This passage argues that after Japan’s defeat, conservative personnel were purged from the old imperial universities and other major institutions, while left-leaning and pro-Comintern scholars came to dominate universities, the bureaucracy, and the world of public discourse.
Focusing on figures such as Herbert Norman, Tsuru Shigeto, and Hani Gorō, it asks how postwar Japan’s intellectual sphere was shaped and why it remained under left-wing influence for so long.
It also highlights, through the example of the revival of Bunjuku Shunjū, that ordinary readers did not necessarily desire left-wing discourse.

2019-05-27
Herbert Norman, the Comintern agent mentioned earlier, is such a figure that in Japan Iwanami Shoten has published his collected works, even though no such collected edition has been published in his native Canada.

The book below is not only required reading for all Japanese citizens, but also a book that people throughout the world should read.
It is filled with facts that those who merely subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun and watched NHK never knew, facts they were never told.
It is one of the finest books in postwar Japan.
Mr. Watanabe Shoichi was from Yamagata Prefecture, the prefecture next to Miyagi, which is my birthplace.
The people of Yamagata must continue to take pride before Japan and the world in the fact that they are from the same homeland as a man who was one of the greatest intellectuals in postwar Japan and one of Japan’s true treasures.
The intellectual sphere became entirely left-wing.
In one sense, it may have been a good thing that generational change progressed in the business world and that matters could be approached with a fresh spirit.
What was important here, however, was the thoroughness of the public-office purge with respect to schools and journalism.
Who was at the center of the purge directives?
Even MacArthur could not possibly have known prewar Japan in detail.
So the man brought in was Herbert Norman.
He had been raised in Japan as the son of a Canadian missionary who was preaching there.
He could speak Japanese just as well as a Japanese person and knew Japan very well.
He studied at Cambridge University, became a Communist Party member, and later studied at Harvard University in the United States, where he earned a doctorate with his English-language work Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State.
The person who served as his private tutor in Japanese history was Hani Gorō.
Hani Gorō was a Marxist scholar of Meiji history.
The Occupation forces needed people like Norman, who knew Japan thoroughly.
When Norman, though a Canadian diplomat, came to Japan to work within the Occupation forces, the first person he tried to find and meet was the economist Tsuru Shigeto, his left-wing associate from his Harvard days.
It is thought that Herbert Norman, Tsuru, Hani, and others were deeply involved in drawing up the purge lists.
Before the war, the Imperial Universities were “the Emperor’s universities,” and left-wing scholars or people connected to the Comintern were made to leave.
These were the very people who, after the purge directives in defeated Japan, were the first to return.
Many of the professors who had originally been at the Imperial Universities were then purged from public office.
And the presidents and chancellors of Japan’s first-class universities, the old Imperial Universities and Hitotsubashi University, which would later produce professors for the newly established universities, became left-wing.
Before the war, these were people criticized as unfit for His Majesty the Emperor’s universities.
The harmful influence that such beneficiaries of defeat had on Japan was enormous.
For example, Tadanao Yanaihara is said to have been a fine Christian, yet after the war he became president of the University of Tokyo.
Before the war, he had written an article saying something like, “God, please destroy Japan,” and had been forced to resign as someone unfit for His Majesty the Emperor’s university.
Japan at that time was moderate, so it would have sufficed if he had withdrawn it, but he did not.
Ōuchi Hyōe, who returned to the University of Tokyo after the defeat and became president of Hosei University, had been removed from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo in connection with the Second Popular Front movement.
Takigawa Yukitoki was also forced to resign because he wrote an anarchistic criminal-law textbook at Kyoto University.
Since it was impossible to teach anarchistic criminal law at His Majesty the Emperor’s university, the Ministry of Education asked him to rewrite the textbook, but he refused, and so he had to resign.
However, resignation did not mean he was criminally punished, and Mr. Takigawa became a lawyer.
