ABSTRACT
A highly visible authority system to depend upon is at the same time a highly visible target to revolt against. Revolt in Japan of the sort which would reconstitute society along new lines of authority or which would express a radically different consensus on basic values of living is not in the offing for Japan. It is in the nature of the Japanese process of consensus building that such an abrupt change in widely held views could occur only under near anomic conditions. The strong Japanese embrace of "democurashi” after defeat in war offers an example of that possibility. But even a turnabout of such seemingly revolutionary impact as that was made possible only by the continued operation of the much stronger political value of an implicit trust and dependency upon those in authority, for whom at that time the word "democracy" was a vital key to open the doors to power in the new post-war order.
