Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Hills: Bureaucrats II

Kate: An interesting point made in Hills of Silver Ruins and elsewhere, including the short stories, is that the worst thing a new emperor—or usurping emperor—can do is to get rid of the current bureaucracy. Certain programs still have to run. The people who know how to do stuff still have to work. Even Asen, for all his faults, doesn’t wipe out all the bureaucrats though he does leave them to their own dog-eat-dog devices and "youma that feed on human souls." And he does allow the infrastructures for his citizens to fall apart, leaving a vacuum that the gangs try to fill. 

The emperor in "Dreaming of Paradise" attempts to literally wipe out the bureaucrats, and his Kirin suffers as a result. In the short story "Weather Vane," the geeks keep doing their geeky jobs because, quite literally, someone has to do them.

A historical tie-in here? How did MacArthur handle the “old guard” in the Japanese government?

Eugene: In the early days of the Occupation, almost three-quarters of a million individuals were flagged as candidates for exclusion from government service because of their participation in the war effort. In the end, only two hundred thousand actually were. By the end of the Occupation, most of them had been "de-purged." After the Occupation, remaining charges against the rest were vacated.

SCAP ended up functioning as a thin governing layer on top of an existing political infrastructure. I like to think of MacArthur as Japan's last shogun. And like Japan's shoguns of old, despite possessing the powers of a dictator, everything he did had to be literally translated through layers and layers of bureaucracy that had remained almost entirely intact.

The "Reverse Course" that commenced in 1947 shifted Occupation policies back toward a more conservative economic and political footing. The "Red Purge" took precedence, and in 1949, the "Dodge Line" (named for banker Joseph Dodge) saw the implementation of a series of draconian fiscal and monetary policies to bring inflation under control.

Shigeru Yoshida served as prime minister from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954. He was deemed acceptable because he'd been opposed to the war. But in British terms, he was a Tory down to his bones. So whatever the New Deal reformers in the early Occupation set out to do (they did succeed in pushing through the new constitution), Yoshida's vision would ultimately prevail.

The stuff the old guard were against, they eventually co-opted. They were against the constitution until it became popular, and then they were all for it and always had been. MacArthur was equally popular, so it made sense to ride his coattails right until the end.