pundits.
The world was shocked soon after the war when it was learned that there had been some level of systematic cooperation by some Jews themselves in the Jewish persecution by the Nazi regime. In the same manner, cooperation on the part of the occupied (erstwhile enemy) population was necessary for occupation policies. That is why there were diplomats like Herbert Norman. The GHQ’s internal personnel affairs also was also likely mixed up in it. It was a time when those in Japan who had been responsible for the war were facing the Tokyo Trials and an ordered purge of public officials. The ideas of President Truman and General MacArthur also had a great effect on the state of affairs. It was a time when even the emperor’s position was endangered. The authority that Japan had had to that point was gone, and everything now operated under the new authority that was the occupation army; and Japan’s intelligentsia, academics, and pundits quickly responded to its sensibilities.
At that time, it was not just America, either. An anti-Japanese “board of directors” made up of representatives from America, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, etc., met to give their input into the policies for the occupation of Japan. They took notice of “the fact that there are publications that were militaristic or anti?Allied Powers that are in general circulation and have been kept,” and advised that all of them should be seized.
Given the situation, the Japanese government was totally unable to offer any resistance. I imagine that to some extent there was probably nothing that could have been done in that there were those among the intelligentsia and among the scholars and pundits who accepted the government’s directions to cooperate, but even given this “cooperation” there is a difference between doing something half-heartedly and doing it enthusiastically, and there is a considerable gap between sabotaging the process and toadying to it.
Recently it has come to be known that at the center of this cooperation was the Faculty of Letters of Tokyo University. This year we also learned the names of two assistant professors who were involved. We have also been able to ascertain that criminal law scholars who were famous at the time had a supporting role in the arranging everything. All of them later were recipients of the Order of Cultural Merit and members of the Japanese Academy.
Japanese history was unmade by people representing Japanese intellectuals and who cut off its continuity. This was the starting point of Japan’s degeneration in the postwar days down to the present. Were we just indulging in sentimental tears to comfort ourselves in “reflecting” on the war immediately following our defeat? One might say this was a weakness, a servility, a vagueness, typical of the Japanese. The most troubling thing, however, is that we only know the names and their participation, and at present we are not absolutely clear on exactly how their participation was arranged or what it was they were doing. After sixty years, there are hardly any living witnesses left. Below, I will put in order an account to clarify the details in as much as I have come to know them. It goes without saying, but the first chapter of this book is the first work that comprehensively summarizes the history of the GHQ “book burning.”

The crafty “confiscations” conducted in secrecy

On 17 March, 1946, a typed memorandum was delivered to the Japanese Imperial Government. At the head was written the most powerful name of the time: “General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers,” and the recipient was given as “Imperial Japanese Government.” It was sent via the Tokyo Central Liaison Office of the GHQ. The memorandum was titled, “Confiscation of Propaganda Publications.” It’s identification tag number was “AG 311.7 (17 Mar 46) CI (SCAPIN – 824).” It was the document that was to be the start of the whole affair. (The appended “Supplement 1” at the end of this book is a photographic reproduction of the original typed memorandum.) The memorandum read:

1. The Japanese Government is directed to collect from all public channels, including warehouse, book shops, book dealers, publishing companies, distributing agents and all commercial establishments, or agencies of the Japanese government where these publications are held in bulk, the following listed propaganda publications:

a. War & Construction (Asahi Newspaper Company) December 1943.
b. Senji Shimbun Tokuhon (Manual of Newspaper Reading in Wartime – Tokijiro Hirata) December 1940.
c. Kindai Kaisen (Modern Sea Battle – Mainichi Newspaper) October 1941.
d. Bei Ei Chosen No Shinso (The True State of the American-British Challenge to Japan – Hachiro Arita) October 1943.
e. Shomem [sic.] Hikohei Tokuhom [sic.] (Reader for Junior Air Corps – Army I-formation Department) November 1943.
f. Bei Ei No Toa Kokuran (American-British Disturbance of East Asia – Hachiro Arita) December 1943.
g. Bei Ei [sic.] No Sekai Shinryoku (American World Agression [sic.] – Kensuku [sic.] Horiuchi) August 1944.2
h. Dai Toa No Kensetsu (The Building of Greater East Asia – Eigi Amo) November 1944.
i. Fujin Asia (Asiatic Women – Mainichi Newspaper) Monthly January 1942 to September 1944.
j. Sakura (Cherry – Mainichi Newspaper Co.) Monthly.

2. These publications will be collected and stored in a central warehouse. Instructions for the disposal of these publications for pulping will be issued by this headquarters at a later date.

3. A periodic report will be submitted on the 15th and last day of each month to General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, beginning 31 March 1946. This report shall include:

a. The name and number of publications collected in the interim period
b. Source from which obtained, including the name and number of publications collected from each source
c. Total number of publications
d. Gross weight
e. Specific location of storage

4. Individual copies in private homes or libraries will be exempted from action directed above.

FOR THE SUPREME COMMANDER:
[signed]
B. M. FITCH,
Brigadier-General, AGD,
Adjutant General

Of the ten works brought up in the memorandum, the publishers of nine were unidentified, but now it is confirmed that the publisher was the Mainichi Shinbun. There are three books whose authors are not named (though they are now known). These ten titles, taken all together, are strange. The mistakes with the titles, too, stand out.
In other words, at the beginning it was done haphazardly as the American forces perfunctorily and arbitrarily picked out whatever books were in front of them. We can see that from the beginning they were resolved to steadily increase the implementation of this plan over time, and they obtained the assistance of the Japanese for the all-out confiscation. No one suspected the magnitude of the specifics of the plan at the start. Nonetheless, they were firm in the methodology and policies for the confiscation process, at least, as if they had done it any number of times before.
What must be noted is the line about “Individual copies in private homes or libraries.” That is, at the start there was an announcement that those works that were privately held or in libraries were not subject to confiscation. Instead, it was to be an exhaustive search of the whole public circuit ― not just bookstores and publishing houses ― to remove the targeted books.
It was a consistent, coherent policy that was put into execution after the Japanese government stepped in upon receipt of their directive from the GHQ. To be precise, the occupational authorities did not know the world of Japanese books, and not only did they not do any study of it, all they really did was decide the policy. That is a critical point.
I did not check into the cases of other countries to see whether the American forces, as well as, perhaps, the British forces, or in general the West, when controlling an occupied territory, habitually acted in the same manner, so this matter is unfortunately not known to me. It is an extremely cunning policy to secretly use a country’s government to carry out the confiscations from public routes, excepting the books in the homes of civilians and libraries, without the knowledge of their countrymen. Because the occupation forces knew that the confiscation of books was a destruction of history such as would not be done by a civilized nation, they were concerned about getting an image as being book burners.3 I will touch on this later, but those involved in carrying out the confiscations were under strict orders not to let uninvolved parties know anything about their activities. Please consider whether this does not sound somewhat clever and underhanded. At any rate, America occupied Japan in the name of liberty and democracy, and this was the opening of a curtain onto a bright, new age heralding a Constitution expressing freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Or was it?
Top-secret documents of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS documents 1,231 A-18, A-19; dated 12 January, 1945), written when Japan was still being bombed, directed the “prohibition of the diffusion of the ideals of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism in any form whatsoever” as administrative principles in the event the American fleet were to occupy “the various western and south-western islands, as well as the Kurile Islands.”

Secret meetings in the office of the director of the Imperial
Library and at the official residence of the Prime Minister

From the delivery to the Japanese government of memorandum No. 1 from the GHQ titled “Confiscation of Propaganda Publications,” dated 17 March, 1946, until 15 April, 1948, a total of forty-eight similar memoranda (and supplemental memorandum No. 46) were delivered. (See the appended “Supplement 2.”)
After looking closely at them, I realized something interesting. Between the fourteenth (supplemental memorandum No. 13, dated 2 December, 1946) and the thirty-third (supplemental memorandum No. 31, dated 2 September, 1947), the itemized number of books to be confiscated suddenly increased. Please note the supplements at the end of this book. In particular, starting with the thirty-third, suddenly 500 books were designated for confiscation each time. That makes 1,000 titles per month. At the beginning it was ten titles (more or less), but it quickly escalated, and in the blink of an eye had become a torrent of thousands.
I conjecture (and this is, ultimately, just conjecture) that it was at that point that the Japanese collaborators began to participate. One copy each of approximately 80 to 90 percent of the original total of 7,769 books that endured the “book-burning” is at present housed in the National Diet Library. This is natural, as the American army did not confiscate books from libraries. In response to a recent inquiry I made, the National Diet Library said that as a result of actually investigating a sampling, they conjectured that they are holding 80 to 90 percent, but they have not made a follow-up examination of all of them, and in particular they did not treat them any differently than other books from the same period in respect to special markings or catalogue numbers.
The explanation for why they did not feel the necessity of any special treatment for those books that had been subjected to the GHQ’s “book-burning” was that the holdings of the National Diet Library had never been confiscated by the GHQ. The holdings of the present-day National Diet Library seem to be a continuation of those of the then-Imperial Library. So now we come to the extremely important testimony from the GHQ that, “The designation of propaganda books for confiscation was made based on the holdings of the Imperial Library, etc.”
In other words, what was to become the setting for the “book-burning” was inside the Imperial Library. When the investigators needed to take hold of the books, to screen them, to make their selections, the books they used were those very same ones that are now held in the National Diet Library. (There is another record that states that the original books used by the GHQ in designating titles for confiscation had been sent to the University of Maryland.)
One copy each of the original books is left in the library, but at any rate the GHQ had the assistance of the Ministry of Education and the police in the various stages of the creation of the list for confiscation, and it has been established that the process for confiscation was an order that was sent to all the prefectural governors.
The following, from the memoir of Okada Narau, then-director of the Imperial Library, is extremely important concerning the above:

Returning the discussion to 1947, investigations for the purge of the expression of views in published works began in that year. Published works from the war years as well as those from before the war were held in the Imperial Library, so on April 14 of that year an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Yano, came to the Library. He was seeking a way [for us] to cooperate in this affair, and a subcommittee was established for the purpose of investigations connected to the purge of published works. Mr. Tanaka, who was deputy director of the political department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Mr. Yano, and Mr. ?ta, who was the director of the Cabinet Liaison Office for Cessation of Hostilities, and others were in charge. We had as our experts Odaka Kunio and Kaneko Takez?, both assistant professors at Tokyo University, and I, too, joined in. The subcommittee generally met in the library director’s office. Meetings under the supervision of the chairman of the committee, Makino Eiichi, took place in the official residence of the prime minister. It was only natural that the National Library had to cooperate this way with national policies, and as a job it was not very pleasant.4

He recounts the matter nonchalantly, but is it not testimony of extraordinary significance?
I was indescribably stunned that the names of three eminent scholars ― Odaka Kunio, Kaneko Takez?, and Makino Eiichi ― suddenly appear in this inconspicuous memoir. This is a shocking discovery. So much so, in fact, that for the many people who know the history of post-war thought, for a time they just may not know what to think.
As I have already said, taking September of 1947 as the cutoff point, the number of books being seized each month climbed to 1,000. It was evident that someone with expertise had gotten involved in the “book-burning” operation as processing the titles had suddenly become systematic and efficient.
Please note again the attached “Supplement 2.” When those two Japanese scholars ― representatives of social science and the humanities ― joined the subcommittee, with a senior jurist behind it as the chairman of the “book committee” to oversee the matter of book confiscations, it was none other than that same year of 1947.

Odaka Kunio, Kaneko Takez?, and Makino Eiichi

Odaka Kunio (1908?1993) came from a background of industry, labor, and business. His older brother, Tomoo, was a scholar of the philosophy of law, and his younger brother, Hisatada, was a composer and conductor. His mother was a daughter of Viscount Shibusawa Eiichi.5 One may say he was a scholar who represented the postwar. Odaka translated Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation) into Japanese and was responsible for the Weber volume in the Sekai no meicho (“Great literary works of the world”) published by Ch?? K?ronsha. His was a name known to the general reading public.
Kaneko Takez? (1905?1987) was married to the sixth daughter of Nishida Kitar?,6 and the successor to Watsuji Tetsur?’s chair in Japanese Ethics at Tokyo University. His studies on Hegel are famous, he wrote on Kant, Jaspers, and others, and I remember reading his 1967 work, Kieerukegooru kara Sarutoru e (“From Kierkegaard to Sartre”). From the way I saw it at the time, my impression was that it was a simple, straightforward introduction to philosophers. In 1958, he was chairman of the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University, so his name must be on my diploma, but I do not recall having taken any of his classes.
Makino Eiichi (1878?1970) was a generation older than the Odaka and Kane-ko. It is said that with his 1909 work, Keijigaku no shinshich? to shinkeih? (“Criminal science and new trends of thought and new penal codes”), he caused a revolution in the theory of criminal law. He seems to have been known as a charismatic scholar who defended his position as a leading light in the academic world while a professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University before the war. I say “seems” because he was a person in a field I do not know and in a world from a different time. He reached retirement age in 1938 but he lived a long life, dying at 92. He spent his time at home in Chigasaki living a traditional life of retirement, surrounded by his studies, as three distinct ages ― prewar, wartime, and postwar ― passed.
Makino spent his youth in the early Meiji years,7 which still had something of the atmosphere of the Edo period about them. He played an active role from the end of the Meiji period through the early Taish? years. Odaka Kunio and Kaneko Takez? were different. When the Greater East Asian War broke out, Odaka and Kaneko were 33 and 36, respectively, and belonged to the so-called war generation, with the greater part of their friends scattered about on distant battlefields. Their writings and activities began after the end of the war.
I am troubled that there is so little concrete evidence to show exactly how these three men participated in the GHQ’s seizure of books. I have only found a book with collected memorial texts (which is not for sale) called Tsuis? Kaneko Takez? (“Kaneko Takez?: Reminiscences”). In it I unexpectedly ran across a memoir titled “Kaneko Takez? Sensei no koto” (“About Kaneko Takeko Sensei”) by none other than Odaka Kunio.

