The Allied Powers signed the official peace treaty with Japan, ending World War II in Asia and the Pacific. The treaty reintegrated Japan into the community of nations.
On September 8, 1951, delegates from the United States, Japan, and forty-six other nations met in San Francisco and signed the Treaty of Peace with Japan. World War II had ended in August, 1945, after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Cold War concerns and fears of renewed Japanese aggression against developing nations delayed the writing of the official peace treaty.
In August, 1945, the United States began a military occupation
Writing a peace treaty could not be delayed perpetually, and when Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War and declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, Asia rapidly turned into a focal point for U.S. foreign policy. With China’s adoption of communism, the Harry S. Truman
The United States primarily sought to use the peace treaty as a means of ensuring an anticommunist orientation in Japan, an orientation that it hoped would deny Japanese trade to the Soviet Union.
Dulles arrived in Japan in late June, 1950. The week of his arrival, North Korea invaded South Korea, thereby starting the Korean War. The outbreak of the war caused Dulles to believe that rearming Japan was one of the most important aspects of the peace treaty negotiations. He believed that the Japanese would readily accept rearmament,
The United States envisioned a massive rearmament that would give Japan a significant defensive and offensive capability. This force would include a large army, a substantial navy, and a modern air force. Yoshida, on the other hand, merely wanted a strong security force. He saw the need for a few small ships to patrol Japan’s coastal waters and a small air force to provide for a modicum of self-defense, but he could not envision the Japanese people rebuilding a large modern military. Dulles attempted to persuade Yoshida that Japan had a right to a substantial defensive force, but the prime minister argued that the Japanese people had had their fill of war and militarism. Dulles never managed to reverse Yoshida’s position, and the peace treaty did not rearm Japan.
Trade
After working out most of the principal details with Japan, Dulles traveled to many other nations in the region to receive their input on the treaty. Dulles found leaders in these nations reluctant to support the lenient treaty the United States favored, so the United States agreed to enter into mutual security treaties with Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines to ensure their support of the American version of the peace treaty. Additionally, Dulles negotiated a security treaty with Japan, since he could not convince Yoshida of the necessity of rearmament.
With drafts of the peace and security treaties in place, the United States hosted the San Francisco Peace Conference in September, 1951. Forty-eight nations attended the conference for the treaty signing, but the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) did not attend. The Soviet Union refused to accept the treaty, and the United States had not invited the governments of China or Taiwan. Communist China was not invited because the United States refused to accept its government as legitimate, and participation by the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan would have been too controversial at the time.
In the treaty, Japan renounced its sovereignty over most of the territories it had acquired before and during World War II. These included Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Hong Kong, the Kuril Islands, P’eng-hu (the Pescadores), and the Spratly Islands. While the treaty stipulated that Japan no longer controlled these areas, it did not specify who did. Japan also agreed to accept all judgments of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, which tried war criminals. Finally, Japan agreed to negotiate separate treaties with those former enemies who desired reparations payments not specified in the peace treaty.
Due to the trade restrictions enacted in the Treaty of San Francisco, Japan had significantly less trade with the People’s Republic of China than with Western Europe. However, the restrictions were lifted when the United States began to normalize relations with China during the Richard M. Nixon administration. Despite this lost trade, however, the leniency of the treaty, coupled with its savings on defense expenditures, allowed Japan to reindustrialize rapidly and to rebuild its infrastructure so that it became one of the leading world economic powers by the 1960’s. Taiwan concluded separate peace arrangements and signed the Treaty of Taipei with Japan in 1952. However, the lack of a treaty with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, coupled with ambiguity in the Treaty of San Francisco concerning disposition of Japanese territories, led to disputes with Russia over the sovereignty of the Kuril Islands and disputes with China over the ownership of the Senkaku Islands. Japan concluded its treaty obligations when it made its last reparations payment to the Philippines in 1976.
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Buckley, Roger. The United States in the Asia-Pacific Since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. An overview of American relations with East Asia since the end of World War II that puts the Japanese Peace Treaty into context. The work examines such themes as Asian concerns about colonialism and the American fear of communism. -
Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Pulitzer Prize-winning account of postwar Japan and the American occupation. Particularly helpful in portraying the differences between Japanese and American cultures during this period. -
Immerman, Richard. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1999. Brief biography of Dulles that touches on the role he played in negotiating the Japanese Peace Treaty and compares his work on the peace treaty to his foreign policy positions as secretary of state. -
Yoshitsu, Michael. Japan and the San Francisco Peace Settlement. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Based on Japanese-language sources, this work gives a good glimpse at Yoshida’s goals for Japan’s future when negotiating the peace treaty.
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