When General Douglas MacArthur’s C-54 transport landed at Atsugi Military Aerodrome near Tokyo on 30 August 1945, the scene before him was almost without precedent in modern history. Japan’s industrial output had collapsed to just 27.6 per cent of its prewar capacity, and the country teetered on the brink of famine. Tokyo was, like dozens of cities across the Home Islands, a smoking ruin; in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, twisted steel and scorched earth stretched as far as the eye could see. Entire neighbourhoods had been erased, their residents either dead or displaced. Food production lagged far behind demand, forcing millions to live on rations often providing fewer than 1,500 calories a day. Typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis stalked the population. For the Allies, the situation posed a monumental challenge: restore order, prevent starvation, dismantle the machinery of war, and replace it with the architecture of peace.

MacArthur moved swiftly, proceeding to Yokohama to set up his headquarters as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). He would oversee a transformation of the country as he set about enforcing the terms of surrender, but also to work with the existing Japanese government to demilitarise, democratise, rebuild the shattered economy and save the population from potential starvation. In rural Japan, he orchestrated a land reform that, in both scope and speed, rivalled the most radical agrarian revolutions of the 20th century.

Within three years, six million acres – about one third of Japan’s farmland – was expropriated from 2.3 million landlords and sold to 4.7 million tenant-farmers at prices so low that inflation often made payments symbolic. By 1950, tenancy had plummeted from nearly half of all cultivated land to just ten per cent. Villages administered their own redistribution through committees dominated by tenants, shifting the balance of power from landlord to farmer. British sociologist Ronald Dore later wrote: ‘In place of the old paternalist order… I detected a sense of empowerment’, as those who had laboured in dependency learned self-government. This was not just an economic shift – it was a social and political earthquake, creating a class of independent smallholders with a vested interest in stability.

Urban Japan saw an equally ambitious overhaul. SCAP’s political officers, under MacArthur’s direct oversight, drafted a new constitution in a single week after rejecting a cautious Japanese draft. It enshrined women’s suffrage, codified civil liberties, and – through Article 9 – renounced war as a sovereign right. The emperor, stripped of power but retained as a symbol, became a unifying figure for a traumatised nation. In tandem, new labour laws expanded rights to organise and strike. By 1949, union membership stood at 55 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce, and May Day rallies filled the streets with slogans demanding fair wages and working conditions.

Yet this new democracy came with boundaries, carefully drawn by MacArthur’s administration – none more revealing than those enforced by the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD). Tasked with overseeing Japan’s information environment, the CCD screened newspapers, books, films, theatre scripts, radio broadcasts, personal letters, and even telegrams. Between 1945 and 1949, it reviewed over 200 million letters and 136 million telegrams. Among its most tightly guarded secrets was the true human cost of the atomic bombings.

Reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki detailing radiation sickness – symptoms such as hair loss, uncontrollable bleeding, and death weeks after exposure – were barred from publication. Japanese doctors’ studies were confiscated; the term ‘atomic bomb disease’ was forbidden in print. Foreign correspondents fared little better. On 5 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett defied occupation orders, took a train to Hiroshima, and filed a dispatch describing a ‘strange, atomic plague’. The US military revoked his press credentials and labelled his account propaganda. The Chicago Daily News’ George Weller reached Nagasaki soon after the surrender and wrote vivid reports of radiation injuries, but every one of his dispatches was killed by the censors. Even William Laurence of the New York Times, embedded with the US military and the Manhattan Project, dismissed radiation fears as ‘Japanese propaganda’ – a line consistent with the official narrative MacArthur sought to protect.

The censorship served multiple aims: to shield the occupation from accusations of cruelty, to prevent the bombings from fuelling anti-American sentiment in Japan, and to control the international debate over nuclear weapons. In effect, Japan’s new democracy was born under a managed silence about the most destructive event in its history. While political debate flourished in many areas, discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s ongoing tragedy remained officially constrained until the end of the occupation in 1952.

Meanwhile, MacArthur’s economic programme shifted from punitive dismantling to rapid industrial recovery, particularly as Cold War priorities emerged. The early Allied push to dissolve the zaibatsu – the large, family-owned business conglomerates that had dominated the Japanese economy since the late-19th century – was scaled back; many firms re-emerged as keiretsu, with banks, manufacturers, and trading companies bound by cross-shareholding. The ‘Dodge Line’ of 1949 imposed fiscal discipline – cutting subsidies, balancing the budget, and fixing the yen at 360 to the dollar. Painful in the short term, these measures restored stability and laid the groundwork for export-led growth. The Korean War acted as an unexpected catalyst: US procurement orders boosted industrial output by more than 70 per cent in two years, cutting unemployment dramatically. By 1960, Japan’s industrial production was 350 per cent of its 1945 level, and its economy was expanding at over 11 per cent annually.

Critics note that MacArthur’s reforms were top-down and at times authoritarian. Leftist movements that initially thrived were later suppressed; the planned 1947 general strike was banned outright. The retention of the emperor, the selective dismantling of zaibatsu, and the calculated censorship of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s legacy all reveal a pragmatic willingness to compromise democratic purity for stability and US strategic interests. Yet the overall record is extraordinary: in less than seven years, Japan was transformed into a stable, democratic, and increasingly prosperous nation. This was a remarkable success story.

Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida later remarked that without land reform, ‘what might have happened… would have been incalculable’. The same might be said of the occupation itself: without MacArthur’s particular mix of reformist zeal and strategic control, Japan’s postwar trajectory could have been far less peaceful. His legacy remains complex – part liberator, part censor, part architect – but undeniably, he was a builder of the Japan we know today.