After Japan’s defeat he became dean of the Faculty of Law at Kyoto University and later president of Kyoto University.
I heard from one of his relatives that at that time he was a communist.
Many of the Kyoto University professors who resigned together with Takigawa went on after the war to hold important posts at various universities.
Araki Sadao, who became a Class-A war criminal, had risen to the highest ranks as a military man, serving as Army Minister, Supreme Military Councillor, and baron, but he was not prosecuted as a soldier.
What became the issue was his period as Minister of Education.
Araki wrote that “the men who made me a Class-A war criminal were Ōuchi Hyōe and Takigawa Yukitoki.”
Tsuru Shigeto, who later became president of Hitotsubashi University, also confessed that he had clearly been a tool of the Comintern.
Even from a brief glance, one can see that the presidents and leading professors of Japan’s major universities were people who, before the war, had been deemed unfit for Japan’s Imperial Universities.
These people, as beneficiaries of defeat, returned to the principal posts like triumphant generals.
After the war, they sent forth their disciples into the universities and junior colleges that sprang up all over Japan like bamboo shoots after rain, nurtured them into professorships, and through the examination questions these men created, produced the civil servants of the state.
Particularly at the major universities, because of the chair system, the number of positions is fixed.
Those who study in such a chair almost invariably end up saying the same things as the professor.
Their disciples do the same, and the disciples of those disciples do the same as well.
This superstition continues until one reaches even the disciples of great-grand-disciples.
Moreover, because the graduates of the major universities taught by them were talented, they became senior bureaucrats and entered the major newspapers and major publishing houses in large numbers.
The teachers of high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools too were educated by scholars of that same lineage.
Before one knew it, Japan’s intellectual life had in no time become entirely left-wing.
Herbert Norman, the Comintern agent mentioned earlier, is such a figure that in Japan Iwanami Shoten has published his collected works, even though no such collected edition has been published in his native Canada.
Once the world of public discourse is dominated by the left, society will hardly move until those people die out.
At that time, one of the major publishers that barely survived was Bungeishunjū.
I still remember that Bungeishunjū carried an article entitled “His Majesty the Emperor Laughs Heartily.”
It was an article saying that Tatsuno Takashi, a scholar of French literature, Satō Hachirō, a poet, and Tokugawa Musei, a benshi, writer, and actor, had enjoyed a pleasant conversation with His Majesty the Emperor.
In the left-wing atmosphere of the time, there was no such article at all in the large magazines.
It was an age in which anything called intellectual meant left-wing thinking.
When ordinary people saw that article, they were delighted and said, “So a magazine like this still remains,” and Bungeishunjū is said to have increased its circulation at that time by around one hundred thousand copies each month.
As an example showing that ordinary people did not desire the left-wing magazines that were said to be intellectual, I remember this story even from my childhood.
Incidentally, Kikuchi Kan, who founded Bungeishunjū, was purged from public office.
Since Kikuchi Kan was regarded as a war criminal, one can see how abnormal the situation was.
Accordingly, Bungeishunjū once dissolved.
However, the twelve who remained, beginning with Sasaki Mosaku and Ikeshima Shinpei, received the company name and magazine title from Kikuchi Kan and somehow revived it.
Thus, all those whom we now call progressive or left-wing are beneficiaries of defeat and their disciples.
Before long, the purge directives were relaxed more and more.
Especially when the Korean War broke out, the argument made by Japan’s defense team at the Tokyo Trials, that Japan had tried to avoid the communization of East Asia, came to be regarded as correct, and instead it was decided that Communist Party leaders should be purged.
It is a truly absurd story.
After MacArthur left Japan, Lieutenant General Ridgway assumed the position of Supreme Commander.
Ridgway issued a statement granting the Japanese government the authority to reexamine the laws and regulations enacted under the Occupation in carrying out Occupation directives, and the lifting of the purges soon began.
In the end, Japan regained its independence through the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the purge directives were abolished.
To be continued.