The Gangster

The Allied Occupation of Japan - Part II

Part I, ‘The Blue-Eyed Shōgun’, is HERE.

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When the Asia-Pacific war ended and the Occupation began, the vast majority of Japanese looked back on a conflict that had brought only disaster: death, hunger, trauma and destruction on a truly epic scale.

For a handful of opportunists, however, the war had been a nice little earner.

One of them was Kodama Yoshio, born in 1911 to a former samurai family in Japan’s northern Fukushima prefecture: one of the poorest parts of the country, where some families were forced to sell daughters into slave-like conditions in factories or into prostitution.

Growing up between Fukushima and Seoul in Japanese-occupied Korea, where he lived with his sister and worked in a steel mill, Kodama’s childhood was a potent brew of poverty, injustice, ultranationalism and wide reading in the social sciences. These last might sound like the innocent entry on the list. But they were deeply political in Japan in the early 20th century, concerned with the way modern Japan was developing and whether and how it ought to change course.

The first sign of where these early life experiences were taking Kodama came in 1929, when he was arrested and imprisoned for trying to present a petition to the Emperor for the relief of the poor. It was the first of many stints behind bars for Kodama, the most notable of which began during the early months of the Occupation, when he found himself amongst a group of suspected Class-A war criminals imprisoned at Sugamo in Tokyo.

What had Kodama done to earn this attention from the Occupation authorities?

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