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When a country loses a war as crushingly as Japan did the war in the Pacific, it can expect a domestic revolution against its wartime leaders. In accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which Japan accepted in surrendering, the State Department instructed MacArthur not to stand in the way of a popular revolution, but when it began to materialize he did so anyway. He chose to keep Hirohito, the wartime emperor, on the throne (where he remained until his death in 1989) and helped bring officials from the industrial and militarist classes that ruled wartime Japan back to power. Except for a few months in 1993 and 1994, the conservatives of the Liberal Democratic Party then ruled Japan until 2009. In this way, Japan and China became among the longest-lived single-party regimes on earth, both parties—the nucleus of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party—having come to power in the same year.*

Equally important in the Japanese case, General MacArthur’s headquarters actually wrote the quite democratic Constitution of 1947 and bestowed it on the Japanese people under circumstances in which they had no alternative but to accept it. In her 1963 book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt stresses “the enormous difference in power and authority between a constitution imposed by a government upon a people and the constitution by which a people constitutes its own government.” She notes that in post–World War I Europe, virtually every case of an imposed constitution led to dictatorship or to a lack of power, authority, and stability.

Although public opinion certainly matters in Japan, its democratic institutions have never been fully tested. The Japanese public knows that its constitution was bestowed by its conqueror, not generated from below by popular action. Japan’s stability depends greatly on the ubiquitous presence of the United States, which supplies the national defense, and on the fairly evenly distributed wealth that gives the public a stake in the regime. But the Japanese people, as well as those of the rest of East Asia, remain fearful of Japan’s ever again being on its own in the world.

While more benign than the norm, Japan’s government is typical of the U.S. record abroad in one major respect. Successive American administrations have consistently favored oligarchies that stand in the way of broad popular aspirations—or movements toward nationalist independence from American control. In Asia, in the post–World War II period, we pursued such antidemocratic policies in South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), and Japan. In Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime minister of munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. Rather than developing as an independent democracy, Japan became a docile Cold War satellite of the United States—and one with an extremely inflexible political system at that.

THE KOREAN CASE

In South Korea, the United States resorted to far sterner measures. From the outset, we favored those who had collaborated with Japan, whereas North Korea built its regime on the foundation of former guerrilla fighters against Japanese rule. During the 1950s, we backed the aged exile Syngman Rhee as our puppet dictator. (He had actually been a student of Woodrow Wilson’s at Princeton early in the century.) When, in 1960, a student movement overthrew Rhee’s corrupt regime and attempted to introduce democracy, we instead supported the seizure of power by General Park Chung Hee.

Educated at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria during the colonial period,