Word: scap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Under orders from SCAP to balance its budget, the Japanese government had decided to raise taxes, end subsidies to manufacturers and fire 270,000 government employees. To Sadanori Shimoyama, president of the Japanese National Railways Corp., fell the job of starting off the mass dismissals. Shimoyama joked with friends: "With these kubikiri [dismissals -literally, "neck cuttings"], I may get it in the neck myself...
Horrified Japanese blamed Red agitation for inspiring the murder. Communist leaders backtracked, delayed strike and slowdown plans on all fronts. Sharp public indignation and the threat of a showdown with either SCAP or the government did not fit into the plans of dapper, greying Communist Strategist Sanzo Nozaka...
...good part of SCAP's first two years was spent in demilitarization and the purge of war-guilty officials. The trusts of the Zaibatsu, big family combines, were broken up. SCAP, however, had nothing to substitute for the old Japanese way of doing business. The Zaibatsu unquestionably carried a heavy share of Japanese war guilt. But instead of punishing individuals for individual offenses, the U.S. economic policy in effect punished the entire Japanese nation because the effect of it was to forestall such limited economic recovery as was still possible. The 1945 basic U.S. occupation directive to MacArthur...
When MacArthur is criticized for SCAP's failure to improve Japan's tragic economic plight, the general replies that he was rigidly bound by the directive, which expressed the will of the people of the U.S. Critics of SCAP, looking at Japan's slow recovery, insist the reply is only partially valid. MacArthur, they argue, had enough stature to go to bat in Washington against any directive he considered wrong...
...SCAP is still criticized in some quarters for its cumbersome, red-taped bureaucracy.* There are too many military minds fumbling with unmilitary chores. One American businessman recently complained: "They clutter up any piece of business with the damndest bureaucracy you ever saw. But foreign businessmen here can at least get into SCAP and yell. The Japanese businessmen are even more helpless and paralyzed-and don't even dare go near SCAP...