ABSTRACT
The intellectual and spiritual climate at the end of the war was depicted by the writer Sakaguchi Ango in his essay "On Degeneration", penned in 1946. Soon the intellectual and cultural vacuum began to be filled with American pop culture, Western liberalism, and Marxist ideology, which were humanistic impulses that had been crushed underfoot by the prewar and wartime militarism. Religion might be looked upon as a gauge to measure the values and attitudes prevalent in Japanese society, although Japan did not undergo the kind of religious fervor that gripped other societies in the past. The sudden international fame gained by Japanese films during the postwar period has made it appear as if the art of the cinema attained instant maturity after the war. An American designer commenting on the Japanese art of packaging remarked, First one is amazed by the mastery and perfection of all the details.
