The Zaibatsu

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24815, 4 March 1946, Page 4

The Zaibatsu

With a general election in Japan scheduled for next month, General MacArthur has sent to the Japanese Cabinet his final political purgelist; and, applying it, the Cabinet has barred from public office the chief r~cials of 32 banking and corporations as well as officials of at least 14 regulatory organisations set up during the war to link the State more closely with industry. The brevity of this news, reported this morning, is no guide to its importance. A fortnight ago the Washington correspondent of the usually well-informed “ New “ York Times ” declared that Britain and the United State : had beer at odds over the elimination of the Zaibatsu as a controlling force in Japan’s economy. The American Government, he said, believed that the Zaibatsu had to be eliminated before democracy could be introduced into Japan, but British experts had urged that measures to break the power of this financial oligarchy should be withheld until the Allies had determined an- economic , policy for Japan. In the result, the American view had prevailed. The British Government had decided that to allow the Zaibatsu to continue in any form would be incompatible with the democratisation of Japan as pledged by the Potsdam Declaration, and that, accordingly, the Zaibatsu holdings should be nationalised by the Japanese Government and operated under international supervision until a long-term industrial and trade policy had been developed. That report has not been officially confirmed. It need hardly be said, however, that today’s news sustains it, in part at least, for to ban from electoral activity the chief officers of almost any of Japan’s banking and industrial corporations is to strike at the Zaibatsu and the dominance of the dozen or so. families which constitute it. The Japan of the Meiji Restoration onwards has been a nation in which governing power has rested in one or other or both of two groups—the Zaibatsu and the military. The people voted, but nothing came of their voting. Even when political parties existed in some strength they were largely the instruments, not of popular sentiment, but of the big monopo- j

lies. When governments appeared to be influenced by the parties they were in fact influenced by the party leaders, who expressed the will of their backers and not the will of their followers. Their backers, like the militarists, came from the old aristocratic class. One of the tasks to which the Allies pledged themselves at Potsdam was “ to eliminate “for all time the authority and in- “ fluence of those who have deceived “ and misled the people of Japan.” In the political field at least an essential beginning is being made.