Top Dog

Geoffrey Hawthorn

• Nippon, New Superpower: Japan since 1945 by William Horsley and Roger Buckley
  BBC, 278 pp, £15.00, November 1990, ISBN 0 563 20875 9
• United Nations Human Development Report 1990 by Mahbub al Haq
  Oxford, 189 pp, £9.95, May 1990, ISBN 0 19 506481 X
• Nationalism and International Society by James Mayall
  Cambridge, 175 pp, £25.00, March 1990, ISBN 0 521 37312 3
• The International Relations of Japan edited by Kathleen Newland
  Macmillan, 232 pp, £40.00, November 1990, ISBN 0 333 53456 5

An officer in MacArthur’s new administration walked into the Mitsui office in Tokyo in September 1945. ‘There it is,’ a manager said, pointing to a map of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – Japan’s prewar plan for the region. ‘We tried. See what you can do with it.’ The Americans hesitated. Washington was at that moment more inclined to retribution than recovery. And the power of zaibatsu like Mitsui, huge family-owned conglomerates which had invested in Japan and its imperial territories in North-East Asia, produced matériel for the war, and come to control much of the country’s heavy industry and financial business, was incompatible with the ‘economic democracy’ the American administration wished to introduce. It started to dismantle them.