I wonder when it was that I encountered Kaneko Takez? Sensei for the first time. I think it was perhaps in 1938, when a youthful Kaneko became an assistant professor at Tokyo University. I was introduced to him at some meeting about that time. The impression I got at that time was that he was short, with a face like a Buddha, and that he was a man unconcerned about personal appearance.
After the end of the Second World War, when investigation by the GHQ into war crimes began, a committee was formed for that purpose as well at the Faculty of Letters of Tokyo University. For some reason, he and I were both selected to be on the committee. So, one day, as the committee was going about its business, we two were asked to go to the GHQ, near Hibiya intersection. Although it was an official visit, our personal appearance was extraordinary. Because of war damage, I possessed no decent suits, but Kaneko Sensei was even worse. He had a shabby national uniform jacket, scruffy trousers, worn-out shoes, and a tired felt hat perched on the back of his head. With heavy steps, we climbed the splendid, well-kept steps of the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building.8 The Nisei official who came out to meet us was surprised, staring us up and down. Kaneko never budged, however, calmly explaining the results of our study.

As you can see, their participation is clear. Moreover, there is clear evidence that a “committee” for “investigating war crimes” was formed in the Faculty of Letters of Tokyo University, and it was probably the intention of a faculty meeting that the young duo were chosen for the committee.
It was probably during the period from 17 March, 1946, when the first GHQ memorandum was delivered to the Japanese government, to sometime around September of 1947, when the thirty-third memorandum was sent, that a request was made by the Japanese government to Tokyo University for cooperation and a committee was formed in the Faculty of Letters. (Tokyo University’s president at the time was Nanbara Shigeru.) Two assistant professors were tapped for the committee and were eventually summoned to the Imperial Library, where they joined the “subcommittee” for the purging of published works as “expert advisors,” which met in the office of Okada Narau, who was director of the library. Such is the chain of events as I understand them.
I dare say that, with that conclusion, I imagine Makino Eiichi heading the meetings of the “book committee” in a businesslike fashion, going about the task of approving the decisions on which books should be seized, in a meeting room in the official residence of the prime minister.
At this same time, Kaneko Takez? wrote the current affairs critiques “Taisen no jinrinteki hansei” (“A humanistic reflection on war”) and “Nihonjin no shimei ni tsuite” (“Concerning the mission of the Japanese”).9 Supposing there may be some kind of hint therein, I quickly read them; but they were commonplace essays of the kind reflecting on Japan as if they had come out under the name of a Western philosopher. I could discern no bearing on this matter at all.
I have discovered no other traces of Odaka Kunio’s cooperation with the GHQ beside the “explaining the results of their investigations” with Kaneko when they went to the GHQ, which I have already presented.
What must not be overlooked is the fact that from April of 1947 to May of 1948, Makino Eiichi worked as a member of the Central Public Official Suitability Review Board. It goes without saying that this tormented the Japanese of the day; it was a committee formed to cooperate with the purge of public officials by the GHQ. Here, too, he was on the side of the erstwhile enemy, taking the role of judging those who had been friends up to the day before. He also worked as an expert examiner at the National Diet Library from July of 1948 to November of 1958. The abominable “book-burning” policy, expanding nation-wide the seizure of books from his own country at the behest of the occupation forces, went from that same July of 1948 to the end of the occupation (in other words, until the conclusion of the peace treaty), and there are sufficient facts to allow us to suppose that Makino was deeply involved in the same affair throughout the entire period.
Exact details on the participation by these three scholars, however, remains shrouded in a dense fog and is still unexplained.

Separating the good from the bad by those who drew up
the occupation forces’ list of books for confiscation

I have already outlined this, but the principal activity of the GHQ’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) was checking up on the mass media. In other words, censoring the information that was out in front of people. To the point that this extended to even opening private mail made its bad reputation infamous in postwar history. One branch of the CCD was the Press, Pictorial & Broadcast Division (PPB). A sub-branch in the PPB was the Research Section, which had been formed with the purpose creating a list of prewar books to be banned. I think it would be fair for the time being to call the Research Section “those who drew up the list of propaganda publications for confiscation.” In every respect, their purpose was creating the list; they were not the group that carried out the actual confiscation. (The idea was to have the Japanese government carry it out.)
The Civil Censorship Detachment were already heavily involved in surveilling the mass media that was in the public eye, so there were no capable people to spare. The Research Section thus had only six American civilians in the employ of the army (two senior officials and four others) attached to it as staff. They were set off on their confiscatory operations but were simply unable to; the Research Section had no choice but to request Japanese help. It seems that they added between nine and twenty-five Japanese to their number.
I wanted to know their names so I started investigating in the National Diet Library. From a telephone book of the time, I was only able to ascertain a single name of one of the Americans: a Lt. F. A. Bonner. I was unable to work out the names of any of the Japanese staff. I expected to see the names of Odaka Kunio and Kaneko Takez? as leaders in the staff, but I had no success.
The total number of publications seized from the targeted period of confiscation (1 January, 1928 to 2 September, 1945) was 221,223. Of that number, 9,288 items that seem to apply to confiscated publications were selected at first. This initial rough selection ought to have been conclusively vital. Looking at it now, however, the classification was slipshod. There are books that I wonder why they were chosen, and there are books that, looking at them from the position of a former enemy, I would consider dangerous and wonder why they were not. The operation lacked precision. We can make the assumption that there was a deficiency in manpower and in time, but it may be that there was also a deficiency of capable people.
I now have in my hands several hundred pages of copied material originally from that time and place which came to me via America. An English-language explanation for the publications that were so crudely selected is included. I would like to present two or three real examples. (See “Supplement 3” at the end of this book.) It is probable that both time and manpower would quickly become insufficient if they were to attach an explanation for each individual book as carefully as here. I understand that they were honest in the assessment itself of the books. There were 9,288 titles that were screened and looked into, and ultimately 7,769 books were designated for confiscation. In March of 1946, the business of separating the wheat from the chaff began. Forty-six times in sequence decisions were relayed to the Japanese government, and in July of 1948, they stopped. Compared with the first narrowing down of the list, the second operation must have taken more time and been more attentive to thinking it out. That is because they selected 85 percent (more or less) of the titles decided upon.
It is vexing that we do not know who the Japanese intellectuals involved were, or when, where, and what exactly they were doing while they were doing it.

Nation-wide expansion of confiscation with the
deputy minister of education’s directive

The list for books designated for confiscation compiled by the Research Section of the Press, Pictorial & Broadcast Division of the Civil Censorship Detachment was conveyed as a directive to the Japanese government via the Central Liaison Office.
As I previously described, these orders were broken down into forty-six exacting directives. At first, the Japanese police were to carry out the confiscation of the books, but starting in June of 1948 the task was transferred to the Social Education Bureau of the Ministry of Education. With this, a directive was sent from the deputy minister of education notifying the governors of all Japan’s prefectures that they were now those responsible for carrying out the confiscation. (See the appended “Supplement 4.”)
With a careful reading of this directive, various things become clear.
It was a very precise order. The deputy minister directs the prefectural governors to work with the police, and the governors were required to select employed persons connected with education from their municipalities to be designated as “confiscation officials.” Local educators, however, were to be exempted from selection, and they should refrain from confiscating books from school libraries. Instead, relevant books at publishing houses and in bookstores were to be seized altogether, and it called for thoroughness in their destruction. It also says that they should not overlook works in circulation or being distributed. Seeing the passage, “including the interiors of stores selling new books, those selling used books, and shops loaning books, as well as their store-rooms,” one can understand its thoroughness. The directive carried out the spirit of items one and four in the first memorandum sent by the GHQ to the Japanese government. They still did not know the world of Japanese books very well, so they only decided on a definite objective first.
As it was confiscation, no money was paid out for the books being taken. As for the investigation and confiscation of the applicable books, or in other words searching for and snatching them, one should keep a lookout for where it says, “Confiscation and investigation is something that should take place with the cooperation of the person being dealt with, but if the subject of a confiscation complains about the investigation or confiscation, or if the confiscator is in fear of harm or the like, he will be expected to request the assistance of police officials and to carry out his duty.”
In item 5 of the deputy minister’s directive, there is a mistake where it notes that those who resist would be punished in accordance with Imperial Ordinance No. 311, dated 12 June, 1936. To be precise, it is “Imperial Ordinance No. 311. Concerning the punishment for acts prejudicial to the Occupation objectives,” which was announced on 12 June, 1946. I found this out as a result of my investigation. He miswrote “1946” as “1936.” That document proclaims that, by Imperial decree, those acting contrary to the objectives of the GHQ would be punished, and article 4 says that offenders “will be punished with sentences up to ten years at hard labor or fines up to 75,000, or detention or a minor fine.”
The deputy minister’s directive was careful to provide blank forms plainly showing illustrations to indicate how the “identification document” that the confiscation officer had to carry and the “confiscated work” chart for details on the confiscated books that was to be taken to the location where the books were being confiscated were to be made up. (See the appended “Supplement 4.”)
What is interesting is the point that while they did only this, it was all to happen in secret; they were quaking with a concern bordering on neurosis as the GHQ’s designs were not to be made known to the Japanese population. Item 9 said, “The work on this matter shall not be disclosed to those who are not connected with it.” Item 3 on the back of the confiscating officers’ identification card read, “You must not let those not involved with these operations know about the execution of these operations.”
I’m sure it is understood that everything I’ve said means that all the meetings that took place at Tokyo University, the Imperial Library, and the prime minister’s residence related to the “book-burning” were secret meetings and no written records remain. If any of those involved let a few loose words slip in memoirs, our eyes would get as big as saucers. It is a mysterious world and one beyond our ability to try to reconstruct the whole affair by anything but inference.
If any one of my readers finds a new bit of information from someone that is more useful in clarifying this mystery, please let me know. My narrative is nothing more than a story based on the deductions I have been able to put together given the state of the data as I presently understand it.
At any rate, what is strange is that the document directs that confiscations were not to be carried out from private owners or libraries, that teachers at schools were not to be apprised of the situation, and that outside parties were not to be spoken to of it, but that is it. There is no specific punishment connected with violations of this strict secrecy. They could not control people’s tongues. Still, Japanese society has become immobilized, as if numbed by some narcotic, and over a period of sixty years has locked away her own past and totally forgotten that this “book burning” had even taken place.
Could this be due to the mystery of human nature? Could it be due to Japan’s particular sentiments of defeat? Could it be the American occupation force’s skill in laying psychological traps? Or, perhaps, could it be because it was nothing more than a “book-burning” and not something like a group massacre? Was it because the Japanese personally tended heavily toward excessive self-regulation that, in a reverse-propaganda, militaristic books were labeled the devil’s books? (Though there was a military organization in Japan, Japan itself was not militaristic. If one says that it was, one might as well say the same of America at the time.) Did this create a taboo deep in the hearts of the Japanese, and before they knew it they had lost the freedom to think at ease and without concern about their own history?

The occupation forces had a sense of having blundered

There is one remaining interesting result. The occupation forces did not always have a sense of achievement or satisfaction, and they were left with a sense of failure that the “book burning” operation could not have been called a clear success.
It seems that early on there were those who got the feeling that things were not going to go well. A memorandum to Gen. MacArthur dated 15 April, 1946, (Central Liaison Office document No. 173) says that the number of printed copies of Japanese publications of the period from prewar through the end of the war were, generally, few in number, and many of them that had been scattered about had been reduced to ashes in the American bombing of Japanese cities.
Early on in the occupation, there were things the Americans seized and disposed of on their own. The book shops were dissatisfied about not being recompensed for the items being seized and were uncooperative. As a general rule, they were not able to touch works that were intentionally kept or hidden in private houses. It is said that the cause of the ultimate feeling of failure is that they were ordered not to let anyone not involved in the confiscation operations know about them, so it would have been difficult to seek the cooperation of the Japanese populace at large.
Still, with the support from the Japanese government during the period of operation (March of 1946 through July of 1948), based on the list narrowed down to 7,769 works designated for seizure, they just managed to succeed in confiscating a total of 38,330 items. We still have a chart that was made per directions from both sides which puts together a precise record of the total number of all the works confiscated during each reporting period. (See appended “Supplement 5.”)
The chart is in sequential order, but the vice minister of education’s directive, which was issued encouraging the action of the prefectural governors and expanded the confiscation operations nationwide, was issued just after the chart ends ― that is, after July of 1948. Therefore, the actual total number of books confiscated is not just over 38,000 items. It has to have been more, but we just have not found the document with those numbers.
When I was a student, I often found these kinds of books in second-hand book shops. I have to wonder if a considerable number of items may have escaped, hidden from the investigations of the GHQ, but I just do not know.

