再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
The “no war” clause offered a legacy of contention, one that remains today within Japan as well as beyond. MacArthur’s initial vision was the complete pacification of Japan, a revolutionary aim for a culture that had prided itself on its martial spirit. MacArthur’s vision for reforming Japan went hand in hand with similar U.S. ambitions to transform the world order. Tying Japan to the emerging architecture of collective security seemed just as important as democratizing political power. In his note, MacArthur wrote, “War as a sovereign right to the nation is abolished, Japan renounces it as an instrumentality for settling its disputes and even for preserving its own security. It relies upon the higher ideals which are now stirring the world for its defense and its protection. No Japanese Army, Navy or Air Force will ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will ever be conferred upon any Japanese force [emphasis added].”7 Thus, in the immediate aftermath of World War II’s devastation, the American idealism that informed the occupation’s reformers saw this new constitution as complementing the construction of a new global order, organized around the United Nations, which promised collective security and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The world changed quickly as the postwar peace brought conflict and a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. policy toward Japan shifted abruptly too, in what the Japanese refer to as the “reverse course.” Before the occupation was over, Americans were urging Japan to rearm, as war broke out on the Korean Peninsula.
