ABSTRACT
The end of the war also meant the end of Japan’s empire and the primacy of the values that supported it. During the following decade, Japanese survivors of the war faced the task of learning how to be a nation again. They no longer had a common culture imposed from above that could bridge local differences and the symbols of empire and imperial ideology, although still powerful at the grass-roots level, could no longer hold the nation together due to persistent Occupation efforts to discredit them in order to reform society.
