A Romantic Reverse Course in Occupation Japan

(First published on February 15, 2022)

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.