One of the most fashionable slogans of the early postsurrender period envisioned Japan becoming a “nation of culture.” In October 1946, Hayashi Fumiko, a well-known fiction writer from an impoverished background herself, argued in a popular magazine that no country so indifferent to the plight of orphans and the homeless could claim to be cultured.48 Over two years later, Osaragi Jirō, a distinguished author respected for his humanism, wrestled frankly with the same issue. A British acquaintance, he wrote, had asked why the Japanese did nothing about their street children. His immediate
...more
