Like other occupation officials, Oppler found that the shock of defeat had stimulated “the revaluation of all values,” even to the point of prompting a thoroughgoing iconoclastic feeling of “damn what you have adored and adore what you have damned.” In the opening stage of the occupation, the reformist ardor of the Americans thus was complemented by a striking “open-mindedness to innovations” on the other side. In these circumstances, Oppler and his colleagues claimed that they “made the greatest effort not to order our Japanese counterparts around, but to work with them on an equal level.
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