I'm Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 189, lifting the Lost, Part 7.

This week I set myself a light, modest, and unambitious goal, to introduce to you the plethora of social

reforms implemented by the occupation government as part of the Herculean task of remolding a

two thousand-year-old society in America's image. Now obviously, I can't do all of that. There's

just way too much to talk about.

However, that's probably a good thing. When you get down to it, the granular detail of how

occupation policy was implemented is, in many cases, astonishingly dull.

It turns out that remaking the rules of a society is primarily an exercise in bureaucracy,

and I'm not sure anybody wants to listen to someone drone on about 300 pages of comparative reports

on what the ideal yen-to-dollar exchange rate is.

And before we eat into it, yes, some of you have expressed an interest in an episode on economic policy, so that's

going to happen, but it's not going to focus on the occupation, because, in my opinion,

post-war economic policy is more interesting anyway. So today I've set myself the relatively

modest goal of providing an overview of occupation policies on education, religion, the economy,

and political life. With the goal of helping us understand what kind of society Douglas MacArthur

and the rest of the Allied leadership were trying to build while sitting in their fancy offices

in the Daiichi building staring down at the emperor. Spoilers, it's a pretty

American one. So let's start with education. Now if I had to choose one word to describe

pre-World War II Japanese education, it would be stratified. The system implemented by

Meiji era reformers was based on the model of Imperial Germany

and was very unabashedly centered on the idea of finding out how the next generation could be useful to state policy.

Now, over 80 years, the education policies of the Japanese Empire changed quite a bit,

...