In this column from Shukan Shincho, journalist Masayuki Takayama dissects the ignorance and malice behind GHQ occupation policies, from language reform and birth control to dietary manipulation. It powerfully demonstrates how postwar Japan was systematically reshaped—and why Takayama’s assessments remain uniquely accurate.

2017-04-21
This week’s column once again brilliantly proves that my assessment of him is entirely correct.
This is from the famous weekly column serialized in Shukan Shincho by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist of the postwar world.
This week’s essay once again splendidly demonstrates that my evaluation of him is completely accurate.
Malice Inside Bread.
On the morning of Japan’s defeat, Americans came swarming in.
Even now, but especially then, their intellectual level was considerably lower than that of the Japanese.
For example, GHQ staff member Leon Becker firmly believed from the outset that Japan lagged behind the United States and therefore must still have slaves.
After searching extensively, he decided that coal mines in Hokkaido were prison chambers and reported that he had “liberated 13,000 slaves” (MacArthur’s Japan, Shinchosha).
He reported that they were fine slaves who had been made to work twenty-four hours a day, but at the time there was a boom in so-called black diamonds—coal.
In fact, after this so-called discovery of prison chambers, GHQ issued an order stating, “For increased coal production, operate twenty-four hours a day.”
The miners who had suddenly been labeled slaves must have been astonished.
Americans also regarded Japanese literacy as another sign of cultural backwardness.
After all, with only twenty-six letters, American literacy barely reached the sixty-percent range.
Because Japanese use more than ten thousand kanji along with kana and the alphabet, they assumed that “eighty-five percent of Japanese probably cannot read newspapers.”
They claimed that this was delaying Japan’s democratization and argued that Japan should first adopt Romanization and eventually switch to English.
To enlighten such foolish notions, in 1948 the Ministry of Education conducted a nationwide Japanese literacy test covering everyone from children to the elderly.
The result was a literacy rate of ninety-eight percent.
It is recorded that the GHQ officer in charge, John Pelzel, begged the Japanese side, saying, “Could you at least falsify it to the level of American literacy?”
The American medical community was also at a low level, believing that newborns remained in a vegetative state for their first year.
Thus GHQ medical officers were shocked to see mothers sleeping alongside their babies from an early stage.
Because they considered co-sleeping dangerous and unhygienic, GHQ ordered maternity wards to separate mothers and infants, which led to an increase in tragic mix-up accidents.
Americans would not learn until the 1980s—when the WHO officially recognized it—that mother-infant co-sleeping has positive effects on emotional stability in babies.
Up to this point, one can sense ignorance mixed with some measure of goodwill, but many GHQ policies were not so benign.
Crawford Sams was the man who sprayed DDT onto Japanese heads, and the next thing he did was enforce birth control using Margaret Sanger and Shizue Kato.
Franklin Roosevelt left a testament stating, “Confine the Japanese to four islands and annihilate them.”
Like Carthage after its defeat in the Punic Wars.
Thus, territories outside the “four islands,” such as Taiwan and Korea, were confiscated.
The military was dismantled and even the right of belligerency was taken away.
It was exactly the same surrender terms Rome imposed on Carthage.
In addition, birth control reduced the population, accelerating Japan’s destruction.
In fact, Japan’s population will eventually fall below its prewar level.
Sams devised yet another scheme.
Japanese Americans began sending so-called LARA relief supplies to help their impoverished homeland.
The U.S. government provided skim milk intended as livestock feed, and then took advantage of the school lunch system that emerged alongside it.
This was the spread of bread-based diets.
They provided about 180,000 tons of wheat as a pump-priming measure, and in return had “bread-centered school lunches” legislated.
According to Akeya Yamaguchi’s GHQ’s Brainwashing of Japan, Senator McGovern said, “With this, we turned Japan into a major long-term purchaser of wheat.”
It was also during this period that the myth “eating rice makes you stupid” was spread.
The Asahi Shimbun took American money and promoted bread, declaring, “Do not force even the next generation of children to eat rice” (1964).
Thus rice consumption declined, and by 2011, spending on bread surpassed that on rice.
When a story about a “bakery” in a first-grade moral education textbook was changed to a “Japanese sweets shop,” it passed textbook screening, on the grounds that Japanese tradition and culture cannot be conveyed through bread.
The Asahi Shimbun attacked this decision.
“Does bread have no tradition or culture?”
Correct.
It has none.
Instead, it is filled with gluten that dulls the mind and the long-practiced cunning of the United States.
Eat rice.
You will begin to see history more clearly.