The fact that authoritarian, top-down exhortations to dramatically alter the status quo were not new does help explain—but only in part—why the American reformers succeeded as well as they did. General MacArthur, quintessential American that he was, easily became a stock figure in the political pageantry of Japan: the new sovereign, the blue-eyed shogun, the paternalistic military dictator, the grandiloquent but excruciatingly sincere Kabuki hero.
