The Resurgence of Military Elements in Japan

BEFORE the outbreak of the Korean war, it was difficult to determine whether former members of the old Japanese army were engaging in clandestine activities. Not only did the individuals in question exercise the utmost prudence, but few courses of direct action lay open to them. Not many of them thought that they would ever again be permitted to return to their former calling. Embittered, discredited, impoverished, and discharged, most ex-soldiers had retired to the remote countryside, where they had more or less vanished among the ordinary people. It was easier for them to live there, restored to the peasant families from which almost all of them had come originally. There they could try to forget and be forgotten. A very small minority, however, sought to keep the flame alight. According to some estimates (probably exaggerated), this minority numbered about ten per cent of the wartime army. Its activities were sporadic and disorganized, and took the form mainly of what the Japanese call renraktu, that is, personal relations of various kinds, such as mutual assistance in coping with the misery and difficulties of postwar life, occasional encounters, exchanges of information by word of mouth, and so forth. The outside observer could conclude only that certain small groups existed and were centered on their most active members. These groups, resembling clans, were united by old bonds of friendship, of regional origin, or of common membership in one or another former military unit. They did not as a rule collaborate with one another; in fact, mutual dislike or hostility usually prevailed. In 1950 the situation began to change: in January General MacArthur's New Year message invited the Japanese to prepare to defend themselves against danger from abroad; in June the Korean war broke out; in July the Yoshida Government, at the instance of SCAP, started to recruit for a National Police Reserve, which was to become a paramilitary force; and in February 1951 John Foster Dulles, in Tokyo, urgently requested the government to undertake rearmament

Ancient history · Political science · History · Japanese History and Culture · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies

• A Symbol of Tradition and Modernity’

  Alessio Patalano•Japanese Studies•2014

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