Abstract
Sherif offers a groundbreaking history of the Japanese affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF pursued Japan because of its strategic position as a US Cold War ally. This chapter employs a range of archival materials in its analysis of three aspects of the CCF Japan journal Jiyû: the challenges for a originally transatlantic initiative in establishing an affiliate in the Pacific rim; the extent and reception of the post-1945 CIA and covert public diplomacy initiatives in Japan; and the reasons that the journal Jiyû never became a Japanese Encounter in the context of Japanese intellectual communities and media.
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Notes
- 1.
The author is grateful for the support and advice of Laura Hein, Michael Bourdaghs, Unoda Shoya, Emer O’Dwyer, Leonard V. Smith, Karashima Masato, and Richard Minear, and the staffs of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, and Mudd Library, Oberlin College. Dedicated to the memory of Michiba Chikanobu.
- 2.
Josselson disparaged the Ford Foundation funding of special issues of Harpers magazine, for which Passin was writing an article, as ‘wasting good money’ in contrast to Encounter, which he saw as having much greater potential for creating ‘impact and good will’ through its message and continuity. Josselson to Passin, 19 November 1953, International Association of Cultural Freedom records, Box 256, Folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago (hereafter IACF).
- 3.
Letter to Passin from Josselson, 31 July 1953, Box 296, Folder 2, IACF.
- 4.
Japanese names are given in Japanese order: family name and then given name. M. Matsuo to Josselson, 1953, Box 196, Folder 6, IACF. Under the Banner of Freedom was titled Jiyû no hata no moto ni in Japanese and had a brochure format. Ironically or not, the Japanese title was identical to that of a contemporary book of biographies of communist leaders with the subtitle ‘Why I became a Communist Party Member’. Rônô Kyûenkai (Aid Society for Farmer Labor Movement) (ed.), Jiyû no hata no moto ni: watakushi wa naze kyosantoin ni natta ka (Kyoto-shi: San’ichi Shobô, 1949).
- 5.
The partnership of foundations and government in US public diplomacy can be traced back to the early twentieth century and initiatives by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information. Martha Bayles, ‘Goodwill Hunting’, The Wilson Quarterly 29 (2005), pp. 46–56. Giles Scott-Smith summarises these differences in ‘The US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in France During the Early Cold War’, Revue française d’études américaines 107 (2006), pp. 47–60.
- 6.
For a broad view of public diplomacy, see Geoffrey Wiseman (ed.), Isolate or Engage: Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
- 7.
Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan, and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002), on the growing significance of non-state agencies in international politics during the Great War and after. Thomas W. Burkman, ‘Nitobe Inazo: From World Order to Regional Order’, in Thomas Rimer (ed.), Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 187–216.
- 8.
Daniel Bell to Yoichi Itagaki, 6 May 1957, Box 193, Folder 9, IACF. Itagaki Yoichi was an economist who visited Europe and the United States in 1957–1958 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was also deeply tied in with CIA agendas. Such conferences and people-to-people interactions may have contributed more to the CCF’s goals in Japan than the journal did. See Masato Karashima, ‘Sengo Nihon no Shakai kagaku to Amerika no fuiransoropii: 1950–1960 ni okeru nichibei hankyô riberaru no kôryû to Rokafera- zaidan’ [American Philanthropy and Social Science in Early Cold War Japan] Nihon kenkyû 3 (2012), pp. 155–161. Karashima discusses Itagaki’s support of Jiyû, the CCF, and his interactions with US Ambassador Edwin Reischauer and American Asian Studies scholars as well, pp. 174–178.
- 9.
Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 146–147 also names members of the 1951 committee (citing IACF-CCF archives but no box number is given): Takeo Naoi, New Leader correspondent, Arahata Kanson (ex-communist journalist), Fukuzawa Ichirô (painter), Takayanagi Kenzo (chair and scholar), Otaka Tomoo (‘liberal jurist’). ‘Matsuhei Matsuo was the secretary and in that capacity received cables of congratulations from Karl Jaspers, Upton Sinclair,…Sidney Hook.’ Raymond Aron, who visited Tokyo in 1952–1953, found the committee a ‘phantom existence’ with no influence over Japanese intellectuals, who, in turn, had an incomprehensible allegiance to the French Left and with ‘characteristic deformations of ex-Marxists’ (Coleman, p. 147).
- 10.
M. Matsuo to Hirabayashi, n.d., Box 196, Folder 7, IACF.
- 11.
Nicholas Nabokov to M. Matsuo, 7 August 1952, Series II, Box 196, Folder 7, IACF.
- 12.
M. Matsuo to Nicholas Nabokov, 22 September 1952, Series II, Box 196, Folder 7, IACF.
- 13.
M. Matsuo to Nicholas Nabokov, 16 January 1954, Series II, Box 196, Folder 7, IACF.
- 14.
Passin to Josselson, 15 February 1954, Box 256, Folder 2, IACF.
- 15.
Okura to Kluger, n.d., Box 196, Folder 6, IACF.
- 16.
To ‘Friends and Comrades’ from Komatsu Kiyoshi, n.d. (before 3 April 1951), Series II, Box 196, Folder 5, IACF (translated from French)
- 17.
A 1956 brochure published by the Tokyo office gives the name Bunka jiyû kaigi as the translation for CCF, whereas earlier correspondence and publications call it Jiyû bunka kaigi. See Box 256, Folder 9, IACF.
- 18.
Herbert Passin to Nicholas Nabokov, n.d. (1955), Box 256, Folder 3, IACF.
- 19.
In the margins of Passin’s warning against the title ‘conservatism’, (Passin to Nabokov, 18 April 1956), Josselson wrote ‘That is exactly what I said!’ Box 256, Folder 5, IACF.
- 20.
Passin to Josselson, 15 February 1954, Box 256, Folder 2, IACF.
- 21.
The proceedings of the February 1955 Rangoon conference were published as Herbert Passin, (ed.), Cultural Freedom in Asia (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1956).
- 22.
Passin and Seidensticker both became leaders in the field of Japanese Studies in the United States after their return. They both spent the latter years of their academic careers at Columbia University. Takeshi Matsuda quotes US Embassy staff in Tokyo in 1952 as describing Passin, who served in the Occupation’s Civil Information and Education Section, as ‘one of the most impressive of the young men trained during the war’. See Matsuda, Soft Power and its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 276, n. 118.
- 23.
For intellectual currents in the Occupation and post-Occupation context, see Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton/New Press, 1999); Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).
- 24.
Peter Coleman argues that even the US government saw good reason to appeal to a wide range of leftists as it reflected the anti-Stalinism and anti-Soviet sentiment spreading among influential American intellectual circles from the late 1940s. See Coleman, pp. 8–9.
- 25.
Tôru Miyakawa, ‘The Japan Cultural Forum: Its Logic and Psychology’, Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan 2 (April 1964), pp. 65–70, exhibits this nuanced understanding of Cold War US rhetoric clearly.
- 26.
On the many shades of liberal anti-communism among elite intellectuals at the centre of the CCF, see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Fall of the American Left (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) and Brandon High, ‘The Recent Historiography of American Neoconservatism’, The Historical Journal 52 (2009), pp. 475–491.
- 27.
Mutô Mitsurô was an economic philosopher and active member of the Democratic Socialist Party of Japan. He translated several works by Jaspers into Japanese, and is credited with introducing Hannah Arendt’s thought to Japan.
- 28.
Ivan Katz to Mutô Mitsurô, 8 November 1961, Box 194, Folder 3, IACF.
- 29.
Lasky, quoted in John Swenson-Wright, Unequal Allies? United States Security and Alliance Policy Toward Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 299–300.
- 30.
See the extensive correspondence between Iwata and Hunt from 1956–1958 in Box 193, Folder 9, IACF.
