Brian P. Walsh is the author of “The ‘Rape of Japan’: The Myth of Mass Sexual Violence During the Allied Occupation,” to be published by the Naval Institute Press on June 15.
In 1964, Japan’s most consequential postwar prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, saluted the leader of America’s occupation of his country by saying, upon Douglas MacArthur’s death: “Out of the stringent food shortages, out of the confusion of our political, economic and social systems, and out of the insecurity of men’s hearts, MacArthur laid the foundations for a new Japan, which became the source of our nation’s prosperity today.”
The enlightened self-interest of the United States toward its conquered foe was a source of pride to most Americans. But in a corner of Japanese society, sensationalist left-wing propagandists had already begun to paint a distorted and often invented picture of widespread atrocities by U.S. occupation forces, atrocities that bore a striking resemblance to Japan’s own wartime outrages. Remarkably, much of this propaganda has now been incorporated into mainstream academic literature on both sides of the Pacific. Otherwise dry and theory-sodden history texts, groaning from prestigious university presses, routinely amplify sloppy, biased and downright dishonest scholarship in a race to describe horrors that have no basis in primary sources.
Thus, academic readers today are told that upon entering Japan, U.S. servicemen “engaged in an orgy of looting, sexual violence, and drunken brawling” and that during the first 10 days of the occupation, there were 1,336 reported cases of rape in Kanagawa Prefecture alone. Not true. They are told that American officers demanded that the Japanese government set up brothels for their troops and that after embarrassed officials in D.C. forced the brothels closed, GIs went on a rampage and that reported rapes of Japanese women skyrocketed from an average of 40 to 330 cases a day. But no one has found or produced those alleged reports.
If one investigates primary sources instead of rehashed propaganda, quite a different story emerges. The United States mobilized more than 12 million men and women for military service during World War II. More than 60 percent were draftees. Inevitably, some criminals found themselves in uniform and on occupation duty in Japan. American servicemen did commit violent, sometimes shocking crimes against Japanese civilians. But 330 per day? Japanese and American police records show that there were about 1,100 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by Allied troops — total — during the more than six years of the occupation. This per capita rate is comparable to what was reported in several midsize U.S. cities in 2009.
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While it is true that prostitution was widespread in the ravaged economy of postwar Japan, and GIs were enthusiastic patrons, the charge that U.S. authorities ordered, encouraged or connived in the creation of a system of forced prostitution is absurd. In fact, MacArthur abolished Japan’s system of licensed prostitution precisely because it relied on involuntary sexual servitude. Soon after, the occupation introduced a new constitution for Japan that recognized women’s right to vote, hold property, choose their own marriage partners and enjoy all the legal rights and privileges enjoyed by Japanese men. The position of women in Japanese society advanced more during the U.S. occupation than in any other time in Japanese history.
Other histories dwell on venereal disease among American troops, accusing them of creating an epidemic among the Japanese. But at no time did infection rates among the soldiers even approach the rates in the Japanese civilian population, and it was an anti-VD campaign pioneered by the occupation’s Public Health and Welfare Section that virtually eradicated sexually transmitted diseases in the population over the next few years. That was but one of many successes for the PHW. Public health reforms introduced by the Americans saved millions of Japanese lives and helped increase the average life span by more than 30 percent.
Why, then, does a narrative that essentially inverts reality enjoy such currency? The politicization of academic history has become so severe in U.S. higher education that even relatively unbiased historians cannot avoid being influenced by the prevalent anti-American bias in the field. Worse, many academic historians have come to see this bias as a virtue rather than a flaw. One fashionable bias holds that the United States and especially its military are repressive and reactionary forces and thus incapable of bringing about any positive change in the world.
Far from masking their bias, some leading lights practically boast of it. As a charter member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, esteemed historian of Japan John W. Dower joined in declaring: “We oppose continuation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, which has compromised Japanese independence by turning Japan into a bulwark of American empire in Asia and forcing her into a posture of hostility to China.” Writing at the height of the murderous Cultural Revolution, it would seem that no evidence could shake his conviction. As recently as 2019, Dower characterized the U.S.-Japanese relationship as “egregious.”
Little wonder, then, that in his much-honored book “Embracing Defeat,” a history of the Allied occupation, Dower uncritically repeated a claim that Japanese women were reporting U.S. soldiers for sexual assault at a rate hundreds of times what the record shows.
Yuki Tanaka, a former professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University — despite being corrected by professor Roger Brown of Saitama University in 2004 — continues to flog the story that “during the first ten days of the Occupation there were 1,336 reported cases of rape in Kanagawa Prefecture alone.” Tanaka proudly identifies himself as an “activist” who has “long been involved” in the “anti-U.S. military bases” movement. His extravagant claim has been incorporated into numerous academic works, and it features prominently in Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.
The radical young scholars of the 1970s and ’80s are now the tenured elders, teaching rising scholars that political posture matters more than accurate analysis. Increasingly, historians view their work as activism, and many disdain the very idea of objective truth as dangerously naive if not downright pernicious. But if we are to maintain our relevance, historians must once again embrace the idea that we are responsible first and foremost for the facts and the conclusions we draw from them. Truth is not a chimera, and its pursuit is a moral imperative.