How America Wrote Japan's Constitution

Revisiting a Constitution Crafted ‘in a Week’

In this Sept. 19, 1950, file photo, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,
 in passenger seat wearing leather jacket, tours the newly
 opened Incheon Front in western Korea during the Korean War.

By Yuka Hayashi

As he steps up his push to revise Japan’s postwar constitution, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has explained that the 66-year-old basic law of Japan has become obsolete. The Japanese people must “get back our constitution,” Mr. Abe says, as the current one was written by the “occupying forces” of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, when the world was a different place. It was something drafted by “young staffers of the GHQ in a very short period of time,” he wrote in his book “Toward A New Country” published in January. “Just in 10 days or so.”

Mr. Abe’s account of how the constitution was prepared matches those given by some of those “young staffers” themselves. Several of the two dozen or so former American officials who were tasked with writing the draft constitution in 1946 shared their experiences in detail in video interviews conducted two decades ago.

Viewers can access the videos for free on the web site of the Claremont Colleges Digital Library based in California.

Among those interviewed was Richard Poole, who went to Tokyo to work for General Headquarters as a 26-year-old State Department official in 1946. Mr. Poole, now deceased, discussed how he and a couple of other young officials were assigned to draw up a section that determined Japan’s current imperial system, including the role of the emperor.

“We were told–it was a total surprise to most of us–you are to draft a new constitution for Japan and you’ll complete the work in a week. We were thunderstruck by this assignment,” he said. “Here we were a group of officers, although not a single one of us was a career officer and we were all from different walks of civilian life. We were hardly comparable to the founding fathers who drafted our constitution in the U.S.”

Another participant was Theodore McNelly, who was a 26-year-old intelligence officer working for Gen. MacArthur at his office in Tokyo’s Hibiya neighborhood. He later became a Japan studies scholar. Mr. McNelly, who passed away in 2008, was assigned to the group that drafted Article 9–probably the most controversial part of the constitution in which Japan renounced war and the possession of a military.

Mr. McNelly explained how Gen. MacArthur and Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney, who as a lawyer led the efforts to prepare the constitution, decided that GHQ had to draw up the draft “as a kind of a model to guide the Japanese.” This came after they determined the document prepared by the cabinet of then Prime Minister Kijuro Shidehara was “really inadequate.”

Writing of the draft, Mr. McNelly said, was such a rush. “We had more materials than we had time to study them,” he said. “When you had to do this in a week, there wasn’t time to do a great deal of historical research.”