Cynics would say that this near-unanimous embrace of the conqueror’s principles merely confirmed what condescending American and British analysts had been arguing all along: that the Japanese had an “ingrained feudalistic tendency” to follow authority—that, as the State Department’s George Atcheson had put it at the beginning of 1946, this was the dawn of “the age of Japan’s imitation of things American—not only of American machines but also American ideas.”64
