Thread by @observingjapan

I was poking around in the archives of the American Legion's magazine and found an absolutely wild travelogue/polemic about Japan in the January 1956 issue: "Japan's New Offensive: Anti-Americanism is growing in Japan as antagonistic groups reach for power" by Victor Riesel.

Quite a lede: "Just 14 years after Pearl Harbor, Japan's intellectual and political leaders appear to have declared war on us again -- a cold war aimed at driving us from our strategic defense positions in the Far East."

Immediately followed by: "If we don't head them off and get to the average Japanese man in the street, we may someday have to shoot it out with them again to maintain our critical defense bases in Asia."

He then describes going to see the 1955 naval war film 『若き魂の記録 七つボタン』 in Tokyo, saying that he could "feel the hatred" from the audience as the only westerner in the room.

...After which he voices a not unfamiliar sentiment -- "Then you realize what it must feel like to be Jim Crowed—you're not wanted because you're white!" -- and complains about new taxes on foreigners living and working in Japan."

Riesel uses this issue of the double taxation of foreign residents to argue that it shows the end of postwar humility. "There is no feeling of guilt. There is only a feeling that a war was lost and now Japan must resurge and not lose the next."

"This attitude seems to prevail against our military as well. You hear the GI's sneered at, reviled, and called importers of crime, rape, hooliganism, and actual lynching of Nipponese." He reports that left-wing intellectuals accuse the US of bringing "vice dens."

But, Riesel reassures his readers, "the vice dens are run by Koreans" and "[predate] Admiral Perry." "The Japanese," he writes, "have nobody but themselves to blame for whatever breakdown of morals they find."

Finally, he reports on Communist-organized protests against US bases, including the Sunagawa incident during protests against the expansion of the Tachikawa air base. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunagawa_…

Only ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Riesel wonders why a public outcry over the possibility that the US could deploy atomic warheads or artillery in Japan. "Just why the Japanese should object to being so well guarded against the communist enemy, no one explained."

He virtually accuses then-Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro -- no one's idea of a leftist -- of communist sympathies for his ardent pursuit of a peace treaty with the Soviet Union & warns of communist infiltration of the GOJ (28 card-holding Communists in the Justice Ministry).

Naturally, he also accuses the "communist-controlled" teachers union of introducing anti-American propaganda.

And says that businessmen have told Americans that they "have no choice but to permit Japanese businessmen to dump their cheap-labor products into the U.S. The insinuation is that they can always turn to Red China and Russia."

He ends with a warning about Japan's rising generation: "Unless someone reaches them soon, they will grow up hating America. We will have lost a friend. We will have re-made an enemy."

Needless to say, a fine illustration of the fact that the transition from adversary to ally was not frictionless.

As an aside, Victor Riesel is a fascinating character in his own right. Son of union organizers who became an anti-communist union activist and journalist, Riesel had a classic New York Jewish neoconservative trajectory, winding up as an advisor to Nixon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Ri…

Only months after this article was published, Riesel was blinded after a gangster threw sulphuric acid in his face, in retaliation for an investigation in corruption in organized labor. The attack led to widespread public investigations into labor and organized crime.

This essay is vintage example of a strain of American thinking on Japan -- by no means extinct --that is surprised by differences of opinion in Japan or that Japanese might feel something other than gratitude to US (esp. galling in 1956 given unequal treaty + recency of the war).