The whereabouts of the large number of works sent to America

Officially, books that were privately held and those kept in libraries remained in Japan just as they were, while those seized by the GHQ were almost entirely pulped and given new life as books for Japanese school children.
Unfortunately, I do not know at present whether the original books used in making decisions for confiscation by the Research Section of the Press, Pictorial & Broadcast Division of the Civil Censorship Detachment are actually housed in the National Diet Library as expected, or whether they were different books. If they are one and the same, the Research Section marched into the then-Imperial Library to set about their work.
According to a different document, after having been stored in the CCD library, the original books that were used were shipped to the University of Maryland.
Here, I have to give a brief account of the general means by which the books, periodicals, newspapers, etc., seized in Japan during the occupation were shipped to America. Generally it breaks down into two routes.
One route had works that had been submitted to the CCD for review, after being collected in the CCD library, shipped to the University of Maryland by Gordon W. Prange, a University of Maryland professor who worked for the GHQ. It is a huge collection, containing some 71,000 books and pamphlets, 14,000 magazines, and 18,000 newspapers, as well as maps, posters, photographs, etc. The other route was to the Washington Document Center (WDC) where they were briefly stored before being sent to the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
Many times I have said that the “censorship” of postwar publications and letters and “book burning” of prewar and wartime publications were two separate matters that must be distinguished as such. The amount of material sent to America from Japan was massive and the two mixed together complicatedly so of course they can not be easily divided; but I suppose it would be fair to say roughly that items in the censored category were sent to Maryland University and formed the Prange Collection, while the confiscated books that were designated for “burning” escaped pulping in Japan and were transferred to the Washington Document Center. Of course, it appears that there are books in the Prange Collection that were designated for confiscation. We will consider this later. The works transferred to the Washington Document Center began by being sent to the Library of Congress just after the war (that is, quickly, in 1946), and was a grouping of 27,000 works that were mostly books and periodicals.
Consider it this way: it is a fact that works on Japanese history, and in particular the Sh?wa history that had the value of knowing about the background for the formation of her fighting spirit, were thoroughly shipped off to America.
I have already said that the Prange Collection is primarily publications from the time of the occupation, while the Washington Document Center collection is primarily made up of works from before and during the war. In the Prange Collection, however, Prange wrote that there were 4,500 prewar books, apparently designated for confiscation, that had been turned over by the Ministry of Education then at no charge. When I recently made an inquiry with the University of Maryland about this, however, they were unable to confirm the existence of the materials. It appears that the university has 4,000?6,000 Japanese books that are now incomplete, and the majority of them are naval library documents, confiscated documents, and censored prewar documents from the Ministry of Home Affairs. There is no way to know how to tell which, if any, of them were handed over by the Ministry of Education. These materials are not actively open to the public, but they will show them to people who have an interest.
Concerning works in the Prange collection other than items censored during the occupation, in other words prewar and wartime books, there is an investigative report by Eiko Sakaguchi.10 In the Prange Collection there are only thirty-seven books that predate 15 August, 1945, and they are all identified as “confiscated books” with the date of 1947.
I do not know for certain whether those thirty-seven books were from among those 4,500 books.
The Prange Collection’s principle assembled content ― documents used in occupation-era censorship ― was made known to the Japanese around 1970, and in 1972 the Diet took up the issue of requesting the materials be repatriated. In view of their importance, the National Diet Library has started microfilming them. The microfilming of the magazine and newspaper sections should be finished by now. This means that it is now possible to read them in Japan.
As for the prewar and wartime “burned books,” on the other hand, their exact whereabouts are unknown. As I have said, they do not fit in with the field of the Prange Collection.
I have already said that the confiscated books in the Washington Document Center are primarily those that were sent to the Library of Congress. Of the 27,000 items said to be in this collection, 23,000 were works related to the Imperial army and navy, and these were returned to the Japan Defense Agency (now the Japanese Ministry of Defense) in 1974.
In addition, a section on documents censored for being unpatriotic by the prewar Ministry of Home Affairs was returned and is now in the National Diet Library, and materials related to the cabinet and the various ministries was returned and is housed in the National Archives of Japan. “Publications Targeted for Seizure During the Occupation and Stored in the United States Library of Congress” (see “Supplement 6”), which takes a look at all of them, is an important and very useful page.
Please look at it carefully. It seems certain that the confiscated books we are looking for are on that chart as serial 5 number 1.

These on serial 5 make up a large number, and the work of cataloguing them ended by ’96, but just the cataloguing from ’93 to ’96 had reached 60,000 works. It goes without saying that even before that the cataloguing had been going on, and we don’t know the exact number of volumes. Also, besides items targeted for confiscation, the United States Library of Congress had been collecting Japanese books and magazines even before the war, and together with those they are now listed in an online catalogue that can be referenced.11

After looking it up on the internet, I found that the majority of the confiscated books are there. That is to say, we have ascertained that they are at the Library of Congress. I must state in advance that this is not the result of looking up each and every book; rather, it is from looking up a chosen sample of them.
Other than these, as I have said, eighty to ninety percent are in the National Diet Library in Japan.
From my research on the internet I realized that the collection of Japanese books in the Library of Congress is both large-scale and exhaustive. It is not that the confiscated books are collected there; rather, the books of the same authors (those that avoided the “book burning”) are almost all there in scrupulously kept collections of their complete works.

The possibility of a connection with the Tokyo Trials

In a memorandum from the Civil Censorship Detachment’s Research Section (the group who produced the list of works for confiscation) dated 4 April, 1946, the following is written (and given the date, we do not know whether the confiscation work had begun or not; it was in the early stages of getting under way):

Approximately 15,000 works held at the library of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere Research Institute are in the hands of the advance team from the Washington Document Center. They are principally reference works in English and Japanese, and those in Japanese have already been shipped to the Washington Document Center. As for the Western books, some have been taken as the personal property of American officials, and some have been taken [by others] as presents when they return to their own country. Many are lost.

This tells us of the victors’ rough handling of their plundered goods. Officials who just arrived in Japan scraped together anything they could get their hands on and sent things to America or took them as their own. This was happening at the same time as the GHQ was sending its first memorandum to the Japanese government detailing their orders for confiscation of books.
On 24 April of that same year, George Atcheson, Jr., head of the Diplomatic Section of the GHQ, wrote the following memorandum: “Concerning the confiscation of propaganda publications, I believe the American State Department wants to demonstrate its interest, so both I and the GHQ Diplomatic Section want to receive five of each of the confiscated publications.”
On 26 April, the American army’s intelligence department sent a reply to Atcheson consenting to his request.
If things were put into effect in this manner, it is a possibility that several tens of thousands of important books were shipped off to Washington at this early stage.
We do not know what happened. The care with which the Research Section finally put together their list after taking two years and three months of a secretive screening and inquiry process until the handing down of a verdict of “guilty” on the books ought to have been assessed, but by taking advantage of the confusion, before that, other wild outrages were overlooked. There is now no way to search out by what route each one of the tens of thousands of important Japanese books that passed through the Washington Document Center to be collected in the Library of Congress made their way across the sea.
For the record, the director of the Diplomatic Section, George Atcheson, was not the same person as the secretary of state during the Korean War, Dean Acheson. He had been sent by the State Department to Japan to act as a political advisor to MacArthur, and served as chairman of the Allied Council for Japan. He was killed in a plane crash in 1947.
In Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan, Richard B. Finn wrote the following:

[T]he political adviser in Tokyo, George Atcheson, wrote President Truman on January 4, 1946, that “the emperor system must disappear if Japan is ever to be wholly democratic.”
…
George Atcheson suggested to the general [MacArthur] on November 6 that the trials be expedited….
MacArthur asked the political adviser on November 7 to list persons he thought should be arrested and to provide evidence. Largely on the basis of information from Washington, Atcheson submitted four lists in November and December, compiled by Robert A. Fearey and John Emmerson of his staff with the help of Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman. 12

Atcheson was serving as chairman of the Allied Council for Japan at the time he was discussing the issue of book confiscations with related countries. The Soviet Union and China made relentless attacks and demands that the Japanese political make-up be utterly destroyed, but he just ignored them. On this matter, however, he was not about to listen to the Japanese side.
Atcheson’s objectives in punishing Japan are truly clear as shown in the above fact that Herbert Norman contributed to the selection of names to be tried at the Tokyo Trials, and that Atcheson himself had written to Truman advocating the extinction of the “emperor system.” At the heart of the GHQ, he was of course concerned with the “book burning” and he participated in it without fail.
Herbert Norman went to Japan immediately after the war, becoming a member of GHQ while a Canadian citizen. He developed deep associations with the leadership of the Japanese Communist Party who were now free to operate, and based on their conversations wrote the documents charging the Class-A war criminals. I am at present completely in the dark as to how or where Norman was involved with the “book burning” or whether in fact he actually was ― but if he was, it has deep implications. This is because as the prosecutors indicated at the Tokyo Trials with “Charge One (conspiracy to commit crimes against peace),” that conspiracy “began on 1 January, 1928.” That is the exact same day that was designated for the start of the book-burning period.
Everything about the “book burning” is shrouded in mystery. I have already mentioned how we have to produce our inferences by tying small facts together. Those victims made to cooperate and those who willingly collaborated were aware that they were doing things they should have been ashamed of; but putting on an innocent face, they continued their offences.
This is because book burning is an act of selling one’s soul.
Japan lost the war, but there was absolutely no reason for “book burning.”
There is no reason for the living foundation of any country ― its politics, thought, history, culture, ethics, military, diplomacy, and, lastly, religion ― to be judged by another people. It was a mistake for Japan to deny that their prewar and wartime stance was assertive when others pointed it out. It was a blunder. Because their books were burned and they lost them, postwar they don’t even realize the fact that they are just living but they are not themselves.
The dispirited appearance of recent Japan and recent Japanese has its roots in this.
I think that, to take back their selves, they have to start by taking back the books that disappeared from them. That is why I have taken up this task.
A sampling of the confiscated books

Exactly what types of books were those that were targeted for confiscation? Finally, I would like to introduce a few random authors and titles, broken down here into several different groupings.

? Hasegawa Ry?, Nichibei kaisen no shins? (“The facts about the outbreak of war between Japan and America”), Dai-Nippon Shuppan
? Kuruse Sabur?, Nichibei k?sh? no keii (“Chronology of the Japanese-American negotiations”), Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbunsha13
? Nakama Teruhisa, Nichibei tatakau beki ka (“Must Japan and America fight?”), Shink?sha
? Kawamura Mikio, Nichibei fu sen ron (“Arguments against war between Japan and America”), Kaigun Kenky?sha
? Suetsugu Nobumasa and Nakano Seig?, Nichibei kiki to sono mit?shi (“The Japanese-American crisis and seeing through it”), Shin Keizai J?h?sha

? Yasuoka Masahiro, T?y? seiji tetsugaku (“Eastern political philosophy”), Genk?sha
? Miyazaki Ichisada, T?y? ni okeru sobokushugi no minzoku to bunmeishugi no shakai (“Simplistic peoples and civilized societies in the East”), Fuzamb?
? Ishibashi Tanzan, Ch?ki kensetu no igi to waga keizai no taiky?ryoku (“The significance of long-term construction and the stamina of our economy”), T?y? Keizai
? Sugiyama Heisuke, Shina to Shinajin to Nihon (“China, the Chinese, and Japan”), Kaiz?sha
? Yoshino Sakuz?, Jiji mondai k?za (7) Tai-Shi mondai (“Course on current topics (7) The China question”), Nippon Hy?ronsha

? Wang Jingwei (trans. Kurone Sh?saku), Nihon to tazusaete (“Brought along with Japan”), Asahi Shinbunsha
? Watsuji Tetsur?, Nihon no shind?, Amerika no kokuminsei (“Japan’s way of loyalty, America’s national characteristics”), Chikuma Shob?
? Nakagawa Yoichi, Nihon no ris? (“The Japanese dream”), Hakusuisha
? It? Sei, Sens? no bungaku (“The literature of war”), Zenkoku Shob?
? Mushak?ji Saneatsu, Dait?a sens? shikan (“Personal impressions of the Great East Asian War”), Kawade Shob?

? Shinobu Junpei, Fusen j?yaku ron (“Discussions on an anti-war treaty”), Kokusai Renmei Ky?kai
? Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Dai-niji ?sh? taisen no kenky? (“A study of the Second World War in Europe”), T?y? Keizai
? Takahashi Kamekichi, Senji keizai k?wa (“A discourse on wartime economics”), Konnichi no Mondai Sha
? Kanda K?ichi, Shis?sen to senden (“Thought warfare and propaganda”), Kashiwa Shob?
? Sakurai Tadashi, Dait?a Kaiky? hatten shi (“A history of the growth of Islam in Greater East Asia”), Sanseid?

? Nippon H?s? Shuppan Ky?kai (=NHK Shuppan), Shussei heishi o okuru uta (“Songs for sending soldiers off to the front”)
? NHK Shuppan, Kigen ni-sen roppyaku nen sh?ka (“An anthem marking the 2,600th year of Japan’s founding [1940]”)
? NHK Shuppan, Moyuru ?zora (“The blazing heavens”)
? NHK Shuppan, Umi o wataru arawashi (“The air ace going overseas”)
? NHK Shuppan, Aa Kitashirakawa-no-miya denka (“Ah, your highness Kita-shirakawa!”)

? Yomiuri Shinbunsha, Shina jihen jikki (2)?(15) (“A true record of the China Incident” (2)?(15)”), Hibonsha
? Miyai K?tar?, Shina jihen j?gun kish?roku (1) (2) (3) (“Collected records from accompanying the army during the China Incident (1), (2), (3)”), Ky?-a Ky?kai
? Tamai Seigor?, Shina jihen seisen shashin shi (“A photographic history of the China Incident crusade”), Ch?y?sha
? Rikugun Gah? Sha, Shina jihen senseki no shiori (“A guidebook to old battlefields of the China Incident (all 3 vols.)”), Rikugun Juppei Bu
? Ministry of the Navy, Kagayaku Ch?sei: Shina jihen h?koku bidan (1) (5) (6) (8) (“Shining loyalty: moving tales of patriotism in the China Incident (1) (5) (6) (8)”) Kaigun Ky?kai

? Araki Sadao, Teikoku no gunjin seishin (“The spirit of the imperial soldier”), Ch?f?sha
? Mayama Seika, N?gi sh?gun (“General N?gi”), Dai-Nippon Y?benkai K?dansha
? Matsunami Jir?, Hagakure bushid? (“Hagakure-style bushid?”), Ichiro Shoen
? Sano Yasushi, Attsu-to gunshin butai t?kon ki (“A record of the fighting spirit of the heroic forces on Attu Island”), Reimei Ch?sha
? Yamanaka Minetar?, Nomonhan sen hishi (“A secret history of the battle of Khalkhin Gol”), Seibund? Shink?sha

? Tsurumi Y?suke, B?ch? no Nihon (“The expanding Japan”), Dai-Nippon Y?benkai K?dansha
? Rash Behari Bose and Ishii Tetsuo, Indo shinryaku hishi (“The tragic history of the invasion of India”), Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbunsha
? Nihon-Thai Ky?kai, Tai-koku ts?shi (“An overview of the history of Thailand”), Ky?-a Nippon Sha
? Matsuda Nobuo, Ny?jirando no sangy? shigen (“Industrial resources of New Zealand”), Shunch?sha
? Sakakibara Jun, Biruma no asa (“Morning in Burma”), Konnichi no Mondai Sha

