Introduction
Shortly after the US-occupation forces left Japan, prominent playwright and radio drama author Kikuta Kazuo (1908–73) made a striking confession in the June 1952 issue of the magazine Literary Spring and Autumn (Bungei shunjū). Recalling his service to the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, hereafter NHK), Kikuta revealed that the majority of radio shows broadcast during the US occupation (1945–52) were ‘American-made programmes’ (Ame-chan bangumi) designed by the Radio Unit of Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) of the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP) and aired under the name of the NHK. His own creations were no exception, including Bell Hill (Kane no naru oka), the primary object of this article's analysis.Footnote 1
Kikuta's confession should have surprised most listeners. It was common knowledge that radio programmes aired during the occupation were often modelled after American shows.Footnote 2 Critical audiences could easily discern the occupation's intentions in overtly political information programmes.Footnote 3 However, it did not become public knowledge until the end of the occupation that radio dramas—a popular entertainment form often assumed to be non-political—were meticulously designed to serve the occupation's agenda.Footnote 4 An anonymous writer to the Asahi Newspaper (Asahi shinbun) later recalled: ‘I was aware that quiz shows … were replicas of American programmes, but I did not know that [dramas like] Bell Hill … resulted from the orders of GHQ/SCAP, and aimed to educate [the Japanese].’Footnote 5
Occupation personnel deliberately experimented with several popular entertainment forms for the more effective promotion of political campaigns. Radio drama was one of them.Footnote 6 This was because the typical information programmes directed by CIE's radio personnel often aroused antipathy from Japanese audiences. By order of CIE, NHK had been airing information programmes during the late evening—a time that numerous surveys indicated was most popular with listeners. Many listeners complained about the scheduling, arguing that, after an exhausting day at work, most people would find it ‘tiresome’ to listen to programmes ‘with too much preaching’.Footnote 7 One listener's letter to World Times (Sekai nippō) even accused NHK of ‘offending’ listeners by ‘broadcasting information programmes even on Saturdays and Sundays’.Footnote 8 Some went further, urging NHK to abolish quite a few of the programmes on the basis that they ‘closely resemble[d] government broadcasts during the war’.Footnote 9 CIE personnel were aware that the similarities between wartime and post-war information programmes could undermine the image of the occupation as a democratic force radically different from the wartime Japanese government. They sought alternative forms of programming to reach mainstream audiences without rousing their antipathy.
This article examines one such experiment: Kikuta's immensely popular radio drama Bell Hill. Produced by CIE as part of an information campaign to promote child welfare and the prevention of juvenile delinquency, the serial was scheduled to follow Father Edward Joseph Flanagan (1886–1948)'s globally publicized visit to Tokyo.Footnote 10 Father Flanagan was an American priest and the founder of a famous rehabilitation home for orphans and homeless children in Omaha, Nebraska called Boys Town—a trans-war experiment that informed CIE's design of Bell Hill. At the invitation of the US War Department, he served as an expert consultant to the Japanese government in the fields of child welfare.Footnote 11 Premiered on 5 July 1947 as a twice-weekly show airing on Saturdays and Sundays, this first children's serial drama in Japanese broadcasting ran for more than three years, with a total of 790 episodes before its conclusion on 29 December 1950.Footnote 12
Bell Hill called for public attention to the care of war-affected homeless children, known literally as ‘juvenile vagrants’ (furōji). It featured the story of several such children seeking to rehabilitate themselves by overcoming a series of hardships and prejudices to build a self-governing community under the liberal guidance of a young repatriate soldier. Treating this redemption story as a trope for Japanese reorientation under the US occupation, this article explores the rehabilitative ideas articulated in this serial and audience reactions to them in relation to American liberal governmentality during the emerging Cold War.
Bell Hill deserves this attention because it achieved massive popularity with Japanese audiences while also reflecting the prescribed US perspective on Japan's post-war reorientation.Footnote 13 As the Radio Unit stated at the time, the show provided ‘an excellent medium for the painless projection of constructive child welfare principles’.Footnote 14 Kikuta's talent and experience contributed significantly to making it ‘probably the best written and produced show being aired over the BCJ [NHK] network’.Footnote 15 Monitoring listeners’ responses in the first week of its broadcast, the occupation's radio staff noticed its potential as a programme with ‘first-class listener appeal’.Footnote 16 It remained one of the most popular series aired during the occupation and was subsequently adapted for film, theatre, and picture-card shows (kamishibai).
The most enthusiastic listeners were those in their thirties and forties and children of about the same age as the show's main characters: elementary-school sixth-graders to first-graders of middle school.Footnote 17 Identifying himself as a childhood fan of Bell Hill, writer Hatayama Hiroshi recalls that the serial became an integral part of the daily routine of school children. For him, the theme song was not simply incidental music, but ‘penetrated into’ the ‘pace and rhythms of [his] everyday life’. The previous day's episode was always the topic of conversation in school. When there was someone who missed the show, about ten children would gather around him/her and re-enact the drama.Footnote 18 Bell Hill reportedly even caused a crowd of children to congregate in front of a radio shop in an area affected by frequent blackouts during 1947, when the programme was at the zenith of its popularity.Footnote 19 In the tenth week of its broadcast, pleased with the enthusiastic reactions from listeners, the Radio Unit concluded that Bell Hill was ‘effective [at] performing the functions for which it was designed’ and that the results appeared to ‘have justified the experiment’.Footnote 20
As I examine below, however, the further audience reactions documented in newspaper reports, magazine articles, individual recollections, and memoirs indicate that the Radio Unit's remarks were rather an understatement of the show's impact. Bell Hill created a profound sensation in early post-war Japan, emotionally engaging people through an involving story and characters, and propelling them into heated debates and even individual social commitments. This fervent audience response to the show constitutes the primary reason that Bell Hill merits critical attention.
