After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the Allied occupying authority SCAP sought to dismantle the existing regime, punish its members and to remove their ability to make war again in the future. Perhaps more importantly, SCAP sought to remove the will of the Japanese people to make war and to create lasting and sustainable peace through reshaping and reorienting Japanese society.

This was done through the pursuit of the key objectives of demilitarisation, democratisation, and deradicalization of Japanese government, institutions, and society.

One key arena for this was education reform as SCAP wisely saw that education was a tool of indoctrination of the former regimes, as well as structurally and institutionally unsuitable for the new Japan they sought to shape.

This paper will explore how SCAP understood the ‘problems’ of education, and how they sought to solve these problems, and to implement new systems and ways of thinking to achieve their goals. It will also emphasise the importance of the agency of the occupied Japanese in this process.