A Romantic Reverse Course in Occupation Japan

TOKYO — The G-2 Intelligence wing of the GHQ and the Canon Agency spied on communists during the Occupation. However, they also spied on fellow Americans. One of their targets was Charles Louis Kades (1906-1996), who was having an affair with the wife of a Japanese aristocrat.

Kades, a Harvard graduate, Roosevelt New Dealer and Wall Street lawyer, was deputy chief of the Government Section of General Headquarters (GHQ). Working under MacArthur, Kades was the moving force behind many of the Occupation’s postwar reforms designed to endow Japan with modern democratic institutions and do away with the feudal system that had put Japan on a path to war.

Kades had arrived in Tokyo in late August 1945. He had overseen the purging and imprisonment of the Japanese military officers, politicians, government officials and businessmen who had led Japan in to the war and he had encouraged the formation of labor unions. Kades was charged with creating the GHQ draft of a new Constitution, a remarkable document that renounced war, stripped the Emperor of authority while leaving him as head of state, established an elected government and guaranteed a range of civil rights, including, or the first time, full equality for women (who had previously been subservient under the law to the male head of the household). The new Constitution took effect on May 3, 1947.