| Abstract |
Despite the scale of civilian and military suffering in World War II, not all forms of wartime trauma translated into long-term political consequences. This paper examines why certain experiences—particularly Soviet internment—had enduring electoral effects in postwar Japan, while others, such as widespread U.S. bombing, did not. Japan’s 1952 general election, the first after the end of Allied occupation, provides a unique setting to study this question using newly digitized electoral results, regiment-level military records, military factory locations, and municipality-level bombing data.
I construct a set of novel instrumental variables to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in wartime exposure. To capture the intensity of aerial bombing, I use (1) the return flight paths of U.S. B-29 bombers, which often dropped unused ordnance on cities along their route back to Saipan or Iwo Jima, and (2) municipal terrain slope, which shaped local casualty levels by affecting the effectiveness of air raid shelters and firebreaks. To estimate the political consequences of Soviet internment, I exploit (3) the distance between regimental deployment locations in China and the Soviet base at Khabarovsk, which strongly predicted the likelihood of capture due to the timing of the Soviet advance in August 1945. In supplementary analyses, I also test (4) a modified version of the island-hopping IV to examine the effects of combat-related casualties from U.S. forces, although results from this specification are less robust.
I find that regions with greater exposure to Soviet internment experienced significantly higher postwar support for anti-communist blocs and for the reinstatement of wartime-era pro-war politicians. By contrast, bombing exposure had little electoral effect despite inflicting far higher civilian casualties. These findings suggest that the political salience of wartime trauma depends not solely on the scale of violence, but on the extent to which affected groups organized to demand recognition and compensation. While former POWs and their families successfully mobilized for pensions and political rehabilitation, bombing victims lacked comparable organization or political leverage. More broadly, the results highlight the importance of post-conflict mobilization—rather than trauma per se—in shaping long-term political behavior.
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