? Yamada Yoshio, Kokutai no hongi (“Underlying principles of the national polity”), H?bunkan
? Ministry of Education, Kokutai no hongi (“Underlying principles of the national polity”), Cabinet Printing Office
? Satomi Kishio, Kokutaih? no kenky? (“A study of the laws of the national polity”), Kinsh?sha
? Sugiura Shigetake and Shiratori Kuraichi, Kokutai shingi (“The true meaning of the national polity”), Sekai Bunko Kank?kai

? Tokutomi Iichir? (Soh?), K?d? Nippon no sekaika (“The Imperial Way: the globalization of Japan”), Min’y?sha
? Kageyama Masaharu, K?d? Man-Shi kensetsu shian (“A private plan to establish the Imperial Way in Manchuria and China”), Dai-Nippon Seisant?
? Uchida Ry?hei, Shina kan: kokunan taru (“Regarding China: the coming national crisis”), Wakabayashi Han
? Yanagita Kunio, Shint? to minzokugaku (“Shint? and ethnology”), Meiseid? Shoten

? Uehara Kunz?, Hy?jun Uehara Marai-go (1) (2) (3) (“Standard Uehara Malaysian (1) (2) (3)”), Seinansha
? Sawa Hisaji, Gobi sabaku tankengy? (“The Gobi Desert expedition.”), Meguro Shoten
? Ishigami Sei, Arasuka, Ary?shan (“Alaska, the Aleutians”), Kik? Seinensha
? Hibino Shir?, ?son Kuriiku (“Wusong Creek”), Ch?? K?ronsha
? ? no Tadatatsu, Gagaku (“Gagaku ― traditional court music”), Rokk? Sh?kai

? Kikuchi Kan (Hiroshi), Ni-sen roppyaku nen shissh? (“Historical extracts of 2,600 years”), D?mei Ts?shinsha
? Minoda Muneki, Nippon seishin to kagaku seishin (“Japanese spirit and scientific spirit”). Genri Nippon Sha
? Kamei Katsuichir?, Nihonjin no shi (“The death of the Japanese”), Shink?sha
? ?kawa Sh?mei, Nippon seishin kenky? (“Studies of the Japanese spirit”), Meiji Shob?
? Inoue Tetsujir?, Sh?sei z?ho: Nippon seishin no honshitsu (“The essence of the Japanese spirit ― Revised and expanded edition”), K?bund? Shoten

? Josef M?rz, Kaiy? chiseijigaku: rekky? to seikaiken (“Ocean geopolitics: the great powers and control of the seas”), Kagakushugi K?gy?sha
? Rudolf von Weldt, Kakute Doitsu ha kaisen shita (“Thus Germany started the war”), Kaiz?sha
? Walter Pal???, Shigen sens? (“A war of resources”), Seibund? Shink?sha
? Oswald Spengler, Sekai wa doko e iku (“Where is the world going?”), Nihon Gaiji Ky?kai
? P. Argus???, Sensha ni miru Doku-So sensen (“Seeing the German-Soviet front lines from their tanks”), Okakura Shob?
? Rudolf Kjellen, Ry?do, minzoku, kokka: chiseigaku no genten (“Dominions, nations, and states: the original text on geopolitics” = Der Staat als Lebensform), Sanseid?
? Wolf Dewelt???, Eikoku kaigun ron (“Discourse on the British navy”), Asahi Shinbunsha

? Takahashi Y?, Ajia shinryaku shi (“A history of aggression in Asia”), Kasumigaseki Shob?
? Miya Keiji, Amerika no tai-Nichi b?ryaku shi (“A history of American scheming against Japan”), Dai T?a Sha
? Sait? Eizabur?, Eikoku no sekai shinryaku shi (“A history of Britain’s world aggression”), Dait? Shuppansha
? Arita Hachir?, Bei-Ei no T?a kakuran (“British and American disturbances in East Asia”), Mainichi Shinbunsha
? Horinouchi Kensuke, Bei-Ei no sekai shinryaku (“British and American world aggression”), Mainichi Shinbunsha

A deeply interesting thing turns up as a result of investigating the list of the GHQ ranking by author of the confiscated books, so please take note of Supplement No. 7.
The top three companies targeted by the GHQ for the most elimination of their published products are the Asahi Shinbunsha with 140 items, the Dai-Nippon Y?benkai K?dansha with 83 items, and the Mainichi Shinbunsha with 81 items.
For a long time after the war, these companies embraced a left-wing, anti-American mood, and these are representative historical masochists of the mass media who have continued to carp on about Japanese aggression and Japanese disturbances in Asia. Is this not strange? Is it not interesting? I would like to know what you think about this.
Iwanami Shoten is a publishing company that has been occupied by the Japanese Communist Party, so their left turn was purely a postwar development. The Asahi, the Mainichi, and K?dansha are not like Iwanami. As I see it, their having been subjected to “book-burning” by the GHQ is closely connected to this at a level deep in their psyches. When the vanquished has the depths of their spirit shattered, they cozy up with the victors, flattering them, even going so far as to make the victor’s gods their gods.

Chapter Two:
Disobedience at the Heart of Japan’s Serenity
as the Occupation Began

“The post-war war” of words and schemes

One peculiarity of the American occupation policy was their not issuing orders to do this, but instead forbidding that. I recall Miura Shumon telling me this in a conversation we had long ago. For example, they did not order everyone to hang the Stars and Stripes at their houses. Instead, anyone who abused or slandered MacArthur or the occupation forces even the slightest bit was punished by being sent down to Okinawa as forced laborers. The occupation forces did not act to cause widespread animosity among the Japanese; rather, to create a fear of disobedience. They were successful at this because that fear lurked deep within, transmitted wordlessly from one person to the next, and Japanese themselves went forward and promoted the restrictions on their own. Prohibitions spread automatically.
The occupation did not pointlessly try to convert the Japanese population to Christianity all at once. Destroying faith ultimately pins down a country’s national power, however, and they knew that that was the best scheme for destroying a country. This is why they allowed the imperial system remain, though they confiscated the larger part of the imperial family’s properties, and ancient members of the imperial family ― who should have been the bulwarks of the house ― were divested of their imperial status. They had the emperor issue his “Declaration of Humanity,” and had a Quaker widow assigned as tutor for the crown prince. They went so far as to remove all the barriers and made the emperor as any other Japanese person. This dressed up the imperial house as democratized. They set the time bomb that foreshadowed the eventual powerlessness of the imperial system some decades later.
I can only presume they believed they were working to civilize the Japanese ― a meddlesome, interfering missionary zeal of teaching and making Japan an advanced culture.
As I think about it, the censorship and book prohibitions by the GHQ was the most complete form of not issuing any orders to do this but instead forbidding that, and it has to be considered the ultimate destruction of thought. In particular, looking back several decades later at the book prohibitions, it was one of those time bombs that, as time passed, turned out to have been quite effective. Though we cannot make an accurate count, some 500 books with the words “imperial household,” “national polity,” “emperor,” “imperial way,” “Shint?,” or “Japanese spirit” in their titles were thoroughly abandoned; it seems as if there was some plan that saw through the coming destruction of faith by the occupation. I believe that traditional Anglo-Saxon methods of governorship were foisted on other occupied country besides Japan, where they took root. We can only think that the reason Japan did not take as easily to Christianity as did the Philippines or Korea was the depth of her singular history, cultivated by 2,000 years of Buddhism and Shint?.
In particular, the book prohibitions that erased the history of those seventeen years of the formative period of Japan’s fighting spirit in front of her people and forced them to wear blinders was an embarrassing act that did damage to depths of the Japanese soul. That was not all, however. There was also the presupposition that the occupying forces would inculcate on Japan a new history ― a viewpoint of American creation. That is, a foolish fairy tale in which, from the Manchurian Incident on, Japan became a devilish country, an aggressor nation, and America, who actually did not want war and tried and tried to prevent it, was finally forced to stand up and smite the devilish country. It was an absolutely necessary process that this fairy tale be forced into the heads of the Japanese.
One hundred million people were completely ruled by the myth that America would give Japan democracy and a rebirth before anyone knew it.
In other words, it would be fair to say that a postwar war ― a war of words and schemes ― continued from 1945. The Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of the GHQ was on the front line of that engagement, and one might say that the six-member Research Section (RS) was the vanguard in the hand-to-hand fighting, so to speak. It is interesting to note that early on in 1946 the GHQ was uneasy, and that there was a sense that implementation of a banning of books would be a failure may be because there was a sense that there was a secret resistance among the Japanese, an underground insubordination against the occupation forces. Having said that, the Japanese as a whole were little by little getting used to obediently wearing their blinders, and before anyone knew it, by around 1948 or 1949 they were all on their way to being pro-American. Whether it was a victory by the GHQ’s strategies or the degree of Japan’s submission, this area is related to the secrets hidden in people’s hearts so even though we try to clarify it, it is inexplicable and most difficult to understand part of the mystery of postwar history.
I remember from my youth that there was a feeling of wide-spread disobedience for the average Japanese citizen. It is sad to say, but I have to wonder if it was not the leadership class who were the most fragile, with no resistance to the American occupation forces. In particular, the weakness of the intellectual leaders ― the intelligentsia, the academics, and the literati ― was embarrassing. This means that we need to reexamine and evaluate Japan’s cooperation with America, such as the purge of public officials like Makino Eiichi of Tokyo University’s faculty of letters, who had been recognized before the war as a first-rate legal scholar. There is not sufficient evidence to determine what Kaneko Takez? and Odaka Kunio did individually, but in the Tokyo University faculty of letters in 1946?47, it was “guilt by association” and everyone was guilty.
If we think about it, were they not betraying their own people? They committed crimes like those committed by the collaborators in the Vichy government in Nazi-occupied France and who were judged by the French after the war, and they should therefore meet the same fates.
For some reason, to this day Japan has gone on without an awareness of these issues occurring. Might this be because Japan was the defeated country? To be sure, one can not say that France was exactly a victorious country. Be that as it may, on the point of obliterating a country’s history, annihilating its culture, and destroying the patriotism of its citizens, excepting certain barbaric acts there is really no difference between the things done by the occupation forces of Nazi Germany and America.
Confiscations were carried out in accordance with a certain directive of the vice-minister of the Ministry of Education based on advice from intelligentsia of different prefectures, designated by their governors, and intellectuals other than local teachers connected with education. Because of this, there surely must be no shortage of lists from around 1948 of “officials responsible for seizure of propaganda texts” buried deep in the archives in each prefectural governor’s office. Without a doubt these people, putting on innocent faces, later became celebrated individuals in their locales and achieved some status. Even though considerable time has passed, their names must now be made public to ascertain who these officials responsible for seizure of propaganda texts were. There is no statute of limitations on issues of this sort. Without a precise remorseful conclusion, Japanese will not be able to stand up as independent people no matter how much time passes.

The dreadful system where private messages were censored

I hope that questioning those connected with the event who are still alive will take place without fail it to find out who it was who executed the prohibitions, and that other investigators will follow me. The situation with “censorship,” however, has been studied, and it is more or less known about. Some may be familiar with Et? Jun’s book, Tozasareta gengo k?kan (“The locked language-room”). It bears the subtitle “Occupation army censorship and postwar Japan.”
This was a book that investigated the matter of GHQ censorship at the library of the University of Maryland, and informed the Japanese of the result of that research. This work is an extraordinarily important investigation into the Prange Collection14 and its background, and it would be fair to say that it has had a considerable impact. Of course, the book does not have as its theme the prohibition of books. I can not be certain, but as far as I can tell, Et? did not know much about the existence of the proscribed books. He studied the activities of the CCD, but he made no references to its subsection, the RS.
Et? wrote an article titled “Amerika wa Nihon de no ken’etsu o ikani junbi shite ita ka?” (“How did America prepare for censorship in Japan?”) that was published in the November, 1982, edition of Shokun! magazine. Tozasareta gengo k?kan was published in 1989. The existence of the Prange Collection came to be known in Japan about the middle of 1965, and the Diet has brought up demands for the return of the confiscated materials any number of times since 1972. The National Diet Library came to know of the importance of those materials from that time. All the GHQ paperwork was gathered and shipped to America in 1949, but in 1992, work began to put the Prange Collection on microfilm. First microfilmed were the magazines; and then the microfilmed newspapers, made by the Maryland University, were purchased. Now they seem to be going for the children’s books. Et?’s research was laboriously done under this flowing chain of microfilm work.
Given this, there is a certain amount of hope on the theme of “censorship,” and as the schemes of the occupation forces also have come to light, we next turn our eyes to the important “confiscated propaganda texts” transferred from the Washington Document Center (WDC) to the Library of Congress where they are now housed. Does one not start to feel that it is time to make a request for a factual investigation of them and that they be returned to Japan? One of the goals of this book is to raise new questions for the reader to consider, but before that, we must turn our attention once again to political and psychological themes to inquire why America was able to cajole Japan so easily.
For example, right after the war, on Sept. 18, 1945, an interview with Hatoyama Ichir? criticizing the cruelty of the atomic bomb massacre was included in the Asahi newspaper, but the publication of the newspaper was prevented.15 When Ishibashi Tanzan (at the time, president of the T?y? Keizai Shinp? ― the Oriental Economist) criticized the acts of violence by soldiers of the occupation army in the T?y? Keizai Shinp?, every single edition was seized. Et? recounts these events in his book.
I do not know whether the reader knows this, but for a long time after the war, one would not have been able to read an article or see any pictures concerning the atomic bomb massacre. One was able to do so for the first time only after the conclusion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, in Asahi Graph. Until that time, the Japanese people had not been permitted to see photographs of the damage caused by the atomic bomb.
Not all, but many, of the letters written by fathers and uncles of my generation, or people a bit older than I, were arbitrarily selected for examination and were censored. Approximately one letter out of every hundred was opened and read. There are many people who can remember receiving the opened letters; that is, letters that bear the censors’ stamp. These opened letters even included personal correspondence.
One may say that this censorship, and this book’s subject of prohibited books, are separate incidents, but though the method of execution was different, the organization and motive on the part of the Americans were the same. Therefore, the political and psychological circumstances for both of them of course shared common features.
The people who participated in the censorship of magazine and newspaper articles and letters were all Japanese. All were intelligent: they could speak English, and all were expert at translating Japanese text into English. There were between 8,000 and 10,000 of these Japanese cooperating with the occupation forces.
As to how this cooperation transpired, right after the war, there were no jobs and no food for the demobilized intelligentsia. Since they had no money and nothing to eat, they worried about starving. The one thing they did have, however, was an ability with English. Such people responded to the GHQ’s recruitment, running to sell out their country and hoping to hide the fact. Among these 8,000 to 10,000 Japanese were people who became the heads of reform governing bodies, the presidents of major corporations, celebrated journalists, or university professors. None of them, however, have ever spoken a single word about their erstwhile involvement in the job of censoring documents.
There was, however, one exceptional, brave individual who offered a personal confession. The above information is in the book GHQ ken’etsu kan (“A GHQ censor”), by Kai Yuzuru. He had been born in 1910. He had graduated from Tokyo University with a degree in English and then worked as an education official in a Japanese government?established education facility in Mongolia, and then had been demobilized. Without a job, there was no way he could make a living, so he applied to take the censor’s test and passed it. His book details the conditions that led him to become a censor, and the difficult and painful time he spent working a job that must have humiliated him. Kai was fortunate in being able to find another job, so he only worked as a censor for two months.
The object was reading Japanese people’s letters, translating them into English, and then showing them to the Americans of the occupying army. I imagine people would think, “why not write fake English translations to protect Japanese friends?”, but there was a frightful system in place. There were censors placed above other censors. If there were a hundred letters, it was the American army who extracted a hundred letters. If, for example, the Japanese censor who handed them over found five letters that he thought were problems, he would translate them and present the translations. Should the American army censor above the Japanese censor wonder whether there might be more suspicious letters among the remaining ninety-five, once again they would extract a sampling. They created a harsh system wherein Japanese had to investigate other Japanese and one censor would inspect another.
There were criteria for something to be censored. I was shocked when I learned of them, but they were very thorough:
(1) “Items with the slogan ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ or praise for the conduct of the Japanese military.” (2) “Items with criticism of these.” I can understand why the first would be no good, but the second was also problematic for some reason. (3) “Items with praise of the supreme commander, Gen. Mac-Arthur.” (4) “Items insulting the same.” Both of these were forbidden, but which one really should be? (5) “Items critical of the occupation army.” (6) “Items receptive of the same.” Which of these two should be a problem? (7) “Items making suggestions about direct actions of the occupation army.” (8) “Items commending the speech or actions of commissioned officers [of the occupation].” I can understand that one should not write about the occupation army doing this or that, but the second is also forbidden. These rules were harsh! (9) “Items offering the pros and cons of the New Constitution presently under development.” Both of those aspects are forbidden: one can not praise it, nor can one complain about it. In other words, any letter referencing the New Constitution could not do either of those things.
Comparing such criteria, if there are a hundred letters, a hundred were censored. If five of those letters were suspicious and extracted, the remaining ninety-five were given to someone else to do. If someone had tried to trick the system and hide something, and it was discovered, he would have lost his job. Immediately. The next day, there would be nothing to eat.
It was a nasty way to do things.

