Editing Reverse Course (section)

==Background==
[[Japan surrendered]] to the Allied Powers on August 15, 1945, and officially exchanged instruments of surrender in [[Tokyo Bay]] on September 2, by which time thousands of Allied Occupation forces had already begun landing on Japanese soil. The Occupation was commanded by American general [[Douglas MacArthur]], whose office was designated the [[Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers|Supreme Command for the Allied Powers]] (SCAP).{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=8}} In the initial phase of the Occupation, from 1945 to 1946, SCAP had pursued an ambitious program of social and political reform, designed to ensure that Japan would never again be a threat to world peace.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=8}} Among other reforms, SCAP worked with Japanese leaders to disband the Japanese military, [[Purge (During Occupation of Japan)|purge wartime leaders from government posts]], and break up the powerful [[zaibatsu]] industrial conglomerates that had supported Japan's drive for empire in Asia.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=8}} In addition, SCAP instituted a sweeping [[land reform]] that made tenant farmers the new owners of the lands they had previously rented, in a blow against a previously powerful landlord class that had supported the wartime regime, and sought to unravel the wartime Japanese police state by breaking up the national police force into small American-style police forces controlled at the local level.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=8}} SCAP also sought to empower previously marginalized groups that it believed would have a moderating effect on future militarism, legalizing the [[Japanese Communist Party|Communist]] and [[Japan Socialist Party|Socialist]] parties, encouraging the formation of labor unions, and extending the right to vote to women. The crowning achievement of the first phase of the Occupation was the promulgation at SCAP's behest in 1947 of a new [[Constitution of Japan]].{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=9}} Most famously [[Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution]] explicitly disavows war as an instrument of state policy and promises that Japan will never maintain a military.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=9}}

At the same time, however, Cold War tensions were already ramping up in Europe, where the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] occupation of Eastern European countries led [[Winston Churchill]] to give his 1946 "[[Iron Curtain]]" speech, as well as in Asia, where the tide was turning in favor of the Communists in the [[Chinese Civil War]].{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=9}} These shifts in the geo-political environment led to a profound shift in U.S. government and Allied Occupation thinking about Japan, and rather than focusing on punishing and weakening Japan for its wartime transgressions, the focus shifted to rebuilding and strengthening Japan as a potential ally in the emerging global [[Cold War]]. Meanwhile on the Japanese domestic front, rampant inflation, continuing hunger and poverty, and the rapid expansion of leftist parties and labor unions led Occupation authorities to fear that Japan was ripe for communist exploitation or even a communist revolution and to believe that conservative and anti-communist forces in Japan needed to be strengthened.

An early sign of the shift in SCAP's thinking came in January 1947 when MacArthur announced that he would not permit a massive, nationwide general strike that labor unions had scheduled for February 1.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=9}} Thereafter, the broader shift in Occupation policies became more and more apparent.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=9}}