Abstract
The epilogue assesses the postwar U.S. military's occupation of Japan and its extraordinary decision to remaker Japanese society (America's inaugural exercise in nation building). The epilogue notes the differences between the remaking of Japan and lack of any attempt to remake other countries like Germany, Italy, and Austria. After 1952, the United States and Japan officially became partners, but in reality Japan was a client of the American empire. In the late 1970s two major Japanese thinkers reconsidered the archaic, trying to determine whether it was redeemable. To the political thinker Maruyama Masao, the archaic offered an unchanging conception of history that informed Japan's past, based on alternating moments of withdrawal from and entry into the world. The literary critic Kobayashi Hideo rediscovered the singular importance of the ancient allusion to “the spirit of words” to describe Japanese, which made Japan from its beginning a “linguistic commune.”