The occupation radically remade Japan, turning it into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of people from totalitarian military rule,” in MacArthur’s telling. The emperor was demoted from an infallible deity to an affable public figure who attended baseball games. A massive land reform campaign dispossessed many absentee landlords. Hundreds of millions of new textbooks were printed to train Japanese students in democratic ways. Public health authorities vaccinated the whole Japanese population—all eighty million—twice for smallpox (the largest vaccination
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