No alternative but to address at least some of their actual problems.
Tokyo, October 16 – Researchers have noted the cultural and political revolution that occurred in the Empire of the Rising Sun following its thorough defeat in 1945, in contrast with the reactions of other cultures that faced such a military and economic thumping, and have arrived at a possible explanation for the comprehensive restructuring and rehabilitation: the lack of preexisting antisemitism that would lead the people to scapegoat Jews for the defeat, instead compelling Hirohito and his subjects to directly address the pathologies that had led them to brutal imperialism and the ultimate failure to maintain its conquests.
While other countries reflexively identified the Jews as culprits when their national military endeavors ended in calamity, Japan, lacking a history of such scapegoating Jews, indeed, of having Jews in the land at all, never developed a propensity to shift blame onto that alien population within. This left them no choice after the Second World War but to reform their society from top to bottom: abandoning the insistence that the emperor was divine; implementing democracy; adopting a war-averse mentality; and toning down the xenophobia that led to so many of the empire’s depredations leading up to the war.
Had Japan played host to Jews and treated them as foreigners to exploit, as so many host societies did to Jews over the previous centuries, her post-war behavior would have consisted not of honest examination of the ideologies and pathologies that led the country to shame and unconditional surrender in 1945 – not to mention two cities devastated by the only two nuclear bombs ever deployed in war – but of emulating, for example, Weimar Germany, in which widespread antisemitism provided fertile soil for conspiracy theories to “explain” the German Empire’s defeat in 1918 not by examining the ideologies and pathologies that led the country to ruin, but by blaming the Jews, collectively, for the failure to defeat the western allies by “stabbing Germany in the back.” The fear of confronting the shame of Germany’s failure found a ready alternative target in the Jews – a psychological defense mechanism that the Japanese did have at their disposal come August 1945, leaving them no alternative but to address at least some of their actual problems.
As a result, analysts say, Japan has managed to rebuild itself in the decades since its defeat, and not to sink into a never-ending spiral of shame and further defeat in avoidance of an honest reckoning, unlike, for example, the bulk of Israel’s Arab-Muslim foes.
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