ABSTRACT
August 15, 1945, saw the downfall of the Empire of Japan and with it the demise of the early modern state born with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The postwar era began with national soul searching. Military- cliques and militarism, and the constitutional framework that had made them possible, were repudiated. People decried the contradictory and backward aspects of Japanese society, such as the concentration of wealth in the hands of the zaibatsu and the landlord class, which had impoverished the urban working class and rural tenant farmers, and the plight of women, whose welfare had been sacrificed to the family system. The immaturity of civil society, the lack of scientific rationality, and the centuries of feudalism and national seclusion that had caused this situation were denounced. Japanese intellectuals and journalists bent over backward to denigrate prewar Japan.
