"After this terrible fury, Japan entered a strange seclusion. It withdrew from the world again—not..."

After this terrible fury, Japan entered a strange seclusion. It withdrew from the world again—not willingly, but under orders from the victors; and not alone, as in the centuries before Perry, but locked in an almost sensual embrace with its American conquerors. And soon enough, it became apparent that the Americans could not or would not let go… 

There was no historical precedent for this sort of relationship, nor anything truly comparable elsewhere in the wake of the war. Responsibility for occupied Germany, Japan’s former Axis partner, divided as it was among the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union, lacked the focused intensity that came with America’s unilateral control over Japan.

Germany also escaped the messianic fervor of General Douglas MacArthur, the post-surrender potentate in Tokyo. For the victors, occupying defeated Germany had none of the exoticism of what took place in Japan: the total control over a pagan, Oriental society by white men who were (unequivocally, in General MacArthur’s view) engaged in a Christian mission. The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’