- 31.
Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 86, 87.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 87, 104.
- 33.
Box 194, Folder 3, IACF.
- 34.
While doing research for this chapter, I contacted a number of scholars of history and journalism in Japan. Without exception, they associated Jiyû primarily with certain strands of conservative and neo-liberal Japanese discourses and intellectuals. The CIA funding and influence are seldom highlighted.
- 35.
Lasch notes the ‘crudely propagandist flavor’ of early meetings in Berlin and Bombay, where CCF members condemned neutralism, and a subsequent approach that aimed at an ‘expansive and tolerant’ image. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 76–78.
- 36.
Passin to Josselson, 15 February 1954, Box 256, Folder 2, IACF.
- 37.
See Michael Schaller, ‘The CIA and Japanese Politics’, Asian Perspective 24 (2000), pp. 79–103; and his Altered States: The United States and Japan Since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 136–137,
- 38.
Swenson-Wright quotes a March 1954 Operations Coordinating Board report recommending ‘a vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy would appear to be a timely and effective way of countering the expected Russian [propaganda] effort and minimizing the harm already done in Japan’ by the toxic fallout of thermonuclear Test Bravo in the South Pacific. Eventually, the US campaign aimed at resituating Japan from ‘victim’ of atomic attack to having a new role as a ‘“participant” in a Free World “atomic community”’, according to American Ambassador to Japan John Allison (1953–1957); see John Swenson-Wright, ‘Unequal Allies? United States Security and Alliance Policy Toward Japan, 1945–1960’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 181–183. Herbert Passin’s papers include Union Carbide reports on nuclear power from the United Nations International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (Geneva, 8–20 August 1955), see Box 267, Folders 6–9, and Box 268 Folders 8–9, IACF.
- 39.
The US government covertly channelled millions of dollars to the LDP during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, although JFK decreased the contributions. See Schaller, Altered States, pp. 159–160, 164–165.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 195.
- 41.
Jomaru speculates that the apology demonstrated the high ethical standards of Ikegami, who knew well the potentially devastating power of the mass media. Jomaru’s book situates Jiyû as a predecessor of Shokun!, a prominent conservative media outlet, but the latter lacks the ethical standards of Jiyû. Yôichi Jômaru, ‘Shokun!’ ‘Seiron’ no kenkyû: hoshû genron wa doo henyô shite kita ka (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2011). In 1968, two years after the Asahi coverage of the New York Times exposé of the CCF, David Conde, a former GHQ officer turned Reuters journalist, published a book in English and in Japanese in which he claimed the CIA, in collaboration with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, established the Japan Cultural Forum and the journal Jiyû. Conde’s book also featured photographs of ‘Japanese participants in this international anti-Communist organization’: Hayashi Kentarô, Hirabayashi Taiko, Takeyama Michiyo, Takayanagi Kenzô, among others. The journalist further claimed that the US Embassy in Tokyo had the journal translated into English and used it to portray this ‘pro-American minority’s’ views as representative of a majority of Japanese public opinion. Conde, CIA Kokusho, trans. Okakura Koshirô and Iwasaki Akira (Tokyo: Rôdô junpôsha, 1968).
- 42.
Reiko Maekawa, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation and the Intellectual Life of Refugee Scholars During the Cold War’, Rockefeller Archive Center, available online: <http://www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/maekawa.php>.
- 43.
Summary by Edward G. Seidensticker, 20 April 1961, Box 194, Folder 3, IACF.
- 44.
Yamane quoted in Seidensticker summary, ibid.
- 45.
‘We Criticize’, p. 1. Translation by Edward G. Seidensticker, 20 April 1961, Box 194, Folder 3, IACF.
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Sherif, A. (2017). Japan’s CCF Affiliate, Jiyû, and Covert Public Diplomacy. In: Scott-Smith, G., Lerg, C. (eds) Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59867-7_14
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