Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century

3. "Their Goal Was Nothing Less than Total Knowledge": Policing in Occupied Japan and the Rise of the National Security Doctrine

Chapter 3 "Their Goal Was Nothing Less than Total Knowledge" Policing in Occupied Japan and the Rise of the National Security Doctrine Despite the fact that SCAP has ordered the ... Home Ministry to democratize its police force . . . the average Japanese lives today in just as great a fear of the police as he did before the occupation. He knows that the police are supported by the occupation troops. - ARTHUR D. BOUTERSE, chief public welfare sub-section GHQ, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Lt. Col. Philip H. Taylor, G-2 War Department, and Arthur Maass, Military Government post liaison officer for Kanagawa prefecture, 1948 You Americans are very difficult. We had all the Communists in jail when you occupied the country in 1945. Then you told us to release them. Now you ask us to find them and put them in jail again. A very cumbersome process. - Japanese leader YOSHIDA SHIGERU to an American reporter following the "reverse course;' 1951 If we do not stop the communist hordes in this area now, it is quite possible for them to be in the USA a few years hence. -COLONEL HOWARD E. PULLIAM to Chairman of the Board, Police Commission, Kansas City. Missouri, September 12, 1950 In the late 1940s, police recruits at a training academy established by the United States in Osaka were required to watch a feature-length film on democratic policing standards titled Midnight in a Great City. The story centered on a generational conflict between a father, a veteran of the police force who clung to traditional methods, and his son, who was schooled in modern scientific techniques. The two got into frequent arguments about the best way to track down criminals, and each followed his own approach. At the climax of the film, the father is wounded by a gangster. Through the incorporation of new technologies and forensic science, the son is able to bring the culprit to justice. The father comes to recognize defects in the old system and after his recovery becomes a major proponent of new scientific methods1 This film captured the ideological underpinnings of the American police programs in Japan, which were designed to inculcate new technologies and 57 professional standards to heighten police efficiency. U.S. officials envisioned that the police would be the bulwark of a new democratic society and provide the security necessary for liberal capitalist development. As the historian John Dower notes, Japan was considered the "super-domino" of the containment doctrine in Southeast Asia, which policymakers desperately hoped to incorporate into the Western orbit. The Pacific War had been fought and atomic bomb dropped, in part to prevent Japan's accommodation to a mainland communist bloc and its becoming the industrial heartland of a new order from which the United States might be excluded2 The police programs took on special importance in this context. New Dealers within the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) initially pressed for police decentralization, the purging of militarists, and the protection of civil liberties; the possibility of a more progressive foreign policy, however , was blighted by the entrenchment ofthe Cold War. Following the "reverse course" policy aimed at undermining leftist advances, police advisers focused more exclusively on counterintelligence and riot control training, mobilizing police to crack down on the Japanese Communist Party OCP) and the political left, which promoted independent development outside American control.3 Novel techniques in population control became institutionalized. By the early 1950s, the Truman administration was providing flamethrowers and tanks to the police reserve, causing people to question whether the United States was abandoning its pledge to bring about demilitarization. But police modernization was on the whole tied to a larger strategic design centered on advancing U.S. hegemony in Southeast Asia, which precluded support for human rights. Exporting the New Deal? Police Modernization and the Limits of Reform The history of modern policing in Japan dates to the 1868 Meiji restoration, when a national police bureau was established and samurai from the warrior class were trained as urban constables. Meiji reformers traveled abroad to survey Western police systems, which they sought to emulate as the country underwent a process of modernization and urbanization. Many of the innovations were later exported to Japan's colonies in the attempt to increase internal security. During World War II, Japanese police were indoctrinated in the belief that "all communists, socialists, and liberals as well as those opposed to the war should be regarded as a national enemy." The Special Higher Police...