Beyond this, the guiding directives incorporated a potent emerging notion among policy bureaucrats, namely, that the occupation authorities should become actively engaged in attempting to change the psychology of the Japanese people. Underlying this immodest objective was a growing sense of urgency that the country should not only be “democratized” to prevent the reemergence of militarism, but simultaneously immunized against a rising tide of communist influence. Such a policy of reeducation, it was stipulated, would require not only the active promotion of American objectives throughout the
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