When Kobayashi Masaki was finally repatriated after being detained for a year by the U.S. military to perform labor services in Okinawa, he was astonished at the political scene that greeted him. “Japan had become extremely democratic,” he recalled. “Everyone was moving in that direction. Everyone was racing off in the direction of a democratic kind of humanist freedom and union activity.” Kobayashi, who went on to become a distinguished director of antiwar and humanistic films, had grave misgivings about this sudden enthusiastic embrace of democracy. “The conformism seemed just the same as
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