Kurosawa Catalog

THE HERO WITHIN US ALL
peratives. He argues that the Japanese state during the war was
not a fascist one like Nazi Germany because there was no party
ideology or dictatorial leader and because the state was much
less repressive and the society not totally politicized. “[S]ocial,
communal, and occupational loyalties continued to st independently
of the state, and no mass party could abolish them.”
However authoritarian the state may have been during the
war, however large the gap between “kokutai,” official ideology,
and actual practice, upon the nation’s surrender the codes
of individual behavior and the relation between the state and
its citizens were subject to intense changes. The Allied Occupation
of Japan resulted in a new constitution that assured basic
human rights and popular, rather than Imperial, sovereignty.
Moreover, because of Allied suspicions of zaibatsu (big business)
complicity with the militarists, a program of economic
reform was implemented that aimed to decentralize economic
power and institute labor and land reforms as a basis for establishing
the foundations of a democratic political order.
As economic, political, and educational reforms were implemented
by American Occupation authorities, building on existing democratic
traditions in Japanese politics,” Western social and political
ideals gained a renewed pervasiveness and popularity compared
with the war years. Robert Bellah notes that “The loss of the war
and the beginning of the American occupation ... precipitated a
rush to the standard of ‘democracy’ in the Japanese intellectual
world. Western ideals of democracy, freedom, and individualism
were the new slogans replacing those of state nationalism.”
Shuichi Kato has suggested that this shift of attention brought with
it a renewed focus upon the initial Meiji project, that is, upon the
meaning of modernization and the American influences conjoined
with it: “it was not until the end of the Second World War
that the modernization of the country as a whole became once
again one of the major concerns of Japanese intellectuals and
writers. As in the Meiji period, modernization is again identified
with Westernization, or more recently with Americanization.
Kurosawa’s work is tied to these cultural shifts and to the renewed
currency that Western ideals received in the immediate postwar
EXCERPT: WILLPOWER CURES ALL HUMAN AILMENTS
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