The Japanese society’s eerie silence

We must think about what kind of an age it was where such things became possible, and we must make a re-examination of the profound Japanese psychology.
We certainly seem to be caught in a really outrageous trap, do we not?
In Et?’s book, Tozasareta gengo k?kan, he wrote of a significant point. When the occupation army first came into Japan, what surprised them was that all the people in Japan were entirely too calm. They thought they were being set up in some sort of trap. It was that quiet. Other occupied countries had not been like that. The populace would rampage while the army would revolt. That is why the occupation came into Japan wondering, “How many bloody disasters will we have to endure to govern that fanatical Japan, that Japan with their kamikaze planes?” Japan, however, was completely silent. Deathly quiet. It was enough to make people feel uneasy.
What was it with the Japanese society’s eerie silence?
Et? quoted a letter from a Japanese person exposed by the censors then:

It’s sudden, so I’m surprised. No matter how horrible the actual condition with the government became, no one wanted anyone to die in vain above and beyond their vows to accomplish the crusade. The enemy goes on about their humanitarianism and their internationalism, but how will they really behave toward the Japanese? I want you to think about all those victims of the war, who are beyond counting. It’s impossible not to feel hatred.

Japanese of the time only naturally would have thought that way. These were their true sentiments.
Here is another a passage from a confiscated letter:

Yesterday I went to Isezaki-ch? and saw them for the first time. They were proudly driving around in their automobiles and walking about. A sentry by the bridge plopped his butt on the handrail, dangling his gun on his shoulder, chewing gum.
When I think of how we were beaten by such a slovenly army, I’m so mortified I just can’t stand it.

The occupation army said such letters from Japanese were “outrageous” and would not pass them on to the addressees. As the Americans saw it, this showed the wicked hearts of the Japanese of the time, the true feelings of Japanese who had not given much reconsideration to things. Immediately after the occupation began, the American army censored these letters and sealed them up as they were unsympathetic and afraid that the Japanese, reading such things, would, as fellow Japanese, come to feel the same way as each other. That the Japanese society was eerily quiet was likely a result of this. Or, perhaps, there was a deeper psychological background for it.
This is what Et? writes of the real feelings of Japanese of the time. It is an important point, so I will quote him:

The Japanese then did not think at all that the misery of the war and the defeat had been brought about by their own “wickedness.”
Those “victims of the war, who are beyond counting” were not the product of Japanese wickedness; rather, they were the result of slaughter and destruction wrought by the enemy (that is, the American army). The one for whom one feels that “hatred” has to be, rather than the Japanese government or the Japanese army, the one who was their killer and their destroyer. Japanese then most typically thought this way. From this viewpoint when looking at the signs of the times, even though Japanese were school children, they had to feel the eyes of “Mr. Soldier-who-died-in-battle” on their backs. In other words, both the living and the dead shared the same sights here.

I, too, clearly remember those times. I was a fourth grader at the time, and I distinctly recall when the American soldiers came to our school for the first time. I also remember Japanese being surprisingly calm. I think the American occupation army was afraid of the calm Japanese.
It is true that “the one for whom one feels that ‘hatred’ has to be, rather than the Japanese government or the Japanese army, the one who was their killer and their destroyer. Japanese then most typically thought this way.” The occupation forces were susceptible to feeling this, and they used every means necessary to forbid Japanese from exchanging their mutual feelings even a little bit, or talking together.

Several reasons Japan became instantly docile after the war

The censoring of journalism and correspondence began in September, 1945.
I do not know whether it was because it was effective, but when the book prohibitions were taking place all over Japan, everyone seemed to be completely won over by American culture. As I have already said, the order for the prohibitions was in 1946, and immediately thereafter it began and the number of targeted books gradually increased. The directive was issued by the vice minister of the Ministry of Education, and when it was actually happening all over Japan was July, 1947. Japan at this time switched to being very pro-American.
I was a seventh grader in 1948, and I clearly remember the changing tides.
Experts on America suddenly threw their weight around, and going off to study in America became a cherished goal. Chewing gum, hot dogs, and Coca-Cola became immensely popular. People flocked to see the film Tarzan. They crowded in to see films like Hitchcock’s Suspicion, and westerns like John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, which re-invigorated a certain zest for life. In 1948, the San Francisco Seals, a triple-A baseball team, went to Japan, and many actresses showed up at Haneda Airport with bouquets for them.
In a manner of speaking, Japan became captivated by America. Hating America that much and then going to war ― what had it all been for? The Japanese had completely reversed course. I do not know what was in their hearts, but there can be no mistake that on the surface at least they had truly changed.
What was this complete change all about? I view it as a great mystery, and at the same time the Japanese also view it as such even today, but in that atmosphere the effect of the prohibition of books gradually took hold. I do not know when the prohibition of books ended. I do not know whether it went on right up to the day the San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed. Even so, as I mentioned in the first chapter about such a situation where books were on sale at used book stores, that no one would buy them. New books put out by the normal distribution system were obliterating the older ones, and there was a sense of war-weariness as well. Upon being told that certain volumes could not be read publicly, people pounced on new books instead of taking any notice of old ones. The war was over. Gradually it became normal that no one was reading the old books. We probably can not exclude consideration of Japanese fickleness either, but the first salvo was “censorship,” and the second salvo was “prohibition of books,” and it would be fair to say that their effect was that the world changed.
The film Aoi sanmyaku (“Blue Mountain Range”) premiered, and a song with lyrics saying “good-bye to old-fashioned garb” was in vogue. Pre-war books had become like that “old-fashioned garb.” Times changed in such an atmosphere.
The war ended and the Japanese became completely tranquil. They became totally docile towards America. What might have been the source of this loss of feelings of hostility? Even today this is a mystery. Still, I would like to dig a little deeper on this point, and try to consider it in a more integrated fashion.
The next point is something I wrote about in my book Kokumin no rekishi (“The people’s history”), in chapter 28, titled “What defeated Japan was the ‘post-war war’.” The first thing that I have to bring up is something simple. It is the fact that for Japan to survive economically after the war, Japan had to be part of the American market. There was a revolution taking place in China, and a war was brewing in Korea. Such were the times, and the only country Japan could rely on was America. This is an extremely easily understood reason.
The second reason is that from the beginning the Japanese really did not hate America or the Americans. For example, Poles hated Russians and Germans to the core, but Japanese did not have such a hatred toward Americans. It was out of pride that Japan fought America. I have to wonder, then, if the war with America was not in fact an abstract war. In the first place, before the war, most Japanese had never even seen an American, so there was no concrete animosity. That is, the Japanese were fighting an enemy they had never seen, and was not the enemy really Western rationalism? I imagine there was also a trace of fighting their own history there.
The third point is, I think, the most important. Even though there was no actual fighting on the home soil, Japan was afflicted by aerial bombardment and the atomic bombings. Though people nurse a desire for retribution regarding petty slights, they can not strike back against major ones. Such is the mentality. The people in the colonies in all the Asian countries were thoroughly tormented by means of petty slights on the part of the advanced nations of Europe and America, but Japan was not one of the countries who had been on the receiving end of those slights. That is why Japan was able to fight for so long, but finally, at the end of a desperate resistance, they were struck down by the dropping of the atomic bombs. Every possible means of going on was exhausted. Japan had been militarily knocked off her feet. That is the third major reason.
The fourth reason, I think, is that European and American cultures were originally the model for Japan. To fight with and be defeated by such a model would be extremely difficult to bear. Being defeated by the thing one desires to be before one is sufficiently like that thing oneself was a tremendous blow to the Japanese psyche. I think it is this problem, in particular, that is the reason for a complicated mentality where Japanese fall into “self-punishment.”
There are other reasons beyond these that the post-war Japanese became docile.
Why did the Japanese become so docile? Why is it that the Japanese had no revengefulness? What was the candidness of the Japanese ego? What was the weakness? The Japanese have thought about and worried about many things to this point. Only seventy-some years after the Meiji Restoration Japan was probably still unskilled at international diplomacy. It is also possible there was a national sense that was peculiar to being an island nation. I suspect there was also an accumulated feeling of war-weariness, and a backlash against the military’s swaggering ways. Not only that, but there was also anger by the people against the poor way of taking responsibility for governing where not one high official in the government took responsibility after losing the war. All of these various things are important, and putting it all together it is an unmistakable fact that we suddenly arrive here.
At the same time, the American army who came to occupy Japan and the British army vigorously argued, in effect, that “the enemy of the Japanese people was not the Americans, nor the British, nor the Russians; but rather, it was those who have led Japan up to this point” ― or “the enemy was Japan’s own feudal history.” With that, the tense thread that had been preserved until that time was summarily snipped. The view of Japanese historical guilt hit like an avalanche.
I think that there are sufficient reasons in all that I have presented here, but to be honest, I would like to offer one completely different reason.

The fighting was over but the war went on

The Japanese became docile, or they were struck down by a sense of defeat. The reason for this may be contrary to popular psychology. Might it be possible that, though defeated in outward appearance, deep in their hearts the Japanese continued to harbor a sense of “disobedience”? This “disobedience” was, in other words, the Japanese thinking, “we haven’t lost yet!” On the surface they may have seemed defeated, but my sense is that the outcome was they were not obedient.
The truth is that this feeling was held by some Japanese. I have already described that point in this book.
That fanaticism and that ambition that burned for that furious war suddenly became as quiet as a graveyard and as cold as ice. I have already said how, on seeing this, the occupation army was surprised, stunned, and then suspicious. Was this silence an indication of the Japanese resolution to eventually rise in retribution and endure incredible hardships to extract their vengeance? Was this domestic serenity because the Japanese had not sufficiently accepted their defeat? Such were the discomfiting thoughts going through their minds.
With this, they turned a harsh observant eye toward the inner hearts of the Japanese. Even though Japanese were outwardly falsifying their feelings, in their hearts they were concealing a sense of disobedience. Were the occupation forces not seeing through the mentality of disobedience toward historical judgment that was lurking under the surface of the Japanese tranquility? The various countries of Europe and America, surreptitiously observing this, said, “we will not allow this!”
The fighting was over but the war went on. That is what I am saying here.
In an article that appeared outside Japan in September, 1945, the Allied Powers raised their voices and pointed out that, “the Japanese are insufficiently sincerely cognizant of the fact of their defeat.” For example, it seems that a certain Japanese general, when told he would not be permitted to wear his sword at the surrender negotiations, openly displayed his anger and thereby almost brought the negotiations to an grinding halt. Some may remember how, after the Russo?Japanese War, Gen. Nogi Maresuke allowed Gen. Anatoly Stoessel to wear his sword at their meeting at Suishigong ― but the Allied Powers would not allow such a thing. In other words, the Allies had extremely strong suspicions that the Japanese army did not yet have a deep acceptance of the situation and did not acknowledge the reality that the war was lost.
As a matter of fact, what we were taught as children and accepted was that Japan had not been defeated by the war but instead had been defeated by the power of science. All Japanese thought that it had not been the war, but the atomic bomb that defeated them.
It is a fact that there was a sense of disobedience hidden in the Japanese. It is in me still now, and it is still truly in the Japanese of today. Such sentiment is still there, sixty years later; but no, in the past ten or twenty years the anti-American feeling has gradually grown stronger.
Is that all right? The American army did not liberate Japan. I myself have no awareness of having been liberated. The only thing I have any consciousness of is the occupation. My sense is clearly that, though defeated by force, Japan was not defeated by justice. Such feelings have continued to this day in our hearts. Is it not probable that this is actually why Japan’s post-war serenity and tranquility has been able to stay alive?
In other words, the fighting is over but the war continues.
On Aug. 29, 1945 when the fighting had been over for two weeks, a Yomiuri H?chi editorial said that they could not accept that Japan had lost the war:

From the beginning, there was not a single person who failed to revere the Imperial Rescript. It is with a sense that it cannot be, this attitude of acceptance of the truth of our defeat, for we made it to today and we have not yet been wiped out.

