People often ask why the Japanese accepted an American Occupation so readily after the end of WWII.

The answer is they didn’t - not everyone, anyway.

Meet Arisue Seizō. That’s him in the armchair, looking supremely at ease on the day that the US Occupation of Japan began: 28th August 1945.

A wartime intelligence chief in the Imperial Japanese Army, Arisue made himself indispensable to the US by drip-feeding them sensitive intelligence documents and promising access to his spy network across the former Japanese Empire.

All the while, Arisue kept a buried stash of weapons and around 100 million yen in cash, ready for him and his network to take back Japan if ever they got the chance.

In the end, the Occupation was a success for Japan: peaceful and productive, despite its flaws. But it might always have been otherwise.

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Source: Richard Samuels, Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community (2019).