Ishibashi Tanzan, the Finance Minister under the first Yoshida cabinet (May 22, 1946 to May 24, 1947) was purged on May 16, 1947, in accordance with category G of Appendix “A” of SCAPIN-550, dated January 4, 1946. Ishibashi's purge was clearly unreasonable. As president and editor-in-chief of the
Oriental Economist, Ishibashi had been firmly in opposition to the Manchurian Incident (1931), the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), The Triple Alliance (1940), and the Pacific War (1941-45). He was well known as one of the few liberalists opposing the totalitarian government in those days. That is why Colonel Kramer, who became the first chief of the Economic & Scientific Section (ESS) of GHQ and had been a reader of the
Oriental Economist even during the war, asked for Ishibashi's cooperation from September to December, 1945.
This article aims to clarify the factors and process of Ishibashi's purge as GHQ's attempt to silence him and to squelch his economic enlargement policies in favor of their own economic retrenchment policies. There were three purge actions on Ishibashi. The first purge movement was requested by the Soviet representatives at the Far Eastern Commission (FEC) conference; GHQ disagreed. The second occasion arose when Ishibashi and ESS came into extreme conflict over the Extraordinary Tax Legislation issue, but General MacArthur denied his purge for fear that the Yoshida cabinet would fall. And finally, the situation that led to the purge of Ishibashi was the clash on the cost problems of the Occupation that occurred between Ishibashi and GHQ. Moreover, the Government Section (GS) viewed Ishibashi as a dangerous man for offering such stout resistance to GHQ. GS had to purge him not as a politician, but as an journalist because there was no clause on resistance to the Allied Powers as a justification in SCAPIN-550. Prime Minister Yoshida assumed an indifferent attitude because Ishibashi was becoming powerful in the Liberal Party.
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