The meaning of that “it cannot be” was that Japan still had a margin of military strength. Looking at it today it is a bit of a joke, but this is a newspaper publicly displaying its martial spirit two weeks after the day the war ended.
In a speech on the program for his administration given on Sept. 5, Prime Minister Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko said that the decision to end the war had been made in solemn accord with the wishes of the emperor, and that the people needed to apologize to the emperor for not making enough of an effort in the war. This, too, shows a continuation of the martial spirit.
For the occupation forces, this was difficult to accept. They had to do something ― anything ― to beat down such martial sentiments. I have brought up the manifestation of that in this work: the prohibition of books, and the American army’s censorship and regulation of speech as presented in Et?’s book, Toza-sareta gengo k?kan.
At the time, there was no one who said that Japan had been evil in fighting the war, so no one was talking about “responsibility for the war.” If someone had said any such thing, people around him would probably have recoiled in shock. It would have been as if he started frothing at the mouth and fallen over. The phrase “war responsibility” was not the product of Japanese thought; rather, it had been a propaganda term by their former enemies which descended on Japan like a tidal wave, and it was to implant in the Japanese a sense of guilt. The occupation army, feeling uneasy over the tranquility they just could not explain in post-war Japan, tried all manner of things to divulge their true colors and to make sure that Japan would not rise up again. They had to thoroughly plunder Japan’s vitality. This extended to the act of banning books, and to this day 7,000 works ― or perhaps even more books beyond that number ― have yet to resurface. With this, those books have been erased from the hearts of the Japanese.
As I have already said, if we think we would like to see these books, we can read them to a certain extent at the National Diet Library. If we want to try we can conduct a detailed study. But the books are not in our hands. Researchers cannot freely get a hold of them and read them. Neither are they freely lent out, and there is a limit on how much can be copied. Studying the banned books is not a simple matter.
I have little by little been revealing the subject matter of the prohibited books that have been discretely entrusted to me, and what I would like to do from this point on is talk about them and say that there are books such as these and that they have been neglected for sixty years. I want to once more breath life into the hearts of Japanese of that time, written in those books, and how they saw the world.
I do not know how many books this task will require of me, but the second volume is already in preparation, and is being readied for printing. This is a challenge for which there is no end.

Japan’s quiet determination during the war against the ABCD Line

I would like to present one final illustration in this chapter.
One of the books to be banned that had the shortest shelf life was Bei-Ei chosen no shinso (“The real situation with the Anglo?American challenge ”), edited by the Far East War Investigative Committee, published on June 1, 1943, by the Mainichi Newspaper Co. The book was part of a series, and prominent people at the time were contributors. The series therefore quickly came under the scrutiny of the American forces, and more than half of them were proscribed.
Many things that could not be spoken of were included in this book, so the occupation choked off the discussion. Readers may be familiar with the so-called ABCD Line. It was formed by the military might of the Americans, British, Chinese, and Dutch (thus “ABCD”) to encircle the Japanese in the Pacific. What kind of implications this line might have had, how it was formed, and how Japan’s government and military understood it at the time ― all of these discussions were in that book.
What was surprising to me was the fact that the Japanese knew all about the Line. They grasped the fine details right down to the military capabilities involved. I will take up those particulars at a future opportunity, but at the end there is a part concerning this “vicious anti-Japanese Line.” I have already gone into some detail on this point, so I will briefly excerpt:

From immediately after the Russo?Japanese War and right up until the outbreak of this present war, the United States has either ostracized or coerced, and on top of that oppressed, and more. This contempt and rudeness heaped on Japan is something rare in the 4,000-year history of international diplomacy. In addition, the attitude taken by Great Britain toward Japan from around the time of the Meiji Restoration to the First Sino?Japanese War, as well as from the Washington Conference to just before the present war, is as difficult to distinguish from that of the United States as it is to tell a male crow from a female one. The only difference is Great Britain lacks an American-like attitude of imbecilic and base exhibitionism, and there it ends. When we regard the manner of many past British and American diplomatic moves concerning Japan ― with their overbearing substance being a given, as well as their attitude and haughtiness, their language and arrogance ― it is a difficult thing to describe in view of their vicious and unjust words. Looking back on it, how could they, our seniors, dare come to us expecting forbearance? In spite of ourselves we cannot help but remember the copious bitter tears hidden behind that great weight.

Only reading this much, it sounds like pretty harsh language, but the “viciousness” of the ABCD Line is presented before this in some detail, so it is a piece with considerable persuasive power. It is also related to what I mentioned earlier, that the Japanese war was fought out of the pride of being a nation of the first rank ― it was a war against an enemy who had never been seen, a war against Western rationalism, a war against their own pre-Meiji Restoration history. It was an insult to Japan so strong that one may wonder, if perhaps they had not fought and lost their self-respect, would the Japan of the post-war revival have existed?

We shall take up the history of Anglo?American insults and contempt toward Japan to a different volume. Only matters of a military nature are here, so we will stop at pointing out the strategic enemy character this anti-Japanese Line has. We do not hesitate to assert that never before in recorded history has there been a vicious strategy of this degree.

Next, the authors discuss the thoroughness of the ABCD Line, and the geographical and strategic relationships behind it.

Before surrounding Japan militarily, they planned to diplomatically isolate and make us helpless, but they were not satisfied by that diplomatic encirclement and again they devised a plan to bring about Japan’s poverty and decline. We have already written about how they continued their underhanded economic pressure on us to drive us into economic isolation. They completely rejected Japanese immigrants, the importation of Japanese goods and products and the exportation of theirs to Japan, and they planned Japan’s ostracism even from other peoples’ countries as they liked, not just restricting Japan from their own countries and their dependent dominions.
That is to say, with this plan to make us a total outcast and a pauper, their scorn of Japan and anti-Japanese policies created the goal of economic encirclement and economic blockade by whatever means available. Their plan was to strip us bare and leave us unarmed and to militarily surround us and then gang up on us. Above all, it was their intent to cut off our access to oil that was the most villainous thing of all. If our ships, planes, and mechanized units were immobilized because the access to oil had been cut off, it would disarm Japan without a fight. If we made even the slightest military preparations, the result would be the same due to the limitation of the amount of our own domestic oil to support those preparations. This was the manner in which they planned to gang up on Japan and strike us down.

What should be noted here is that it did not really become like this. Had Japan not risen up, her adversaries thought they would have ended up making Japan only a little country, subsisting on the oil it could produce on its own. On top of that, they also thought to strike Japan down.

To give an example, speaking of a gang-leader and his subordinates, they surround a single good boy and show their intention to gang up on him and beat him, heaping insults, abuse, and difficulties on him, posturing to beat him down. That was the anti-Japanese [ABCD] Line.

An important point here is that the Japanese government knew of the ABCD Line’s formidability and strength, and of its dreadful nature.

As we have previously related, the Line before the outbreak of the war was not an encircling line, but a siege line. It would only be natural that any country should take whatever steps were necessary to prepare for their own defense, and of course it is also only natural that in the case of war against a hypothetical enemy sufficient consideration must be given before hand; and the substance of these actions, as well as their appearance, must be defensive. We can state with certainty that this strategy of challenging us by creating a siege line around Japan poised to gang up on us, giving us no choice but to rise up as foes (but if we did so we would be ganged up on and beaten) is a vicious strategy of a type unseen in the history of the world.
…
Such is this vicious Line. It was, as it were, a direct challenge. Had we not risen up, Japan would either have destroyed herself, or been ganged up on and beaten to death. That Japan stood up, resolute in self-reliant self-defense, was only the natural consequence, so to speak.

What was it that was the strength of Japanese back then?

There was an inevitability about Japan’s entry into war. History textbooks long ago said this. Even though it was a small country, it was only natural that Japan would rise up after having been forced to endure all those conditions. Even today, this is still being said. I imagine, therefore, that such quotations as those above contain nothing surprising; but in truth, the situation with Japan being encircled was actually quite hard. The Soviet Union was moving south. Mainland China, which was being targeted by every country, was in a state of perpetual unrest. France controlled French Indochina; the British were in India, Burma, and Malaysia; the Dutch had Indonesia under their thumb; and America was on various Pacific islands and totally occupied the Philippines. That is why the border separating the United States and Japan before the war was between Taiwan and the Philippines. Australia joined hands with America and pulled every possible dirty trick. Considering such conditions, it is clear Japan really was deeply cornered by that Line of their enemies’.
Why did it become so? We have to think deeply about that question, but when I read Bei-Ei chosen no shinso, there was just one thing I thought strange: while everyone knew that the ABCD Line was rational and extremely secure, Japan went about it calmly. That is, Japan was not terribly concerned. We can see a resolution as if to say, “I’ll fight all four of you, fair and square!” There was very little agitation, as well. When I think about it now, it strikes me as very peculiar.
This book came out in 1943, when the war was at its height. Moreover, it examines in detail the enemies’ Line. The authors knew in detail about its military strength and disposition. I look at it closely. This is realism. They were not underrating the enemy. There is no arrogant posturing. Neither were they throwing themselves headlong into a war they knew they could not win. These are the things I get out of this book. It was written by people with a rational, strategic, and pragmatic eye. They saw through the difficulty of the affair, and said that there was no option but to rise up. The strength of heart of the Japanese in those days is a mystery. Nonetheless, it is a reality of history, and as a truth that was in our past, it will not change. Today we can no longer conceive of such strength.
Why might this be?
I do not know. I just do not know.
Historical mysteries such as this one must be hidden within those prohibited books. Of course, I am not giving one iota of thought to militarism and the march to war, or a history of Japan’s crimes. We are treading the path of the inevitable current where things that had to happen historically happened ― and in the flow of history, we have arrived where we are.
In this book, I will not only present for consideration descriptions of individual events, I will look at why things happened that were in the prohibited books, what was happening in the background, and what the mentality of Japanese in those days was. I will also confirm that the motives of the Allied Powers leading up to the war continued to move them after the war.
When the war ended, we thought the war was over. The “post-war war” continued, however. The pre-war anti-Japanese Line continued after the war in the form of book-banning and censorship. And it also menaces present-day Japan. I will verify these things, and starting with the next chapter I hope to present concrete examples for consideration.

Appended Supplementary Materials

Supplement One: Memorandum from the SCAP GHQ (copy of original) 39
Supplement Two: Memorandum from the SCAP GHQ 41
Supplement Three: Textual materials drawn up for selecting publications to be
seized by the GHQ civilian censorship task force department 45
Supplement Four: Directive from the Vice-Minister of Education
concerning the confiscation of publications 47
Supplement Five: Summary of the number of books confiscated by the
Japanese government on GHQ orders 51
Supplement Six: Publications targeted for seizure during the occupation and
stored in the United States Library of Congress 53
Supplement Seven: Ranking of GHQ-confiscated works by author 55
Supplement Eight: History of the occupation and government of the South Sea Islands 63

Supplementary Document One:
Memorandum from SCAP GHQ
(copy of original)

Supplementary Document Two:
Memorandum from SCAP GHQ

Memorandum

This matter in the memorandum from the SCAP is being carried out at present by the GHQ as well as the Civil Censorship Detachment in cooperation with the Far East Military Intelligence Section.
The entire texts of the memoranda (omitting the books’ titles and other information) follows.

