The Supreme Court was Subservient to Correspondence from M
From the start of 1950, the Red Purge by private corporations moved forward apace with the backing of GHQ. Macarthur’s letter of July 18 to Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru led the way. The letter directly orders suspended publication of the central organ of the Japanese Communist Party, Akahata (Red Flag), along with publication of any successor newspaper. This letter became the sole legal basis for the red purge in the media. The GHQ authorities insisted that the letter took precedence over all other laws and that its instructions constituted a ‘directive’ (shiji) rather than an ‘order’ (shirei).