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To offset Socialist cries for a complete break with "U.S. imperialism," MacArthur plumped for an agreement highly favorable to Japan, which Kishi could point to as proof that the U.S. and Japan were now equal partners. The original Security Treaty had tied Japan to the U.S. in perpetuity, had entitled the U.S. to "come to Japan's defense" whether or not Japan so desired. The new treaty was limited to ten years, at which point Japan could refuse to renew it, and pledged the U.S. to "consult" with Japan before reacting militarily to a threat to Japanese or Far Eastern security. Implicitly—and by Japanese interpretation—the new treaty gave the Japanese government a veto power over the kind of weapons the U.S. could maintain in Japan as well as over deployment of Japan-based U.S. forces.
Back to Marx. At this point, Douglas MacArthur II ran smack into two more unfortunate monuments to his uncle's administration of Japan. In the heady early years of the occupation, General MacArthur was somehow persuaded to let SCAP's Labor Division fasten onto Japan a set of labor-relations laws that gave Japanese unions a readymade war chest by imposing the dues "checkoff," and saddled the country with minimum standards for working hours, accident compensation, etc. matching those of the U.S. Desperately short of trained leaders, the unions all too often turned to Socialist and Communist agitators, who set about converting the labor movement into an anti-American political tool.
Even more ominous for Japan in the long term were the consequences of SCAP's educational reforms. Basic occupation policy on education was laid down in 1946 by an Education Mission heavily loaded with men who were devoted to the doctrines of Pragmatic Philosopher John Dewey. They failed to recognize that what Japan's children needed was not to learn to adjust to the shattered society around them but to be provided with a faith to replace the one Japan had lost. Simultaneously, SCAP's Information and Education Section set out to fill Japan's schools with teachers avowedly opposed to prewar Japanese policy. Thus encouraged, most of Japan's educators reverted to the Marxist beliefs so many of them had held in the 1920s. Nikkyoso, the 600,000-member Japanese teachers union, soon fell under Marxist domination. Preached at in their classrooms, often encouraged to skip school for political demonstrations, a whole generation of Japanese has grown up in an atmosphere of reverse McCarthyism.
The "Don't Knows." What made the unholy Marxist alliance between Japan's labor leaders and intellectuals particularly dangerous was the passivity of Japan's masses, who still cherish great respect for their nation's anarchic intelligentsia and are so reluctant to take a stand on anything that opinion polls regularly turn up a majority of "don't knows." When the Red-led unions and students launched their increasingly violent campaign against Kishi and the treaty, the majority of conservative-voting Japanese almost certainly disapproved—but did nothing.