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slash Japan to claim your offer. This week I'm going to recommend SPQR by Mary Beard. No joke,

this is not only an enjoyable read, but an immensely informative one.

Back when I was teaching community college, most of my Roman Republic unit was built out of material from this book, and I still dig it out for fun from time to time.

Go to audiblechild.com slash Japan to claim your copy. Oh, Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 191, lifting the lost, part 9.

So the thing about the occupation was that nobody was quite sure how long it was going to last.

After all, nobody had ever really tried to rebuild another society from the ground up before,

so there wasn't really a template for it.

The whole notion of nation-building, so familiar, if still somewhat murky to us today, was

a complete unknown in 1945.

The closest analog, one that the planners of the occupation would have rejected, though some

Japanese might have thought it appropriate, was the sort of paternalistic colonialism of the late 19th and

early 20th centuries. Nobody then had a clear sense of exactly what the allies were committing

themselves to in rebuilding Japan from the ground up, but hey, it was 1945. Liberal democracy

had crushed fascism with some help from the commies, but hey, they weren't so bad for a bunch of dirty reds,

and it seemed like the sky was the limit when it came to optimistic visions of the post-war future.

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