2015 is a very significant year for Germany and Japan, undoubtedly two of the most significant players on today’s world stage.
This year is the 70th year after the formal end of the most destructive conflict that the world has ever known. In May 1945 Germany, the instigator of World War II, signed an instrument of unconditional surrender to the US, Britain, France and the other major Allied powers, and in August, the Japanese Empire agreed to surrender unconditionally to the same Allied powers after the US used atomic bombs for the first time on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The number of people who personally experienced the injuries, atrocities and destruction visited by Germany, Japan and its allies on the occupied countries of Europe and Asia have greatly diminished over the past 70 years, and, with their diminution, the intensity of the hatred and opprobrium felt toward World War II’s aggressors gradually disappeared. Only those who are in their late 70s and above have abiding recollections of what it was like to live under German and Japanese military boots. Certainly those who survived the Holocaust and the surviving soldiers who freed the concentration camps, and the living victims of the Kempeitai, will never forget what Hitler and the Japanese militarists did to the peoples of Europe and Asia.
Even before World War II came to an end, during their wartime conferences, the Allied leaders decided that the mistakes committed by the victorious powers of World War I—the imposition of harsh and humiliating terms on the losers—were not going to be repeated in any settlement ending World War II. No opportunity would be given to another Adolf Hitler to stoke resentment toward the victors and thereby set the stage for a Fourth Reich and a Japanese Empire II.
The contrary happened. In the aftermath of World War II the US and its Western European allies embarked on the greatest rehabilitation effort in world history. The US rolled out the Marshall Plan—named after Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall—that poured enormous amounts of cash and peacetime goods, for consumer and industrial needs, into Germany and the former Austria. By 1952 Germany, led by the respected Konrad Adenauer was back on its economic and political feet. The reentry of Germany into the international community was signaled by the acceptance of Germany as a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Community.
On the other side of the world the former commander of the Allied powers in the Pacific war theater General Douglas MacArthur, was appointed as the effective head of the government of Japan. At the very start MacArthur indicated that he–=and the US government that he represented—wanted not a humiliated and broken Land of the Rising Sun but a Japan that would be able to reclaim its place in the community of democratic, peace-loving and progressive nations. Correctly perceiving that a post-War Japan needed a unifying figure, Gen. MacArthur retained Hirohito as emperor but shorn of his godlike character.
Like its European wartime ally, Japan by the early 1950s was back on its economic and political feat. So economically stable had it become that Japan was able to comply with the terms of the Reparation Agreements that it had entered into with the Philippines and the other Asian countries that it occupied. Corporate names like Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toshiba and Toyota began to carve out increasingly sizeable chunks of the world markets for their products.
Today, Germany and Japan are without a doubt two of the most important nations in the world, with Japan as the country with the world’s third largest economy and Germany as the country with the fourth largest. Germany calls the shots in the European Union and Angela Merkel is the primus inter pares among Europe’s leaders. Japan, long tied down militarily and diplomatically by its post-World War II Constitution, recently has made moves toward shedding its pacifist international posture and getting more involved in international peacekeeping initiatives.
Today, seventy years after they abjectly executed instruments of surrender in the midst of the destruction, displacement and grief that they had caused, Germany and Japan occupy places on the world stage befitting proud and respected nations. In 1945 hardly anyone could have foreseen that reversal of fortunes.
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