I. Memorandum concerning the confiscation of propaganda publications (dated 17 March, 1946)
1. The Japanese government is directed to collect all propaganda publications from warehouses, bookstores, book dealers, publishing companies, distribution companies, and all commercial establishments, as well as various Japanese governmental offices, etc., where propaganda publications are held in bulk, excepting privately held [copies], as follows:

Title Author Publisher Pub. Add. Pub. Date
War & Construction Hirata Tokijir? Asahi Newspaper Co. 2-3 Y?rakuch?, Dec. 1943
K?jimachi, Tokyo
(Nine omitted titles follow)
2. Steps for the pulping and recycling of collected publications will be directed at a future date by this headquarters.
3. Scheduled reports concerning confiscations are to be made to this headquarters each month on the 15th and at the end of the month, the first report date being 31 March. The following information is to be included in these reports:
a. The name and number of publications collected in the interim period
b. The location whence collected, and the names and number of publications collected at each location
c. Total number of publications collected
d. Gross weight
e. Specific storage location
4. Publications personally held in the homes of average people or in libraries are exempt from these directions.
II. Addendum #1 to the above memorandum (dated 27 March, 1946)
1. Refers to the memorandum dated 17 March.
2. Item 2 is as detailed in the previous memorandum, but there are six publications that have newly been designated for confiscation:
(Six titles omitted)
3, 4, 5. The content of these is the same as items 2, 3, and 4 of the previous memorandum.
6. The Central Liaison Office made instructions concerning the civilian censors at the GHQ on the following two reasons for selecting the person(s) responsible for making the scheduled reports:
a. To acknowledge the appended list of propaganda publications that must be collected and carrying out item 3 in the original memorandum.
b. To issue scheduled reports on the collection of propaganda publications.
III. Addendum #2 to the above memorandum (dated 15 April, 1946)
The content of this memorandum is identical with that of the previous memoranda, with an additional 16 works designated to be confiscated. (Sixteen titles omitted.)
IV. Addendum #3 to the above memorandum (dated 30 April, 1946)
Designated 26 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
V. Addendum #4 to the above memorandum (dated 5 May, 1946)
Designated 14 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
VI. Addendum #5 to the above memorandum (dated 31 May, 1946)
Designated 11 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
VII. Addendum #6 to the above memorandum (dated 10 June, 1946)
Designated 11 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
VIII. Addendum #7 to the above memorandum (dated 1 July, 1946)
Designated 5 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
IX. Addendum #8 to the above memorandum (dated 21 July, 1946)
Designated 17 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
X. Addendum #9 to the above memorandum (dated 15 August, 1946)
Designated 38 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XI. Addendum #10 to the above memorandum (dated 31 August, 1946)
Designated 15 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XII. Addendum #11 to the above memorandum (dated 2 October, 1946)
Designated 4 publications for confiscation, and 13 musical scores published by the Japan National Broadcasting Company.
XIII. Addendum #12 to the above memorandum (dated 31 October, 1946)
Designated 12 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XIV. Addendum #13 to the above memorandum (dated 21 December, 1946)
Designated 41 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XV. On 23 January, 1947, verbal notice was made from Maj. Costello, the director of the newspaper, publication and broadcasting department of the Civil Censorship Detachment of the GHQ’s Office of Military Intelligence, reported via the Central Liaison Office, to the Japanese government, that some the locations for publications being confiscated through Addendum #14 had been changed.
(Verbal notice)
The Central Liaison Office directs all the personnel taking part in the plans for confiscation of propaganda publications should be instructed to concentrate their full efforts on typical distribution networks such as bookstores, publishers’ warehouses and distribution services, etc.
The investigation of schools, libraries, and private collections is particularly forbidden.
XVI. Addendum #14 to the above memorandum (dated 17 December, 1946)
Designated 20 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XVII. Addendum #15 to the above memorandum (dated 31 December, 1946)
Designated 27 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XVIII. Addendum #16 to the above memorandum (dated 17 January, 1947)
Designated 60 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XIX. Addendum #17 to the above memorandum (dated 3 February, 1947)
Designated 24 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XX. Addendum #18 to the above memorandum (dated 15 February, 1947)
Designated 31 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXI. Addendum #19 to the above memorandum (dated 1 March, 1947)
Designated 58 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXII. Addendum #20 to the above memorandum (dated 17 March, 1947)
Designated 28 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXIII. Addendum #21 to the above memorandum (dated 21 May, 1947)
Designated 39 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXIV. Addendum #22 to the above memorandum (dated 15 April, 1947)
Designated 56 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXV. Addendum #23 to the above memorandum (dated 1 May, 1947)
Designated 50 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXVI. Addendum #24 to the above memorandum (dated 15 May, 1947)
Designated 50 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXVII. Addendum #25 to the above memorandum (dated 2 June, 1947)
Designated 60 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)

? From this point this affair was transferred from the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Social Education Department of the Ministry of Education.

XXVIII. Addendum #26 to the above memorandum (dated 16 June, 1947)
Designated 29 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXIX. Addendum #27 to the above memorandum (dated 1 July, 1947)
Designated 61 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXX. Addendum #28 to the above memorandum (dated 15 July, 1947)
Designated 50 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXI. Addendum #29 to the above memorandum (dated 1 August, 1947)
Designated 39 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXII. Addendum #30 to the above memorandum (dated 15 August, 1947)
Designated 88 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXIII. Addendum #31 to the above memorandum (dated 2 September, 1947)
Designated 500 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXIV. Addendum #32 to the above memorandum (dated 15 September, 1947)
Designated 540 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXV. Addendum #33 to the above memorandum (dated 1 October, 1947)
Designated 515 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXVI. Addendum #34 to the above memorandum (dated 15 October, 1947)
Designated 450 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXVII. Addendum #35 to the above memorandum (dated 1 November, 1947)
Designated 560 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXVIII. Addendum #36 to the above memorandum (dated 15 November, 1947)
Designated 605 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XXXIX. Addendum #37 to the above memorandum (dated 1 December, 1947)
Designated 550 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XL. Addendum #38 to the above memorandum (dated 26 December, 1947)
Designated 500 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLI. Addendum #39 to the above memorandum (dated 1 January, 1948)
Designated 550 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLII. Addendum #40 to the above memorandum (dated 23 January, 1948)
Designated 550 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLIII. Addendum #41 to the above memorandum (dated 1 February, 1948)
Designated 550 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLIV. Addendum #42 to the above memorandum (dated 15 February, 1948)
Designated 500 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLV. Addendum #43 to the above memorandum (dated 1 March, 1948)
Designated 240 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLVI. Addendum #44 to the above memorandum (dated 15 March, 1948)
Designated 80 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLVII. Addendum #45 to the above memorandum (dated 1 April, 1948)
Designated 60 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)
XLVIII. Addendum #46 to the above memorandum (dated 15 April, 1948)
Designated 20 publications for confiscation. (Titles omitted.)

These are the memoranda, but I, II, and XV are particularly important and need to be noted.
Such was the situation with the Japanese government’s method of confiscating the publications ― as in accordance with the notification from the vice-minister of the Ministry of Education requesting cooperation from all the regional governors, they then requested cooperation of their Boards of Education.

Supplementary Document Three:
Textual Materials Drawn Up for Selecting Publications
to Be Seized by the GHQ Civilian Censorship
Task Force Department

Supplementary Document Four:
Directive from the Vice-Minister of Education Concerning the Confiscation of Publications

Facsimile of Vice-Minister of Education’s Directive
Number 174
22 June, 1948

Vice-Minister, Ministry of Education

To all prefectural governors:
Concerning the confiscation of propaganda publications ―
The transfer of control from the police department to the education department in all the prefectures in accordance with the execution of the new Police Law is to be carried out as instructed in the directive co-signed by the director of the Ministry of Education’s Social Education Bureau and the first director of the Department of Home Affairs, Ministry Notice no. 75, dated 5 May of this year, to the Superintendant General of the Metropolitan Police and to all the prefectural governors, and the directive from the director of the Social Education Bureau of the Ministry of Education, Ministry Notice no. 98, dated 6 June, to all the prefectural governors and to Superintendant General of the Metropolitan Police. However, on a different aspect in regards to the afore-mentioned transfer of control, we have now changed the way those who enforce that work deal with it as follows, so I would like to request your consideration so as not to have any omissions in the paperwork.

Text

1. The business of confiscating propaganda publications, shall be dealt with in accordance with the memorandum from the SCAP GHQ dated 17 March, 1946, and the subsequent additional memoranda up to no. 46.
2. The person responsible for the confiscation activities in each prefecture is to be the governor.
3. (1) Heretofore in carrying out the work of enforcing confiscations, the education department has dispatched police officials who then directly went out and returned; but henceforth the governors shall make careful selection of suitable individuals from among the educational administration officials and education officials (but not to include school faculty members) in the municipalities under their jurisdiction as an auxiliary apparatus, appointing them to carry out the work of confiscations.
(2) The number of those responsible for the afore-mentioned confiscations will be determined by the governors after consideration of the number of actual book stores as well as the state of distribution and so forth in the municipalities under their jurisdictions.
(3) The governors will have the afore-mentioned persons responsible for the confiscations regularly carry the enclosed form no.1 as an identification document to clarify their status in the paperwork.
(4) Particularly close cooperation will be undertaken with police officials in carrying out the confiscations, and as need should arise their assistance shall be requested. Confiscation and investigation is something that should take place with the cooperation of the person being dealt with, but if the subject of a confiscation complains about the investigation or confiscation, or if the confiscator is in fear of harm or the like, he will be expected to request the assistance of police officials and to carry out his duty.
4. (1) Confiscations have been carried out in bookstores (including the interiors of stores selling new books, those selling used books, and shops loaning books, as well as their store-rooms), distribution centers, printing houses, etc., and on books sold and in transport, but private collections and libraries have been excluded up to this point.
(2) We will want to exercise sufficient care when confiscating works, as there are cases where the titles are the same but the author or publisher are different.
5. Violations of this matter will be subject to punishment in accordance with Imperial Ordinance No. 311, dated 12 June, 1936.
6. Upon the confiscation of an applicable publication, the enclosed form no. 2, “confiscated work,” will be issued to the person from whom it is being confiscated.
7. The size of the identification paper and confiscated work [forms] are convenient; we would wish the items mentioned to be on the forms. We would like the register of issued credentials and the collated forms for confiscated books to be available for inspection at any time by commissioned officers connected with the local military or governmental departments.
8. The fixed term for [filing] written reports on the situation with the confiscations, regardless of the presence or absence of confiscated material, is twice monthly (on the first and fifteenth), and they should be sent to this ministry. The title of the confiscated work, the place of confiscation, the name of the book store (as well as the name of the individual responsible), and the quantity confiscated are to be recorded.
9. The work on this matter shall not be disclosed to those who are not connected with it.

Notes:

The following is being telegraphed from the central headquarters of the nation’s regional police (the jurisdiction of the criminal prevention division) to the heads of the police force in each prefecture, to be thoroughly circulated to the police stations within their jurisdiction:

“Concerning the notification sent to the governor by the Ministry of Education on the confiscation of propaganda publications as ordered by the GHQ: the appropriate officials are the ones who will carry this out, and you shall cooperate with them should the police be needed. We are making this notification to be sure that there is no misunderstanding.”

Attachment 1:

Attachment 2:

Supplementary Document Five:
Summary of the Number of Books Confiscated
by the Japanese Government on GHQ Orders

Supplementary Document Six:
Publications Targeted for Seizure During the Occupation and Stored in the United States Library of Congress

Serial No.
小番号
Title
Quant.
Micro-filmed
Catalog
Location, Transfer Info.
Supple-mental
1
1
Children’s literature published during the Occupation
1116 titles
No
LCOC
LC

1
2
Children’s magazines published during the Occupation
219 titles, 1,814 vols.
No
LCOC
LC

1
3
Textbooks for children published during the Occupation
665 titles
No
LCOC
LC

2
1
Books published during the Occupation
1,555 titles
No
LCOC
LC

2
2
Magazines published during the Occupation
3,547 titles,
517 reels
Yes, 1998
YKC ’06,
LCOC
LC

3
1
Censored books of the Ministry of Home Affairs
933 titles, 1,066 vols.
Yes, 75?78
YKC ’92,
LCOC
Repatriated 76?78
Part not yet in Diet possession
3
2
Censored books of the Ministry of Home Affairs
434 titles, 439 vols., 32 reels
Yes,
1997
YKC ’02,LCOC
LC

3
3
Censored books of the Ministry of Home Affairs
2,000 vols.
No
LCOC
LC

3
4
Censored periodicals of the Ministry of Home Affairs
10 titles, 512 vols., 31 reels
Yes, 1968
YKC ’92, LCOC
LC

3
5
Censored periodicals of the Ministry of Home Affairs
352 titles, 228 reels
Yes, 76?80
YKC ’94, LCOC
LC

3
6
Censored periodicals of the Ministry of Home Affairs
755 titles, 976 vols., 44 reels
Yes, 1990
YKC ’94, LCOC
LC

3
7
Censored periodicals of the Ministry of Home Affairs
103 titles
Yes, 1999
YKC ’02, LCOC
LC
103 titles found in addition to 755 above
4

Documents pertaining to the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
5,748 documents
No
THC ’95
LC

5
1
Books published before and during the War

No
LCOC
LC

5
2
Periodicals published before and during the War

Partial
YKM 92?06, LCOC
LC
6 titles, 546 vols., 37 reels
6

Unsorted periodicals, etc.
1,500 vols.
No
LCOC (80%)
LC

7
1
Documents
2,200 titles, 21,597 vols., 129 reels
Yes, 67?73
YKC ’92
Repatriated 1973 (Nat’l Archives of Japan)
350 reels (incl. 5-1); 226 of these are cataloged
7
2
Documents
2,716 titles, 168 reels
Yes, 63?06
YKC ’02, ’06
LC
Part found in addition to above
7
3
Uncompleted documents, etc.

No

LC

8
1
Redundant books and periodicals
3,000 vols.
No
LCOC
Sent to colleges throughout the USA, 49?50

8
2
Redundant books and periodicals
6,000?7,000 vols.
No

Sent to Ry?ky? University, 1955
Also reports from 1960
8
3
Redundant books and periodicals

No

Sent to various colleges in USA

8
4
Torn or discarded documents

No

Unknown

LC = Library of Congress.
LCOC = Library of Congress Online Catalog (http://catalog.loc.gov).
YKC = Yoshimura Keiko’s Catalog (a catalogue created by Yoshimura Keiko; a copy is on file at the National Diet Library in the constitutional government reference room).
THC = Tanaka Hiromi Catalog (appears in Senry? sessh? ky? rikukaigun shiry? s?mokuroku [An index of d Imperial Armed Forces documents confiscated under the Occupation], published in 1995 by T?y? Shorin.
Repatriated = Returned to Japan.

