Students of Japanese culture like to overstate the radical foreignness of the Japanese monarchy, and the era transition is a good example. Most everybody knows how the office of the Japanese Emperor became “ceremonial” for the better part of 700 years, and how the archipelago was governed in isolation by what we call the shogunate. So Gen. Douglas MacArthur and a few foreign-policy brainiacs reached a magnificent, cynical modus vivendi: they would exploit and reshape the Japanese monarchy rather than smashing it. The Japanese public embraced the egalitarianism and the pacifism — and again, with astonishing speed, adapted to an all-new social schema. They advocated an explicitly republican Japan; the chief effect of this was to cost them the public goodwill they might have been thought to have earned.

Source: National Post April 29, 2019 19:18 UTC