Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

All this contributed to the kyodatsu condition. To be called on to endure the unendurable was something the Japanese people had grown used to over long years of war. Then, at least, the exhortation carried a clear sense of purpose: their nation, their culture, their “national polity,” people were led to believe, were imperiled by external forces. To be told to endure the unendurable in the postwar quagmire was a different matter, and the Diet report on the hoarded-goods scandal went a good way toward explaining why, for so many, physical and emotional exhaustion persisted for so long. “Private individuals have profited fabulously and have nourished the black market,” the investigators concluded, whereas attempts to expose the scandal and retrieve looted materials had been “frustrated by a combination of fraud and legal barriers” at every level. Of the men of influence who profited from the scandal, it was observed that “they wear a mask of democracy but in reality they swagger on the black markets,” revelling in the prolongation of economic confusion.