Supplementary Document Seven:
Ranking of GHQ-Confiscated Works by Author

Authors with more than six proscribed works

Rank
Name
Notes
Works banned
1
Noyori Hideichi
Intellectual; owner of Teito Hibi Newspaper.
23
2
Nakak?ji Akira
Intellectual.
22
3
Nagano Akira
China specialist; Takushoku University professor
18

K?no Seiz?
Shint? scholar; president of Kokugakuin University.
18
5
Yamanaka Minetar?
Writer.
17
6
Nagamatsu Senz?
Writer.
14

Tokutomi Iichir? (aka: T. Soh?)
Intellectual.
14

Ishimaru T?ta
Naval lieutenant commander; historian.
14

Minowa K?son
Editor of army-related examinations.
14

Sakurai Tadayoshi
Officer subordinate to Gen. Nogi; author of the war record, Nikudan (“Human bullets”).
14

S?ma Motoi
Critic; Mainichi Newspaper journalist; sum? reporter.
14

Watari Sh?zabur?
Tokyo Teachers’ School and moral educator.
14
13
?gushi Toyoo
Scholar of civics and constitutional law.
13
14
Takasu Yoshijir?
Scholar of Japanese literature and Mito-gaku.
12

Kat? Totsud?
Intellectual on Buddhist and Confucian thought and self-discipline.
12

?tani K?zui
Buddhist religionist; master of the Nishi Honganji.
12

Mut? Teiichi
Critic of military affairs and diplomacy with the Asahi Newspaper.
12

Owari Shinnosuke
Editor and publisher at Kodansha.
12

Nishi Shin’ichir?
Philosopher, professor at Hiroshima Bunrika University.
12
20
Sat? Giry? (aka S. Yoshisuke)
Founder of Shinch?sha (a publisher).
11

Nakano Yasohachi
President of Seimei Gakuen (attached to Takushoku University); educator.
11

Ikezaki Tadataka (aka Akagi K?hei)
Critic; politician.
11

Fujisawa Chikao
Intellectual; staff at National Institute of Spirit and Culture.
11

Kobayashi Tomoharu
Writer of military history.
11
25
S?sa Tanetsugu
Rear admiral, graduated in the 26th class of the Imperial Naval Academy; historian.
10

Miura T?saku
Ethics/moral philosopher; writer.
10

Hata Kensuke
Writer with the army.
10

Matsuoka Y?suke
Politician.
10

Murofuse K?shin
Critic.
10

It? Masanosuke
Historiographer.
10

Sasaki Kazuo
Colonel; military historian.
10

Nakajima Takeshi
Naval military historian.
10
33
Matsushita Yoshio
Army first lieutenant; military affairs historian.
9

Kojima Seiichi
Economist.
9

Takahashi Kamekichi
Economic critic.
9

Sat? Kiyokatsu
Lieutenant general; historian.
9

Mori Kiyondo
Scholar of imperial edicts; editor of Collected Imperial Edicts.
9

Higuchi Masanori
Publisher and editor of Sh?kan Asahi magazine.
9
39
Inoue Masaji
Advisor on financial affairs in the Korean government.
8

Yamamotoji Chiei
Editor and journalist at the Asahi Newspaper.
8

Araki Sadao
General.
8

Terada Yakichi
Philosopher; intellectual.
8

Takayanagi Mitsutoshi
Historiographer; specialist in Japan’s warring states period.
8

Funabashi Shigeru
Colonel; military historian.
8

?kawa Sh?mei
Intellectual.
8

Satomi Kishio
Intellectual; founder of the Rissh? Ky?dan religious organization.
8
47
Hino Ashihei
Writer.
7

Yamaguchi Gor?
Writer.
7

Sawada Ken
Biographer.
7

Kat? Kazuo
Writer; critic.
7

Shibata Ken’ichi
Writer of military history.
7

Obama Shigeo
Resources specialist.
7

Kihira Tadayoshi
Philosopher
7

Yoshida Kumaji
Educator.
7

Fukunaga Ky?suke
Naval captain; military historian.
7

Nakashiba Suezumi
Major general; military historian.
7

Kiyohara Sadao
Historiographer.
7

Kiyosawa Kiyoshi
Critic, Intellectual.
7

Nakano Seig?
Intellectual.
7
60
Asaka K?ji
Film director.
6

Kubo Kanzabur?
Philosopher.
6

Takagi Tomosabur?
Economist.
6

Takagi Yoshikata
Kodansha editor.
6

Matsunaga Motoki
Intellectual.
6

Kobayashi Ichir?
Scholar of Buddhist thought.
6

Shida Nobuyoshi
Scholar of Japanese literature.
6

Ogura Ky?ji
Shint? scholar.
6

Komaki Saneshige
Geologist.
6

Ikeoka Naotaka
Ethics and morality educator.
6

Kikuchi Kan
(aka K. Hiroshi)
Writer.
6

Matsunami Jir?
Writer.
6

Mizuno Masaji
Historian.
6

Minoda Muneki
Intellectual, critic of Marxism.
6

Narasaki Toshio
Economist.
6

Ishikawa Eiy?
Scholar of civic planning.
6

Hirade Hideo
Military historian; naval studies.
6

Akamatsu Hiroyuki
Diplomat; historian.
6

Hasegawa Ry?
Scholar of the history of diplomacy.
6

Nakahira Ry?
Journalist with the Asahi Newspaper; critic.
6

It? Kinjir?
Writer of military history.
6

Hirose Hikota
Naval captain; military historian.
6

Suzuki Kazuma
Lieutenant general; Naval Journal association.
6

Maeda Iwatar?
Imperial army; tactical researcher.
6

?ba Yahei
Major general; tactical researcher.
6

Takizawa Masakatsu
Imperial army; tactical researcher.
6

Kikuchi Ikujir?
Editor, Transcripts of Army Lectures.
6

Other authors (names arbitrarily recorded)

Name
Notes
Works banned
Suetsugu Nobumasa
Commander-in-Chief of the combined fleet.
5
Takagusu Junjir?
Scholar of Indian philosophy; president of Musashino Women’s College
5
Taniguchi Masaharu
Religionist; president of Seich? no Ie (a new religious movement).
5
Yasuoka Seitoku
Intellectual.
4
Shirayanagi Sh?ko
Historian.
4
Akao Yoshio
President of ?bunsha publishing company.
4
R?yama Masamichi
Political scientist.
4
Kajima Morinosuke
President of Kajima Construction Co.
4
Miyake Setsurei
Critic.
4
Yamaoka S?hachi
Writer.
3
Ozaki Shir?
Writer.
3
Sasaki Nobutsuna
Poet.
3
Naruse Sekiji
Specialist in Japanese swords.
3
Ishiwara Kanji
Lieutenant general.
3
Hayashi Fusao
Writer.
3
Mukai Junkichi
Artist.
2
Matsumae Shigeyoshi
Scholar; president of T?kai University.
2
Nitobe Inaz?
Intellectual; educator.
2
Nakaya Ken’ichi
Newspaper journalist; scholar.
2
Tanaka Masaaki
Private secretary to Gen. Matsui Iwane; intellectual.
2
Kishi Nobusuke
Cabinet minister; politician.
1
Yasuda Yoj?ro
Intellectual.
1
T?yama Mitsuru
Intellectual.
1
Watsuji Tetsur?
Philosopher.
1
Kamei Katsuichir?
Critic.
1
Hisamatsu Sen’ichi
Scholar of Japanese literature.
1
It? Sei
Writer.
1
Yanagita Kunio
Scholar of folklore.
1
Kusano Shinpei
Poet.
1
Saij? Yaso
Poet.
1
Doi Bansui
(aka Rinkichi, aka Tsuchii Bansui)
Poet, scholar.
1
Ishikawa Tatsuz?
Writer.
1
Kishida Kunio
Dramatist.
1
Sakaguchi Ango
Writer.
1
Osaragi Jir?
Writer.
1
Mushak?ji Saneatsu
Writer.
1
Ogawa Takuji
Geologist.
1
Shinobu Junpei
Legal scholar.
1
Obara Kuniyoshi
Educator; founder of Tamagawa Gakuen.
1
Koizumi Shinz?
Educator; president of Kei? University.
1
Kaigo Tokiomi
Pedagogue.
1
Fujita Tsuguharu
Artist.
1
Sano Sh?ichi
Actor.
1

Authors whose works cannot be found on the proscribed list

Name
Notes
Works banned
Kobayashi Takiji
Writer.
0
Takami Jun
Writer.
0
Hayashi Fumiko
Writer.
0
Miyamoto Yuriko
Writer.
0
Sakai Toshihiko
Social activist.
0
Nosaka Sanz?
Communist Party member.
0
Mori Sh?z?
Mainichi Newspaper journalist; editor.
0
Ozaki Hotsumi
Asahi Newspaper journalist; implicated as an informant in the Sorge espionage incident and executed.
0
Miki Kiyoshi
Intellectual.
0
Yanagida Kenj?r?
Intellectual; Marxist.
0
Kagawa Toyohiko
Religionist.
0
Kawakami Hajime
Scholar.
0
Takikawa Yukitoki
Scholar.
0
Takikawa Masajir?
Scholar.
0
Tsuru Shigeto
Scholar.
0
Amano Teiy?
Scholar.
0
Minobe Tatukichi
Scholar.
0
Yokota Kisabur?
Legal scholar; chief justice of the Supreme Court
0
Morito Tatsuo
Economist.
0
Minobe Ry?kichi
Economist.
0
?uchi Hy?e
Economist.
0
Nishida Kitar?
Philosopher.
0
Kobayashi Hideo
Literary critic.
0
(names arbitrarily recorded)

Source: Compiled by Mizokuchi Kunio from Bossh? shitei tosho s?mokuroku (Complete index of books designated for confiscation).

Supplementary Document Eight:
History of the Occupation and Government of
the South Sea Islands

Eastern Region

Island Name
Year of Discovery, Occupation,
and/or Mandate
Area (sq. miles)
Population (in 1936)
Hawaiian Islands
1528 (Spain); 1898 (USA)
6,456
396,715(a)
Teraina
(Washington Island)
1892 (Britain)
6
131
Tabuaeran
(Fanning Atoll)
1892 (Britain)
15
175
Phoenix Islands
1886 (Britain)
16
95
Samoa
1772 (Holland); 1812 (France); 1872 (USA); 1899 (Britain & Germany); 1920 (USA, New Zealand Mandate)
776
66,000
Tonga
1643 (Holland); 1773 (Britain)
385
31,604
Malden Island
1886 (Britain)
35
102
Marquesas
1595 (Spain); 1777 (France)
490
999
Society Islands
1605 (Spain); 1767 (Britain); 1768 (France)
657
30,824
Tuamoto Archipelago
1606 (Spain); 1843 (France)
222
4,346
Pitcairn Island
1767 (Britain)
2
209
Cook Islands
1774 (Britain)
111
12,000

Central Region

Island Name
Year of Discovery, Occupation,
and/or Mandate
Area (sq. miles)
Population (in 1936)
Marianas
1521 (Spain); 1899 (German); 1920 (Japanese Mandate)
705
109,847 (a)
Marshall Islands
1527 (Spain); 1885 (Britain); 1886 (Germany); 1920 (Japanese Mandate)
*
*
Palau
1527 (Spain); 1898 (Germany); 1920 (Japanese Mandate)
*
*
Caroline Island
1527 (Spain); 1899 (Germany); 1920 (Japanese Mandate)
*
*
Jaluit Atoll
1888 (Germany); 1920 (Japanese Mandate)
*
*
Guam
1521 (Spain); 1898 (USA)
225
22,137 (a)
New Guinea
1511 (Holland); 1606 (Spain); 1885?6 (Britain, Germany, Holland); 1920 (Britain, Holland, Australian Mandate)
9,300 (e)
548,291
Nauru
1798 (Germany); 1920 (British Mandate)
8
3,097 (a)
Bismarck Archipelago
1615 (Holland); 1884 (Germany); 1920 (Australian Mandate)
181,571
75,920
Australia
1605 (Holland); 1770 (Britain)
2,974,581
6,806,752
Gilbert Islands
1764 (Britain)
166
27,029
Tuvalu
1781 (Spain); 1892 (Britain)
14
4,124
Banaba Island
(Ocean Island)
1892 (Britain)
6
2,791
Solomon Islands
1567 (Spain); 1616 (Holland); 1857 (Britain); 1884 (Germany); 1894 (Britain)
375,000 (e)
94,155
Santa Cruz Islands
1767 (Britain)
380
5,000 (e)
New Hebrides
1606 (Spain); 1774 (Britain); 1906 (Anglo-French Co-Mandate)
5,700 (e)
40,000 (b, e)
New Caledonia
1774 (Britain); 1843 (France)
8,548
53,245
Fiji
1643 (Spain, Holland); 1840 (USA); 1874 (Britain)
7,083
201,086
New Zealand
1642 (Holland); 1769 (Britain)
103,722
6,806,752

Western Region

Island Name
Year of Discovery, Occupation,
and/or Mandate
Area (sq. miles)
Population (in 1936)
Philippines
1521 (Portugal, Spain); 1569 (Spain); 1898 (USA)
97,104
13,266,700
Moluccas
(Spice Islands)
1512 (Portugal); 1622 (Holland); 1798 (Britain); 1814 (Holland)
1,350
720,558 (d)
Borneo
1511 (Portugal); 1604 (Holland); 1798 (Britain); 1842 (Britain, Holland)
285,391
2,944,661 (c)
Celebes
1511 (Portugal); 1798 (Britain); 1802 (Holland); 1810 (France); 1814 (Holland)
72,986
4.231.906
Sumatra
1511 (Portugal); 1798 (Britain); 1802 (Holland); 1810 (France); 1814 (Holland)
1,774,448
6,779,706
Jarvis Island
(Bunker Island)
1511 (Portugal); 1798 (Britain); 1802 (Holland); 1810 (France); 1814 (Holland)
4,611
205,363
リアリガ
1511 (Portugal); 1798 (Britain); 1802 (Holland); 1810 (France); 1814 (Holland)
12,235
298,225
Bali
1511 (Portugal); 1798 (Britain); 1802 (Holland); 1810 (France); 1814 (Holland)
3,973
1,802,683
Java
1619 (Holland); 1811 (Britain); 1816 (Holland)
――
――
Timor
1515 (Portugal); 1859 (Portugal, Holland)
7.300
460.655 (b)
Christmas Island
1777 (Spain); 1888 (Britain)
62
1,237
Labuan
1846 (Britain)
40
8.111 (a)
Singapore
1619 (Britain)
220
651,486 (a)
Ceylon
1505 (Portugal); 1602 (Holland); 1782 (Britain)
25,332
5,312,548 (c)

This chart is primarily derived from the 1939 World Year Book, edited by the Japanese Association of International Affairs.

(a) In 1937 (b) In 1934 (c) In 1931 (d) In 1930 (e) Approximation (*) Included in the numbers for Marianas.

Source: Ajia shinryaku hishi (A secret history of the Asian Invasion) by Kuwahara Sabur? (Shimizu Shob?, 1961).