The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

I think there are various ways to arouse the Japanese people but the most important one is freedom of speech. In these few years, the people have not been afraid that they might be blamed if they spoke certain matters. They hesitated, and tried to patch up the surface, so the public mind has really become timid. We can never develop the total power of the people in this way.

Nothing is more helpful to an anthropologist than to study contrasts he finds between peoples who on the whole share many traits. No matter how bizarre his act or his opinion, the way a man feels and thinks has some relation to his experience.

America laid the war to the aggressions of the Axis…… Whether the Axis had seized power in Manchukuo or in Ethiopia or in Poland, it proved that they had embarked on an evil course of oppressing weak peoples. They had sinned against an international code of ‘live and let live’ or at least of ‘open doors’ for free enterprise.

In the nineteen-thirties General Araki, fanatical militarist and one-time Minister of War, wrote in a pamphlet addressed ‘To the whole Japanese Race’ that ‘the true mission’ of Japan was ‘to spread and glorify the Imperial way to the end of the Four Seas.