Stanford University Press Blog

Japan vs. Iraq: What we did differently?

Going into the war in Iraq, President Bush invoked the American occupation of Japan after World War II, an occupation that transformed a feudal society into a democratic nation:

America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit -- for their sake, and our own. (September 7, 2003)

Now, historian Takeshi Matsuda presents a vivid description of the American occupation of Japan in Soft Power and its Perils (2007). He explains why the Japanese consented to the changes the American occupation brought, while we have seen the Iraqis become increasingly hostile to an American presence in their country.

One of the primary differences, in his view, is that the United States approached Japan with a genuine interest to understand Japanese culture and to create mutual understanding between the two nations. Matsuda argues that, while the American occupation was certainly geared toward a certain level of cultural imperialism, the US also prepared huge reserve of knowledge about how Japanese and American cultures would interact well before the occupation began:

“In contrast to the current situation in Iraq, the U.S occupation of Japan was a democratic experiment supported by American soft power, as well as hard power…U.S. preparation for the occupation of Japan began immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that is, four years before the actual occupation of the country.” In addition, “intergovernmental agencies in Washington also spent a great deal of effort defining the general objectives of the occupation of Japan and formulating programs need to meet the specific objectives of the United States.”

Matsuda argues for the importance of academics in shaping the perceptions of both countries of one another. Following World War II, there was an explosion of Japanese Studies in the US and American Studies in Japan, the latter often heavily subsidized by the US. According to Matsuda, this facilitated understanding between the two cultures, such that “U.S.-Japan cultural relations flourished and became full blown in later years in ways that few people would have ever dreamed.”

Taxing the Family

In All In The Family, Patricia Strach shows how the family is used by the US government to implement policies and explores the challenges that arise when employing something as nebulous and uncontrolled as family relations to administer policy.

Since 1948, family has been the basic taxable unit in the US. This not only results in different tax rates based on an individual’s familial role (spouse, dependent, single parent, single childless adult, etc.), but also sets expectations for how members of a family act toward one another and taxes based on those expectations.

For example, parents are expected to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their offspring, and they are awarded tax credits, deductions, and exemptions to assist with those expenses. In using such tax expenditures to pay parents to support their children, the government saves itself the cost of creating an agency to accomplish that goal. At the same time, it presupposes that parents will use the savings from these tax expenditures for the goals the government intends, but there is no oversight to insure that this is the case, as their would be for an official government agency.

The government’s assumptions that family units have combined resources and act to help their members are seen in the prohibition from deducting student loan interest when the loan comes from a family member, whereas the interest on a loan from a stranger is tax deductible. This can be seen as a limit the government places on individual taxpayers to help their family financially.   

As the average American household increasingly moves away from the nuclear family with a single breadwinner around which these taxes were originally designed, definitions of family within various parts of the tax code struggle to keep up.  The so-called marriage tax penalty came about when a significant number of married women entered the workplace: suddenly, a tax code that had been seen as equitable and progressive for families with a single breadwinner was seen as taking resources away from families. Similarly, untraditional households—from unmarried parents to individuals or couples caring for children who are not their biological offspring—are not recognized in the same way across the tax code.

Amongst debates over gay marriage, the role of family in immigration, and adoption rights, our laws continue to use family as a determiner of responsibilities as well as rights. And responsibilities that are not given to or taken up by individuals often fall to the government itself.