Despite the lack of scholarly interest in Bell Hill as a primary historical object, the show has previously appeared in several studies on war orphans and juvenile vagrants in post-war Japan. This research, however, has largely dealt with these children as a social problem that ‘objectively’ existed in the margins of ‘normal’ society in the wake of the lost war and has been concerned with whether Bell Hill reflected such a reality correctly or publicized the issue effectively.Footnote 21 This article approaches the problem of juvenile vagrants as a discursively constructed category. In so doing, I argue that the historical significance of Bell Hill resides in the way it stimulated social interest in children who fell into this category from a particular redemptive perspective: an optimistic vision of rehabilitation based upon progressive ideas of human redeemability and the liberal notion of the individual as a self-governing agent.
I will unpack the major tenets of Bell Hill's vision by borrowing some insights from the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and technologies of the self in modern governmentality. At the same time, I note that its sentimental narrative was integral to the unfolding of Bell Hill's plot—a quality that ultimately inspired concrete actions to fulfil the programme's vision in reality. Drawing upon recent studies of emotions and affects that seek to modify the rationality-centred Foucauldian concepts of power and governmentality, I will treat sentimentalism as a technology of power deployed to underpin the rehabilitation process described in the story and thus later materialized in reality.
Through this analysis, I suggest a way to understand Japan's post-war reconstruction under the US occupation as neither unilateral indoctrination nor liberation, but primarily as a process of self-rehabilitation closely intertwined with what Lisa Yoneyama has termed ‘the U.S. Cold War governmentality’.Footnote 22 Such an understanding, as I shall discuss in conclusion, opens a further possibility to locate this post-war articulation of homeless children's self-rehabilitation within a wider trans-war continuum of attempts to create self-responsible and productive national and imperial subjects. As Stefan Tanaka, David R. Ambaras, and Max M. Ward have shown, the reform of ‘endangered children’ served as a model for earlier cases of modern education, war mobilization, imperial subjectification, and the ideological conversion of radicals, and the legacy of this dynamic continued to affect the post-war imaginary and practices of human reformation.Footnote 23 By foregrounding these historical circumstances, I problematize the binary conceptions of wartime and post-war eras, and Japan and the United States of America that have buttressed simplistic accounts of Japan's post-war rebuilding under US occupation.
Juvenile vagrants as redeemable war orphans within a biopolitical order of Cold-War governmentality
Before analysing the vision of rehabilitation offered by Bell Hill, I would like to discuss the social discourse surrounding juvenile vagrancy in the early post-war context. Even though the drama was produced under the banner of the child-welfare campaign, the occupation's radio personnel held from the outset a clear intention to treat this particular category of children. According to Kikuta's dairy, on 2 April 1947, NHK producer Udoyama Manji informed him that NHK was planning to produce a radio serial drama on ‘war-affected juvenile vagrants’ (sensai furōji) on the advice of occupation forces and asked him to meet with Major F. B. Huggins, the chief of the Radio Unit.Footnote 24 When the meeting took place, Huggins specifically requested that Kikuta write a story about ‘the rescue of juvenile vagrants’.Footnote 25 And, to further emphasize this point, during the first seven months of broadcast, listeners were repeatedly reminded in the opening announcement that the show's goal was ‘to call for social attention to the aid to juvenile vagrants’.Footnote 26
Juvenile vagrants existed in the preoccupation era but did not become a major category of interest within the field of juvenile delinquency and child welfare until after the war. Tsujimura Yasuo, an official in the Children's Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare during the occupation, noted that, in the pre-war era, juvenile vagrants did not exist at all as an established category within the surveys of the number of children institutionalized in protection facilities.Footnote 27 This point was further confirmed by Kitagawa Kenzō in his research on juvenile vagrants in the early post-war period.Footnote 28 We might ask, then, what historical circumstances made the topic of juvenile vagrants, amongst various other issues of juvenile delinquency, a top priority for the occupation government and radio personnel.
The recent war provided one obvious context. War damages and the repatriation process of the immediate post-war years drove a large number of children into homelessness, making these children more physically visible. In this specific social context of early post-war Japan, the term ‘juvenile vagrants’ was often used interchangeably with or alongside ‘war orphans’.Footnote 29
Nevertheless, this increase in number alone does not fully explain the degree of attention paid to war-affected juvenile vagrants. The testimonies of contemporary officials and social workers involved in juvenile delinquency and statistics from the early post-war years suggest that juvenile vagrants and war orphans did not necessarily overlap. Furthermore, the actual number of children who fell into the category of ‘war-affected juvenile vagrants’ was rather small for the amount of attention given to the subject and the heated debates on the proper social approach to juvenile vagrants kindled by Bell Hill.
A national survey on orphans conducted by the instruction of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, one of the earliest full-scale surveys on the subject, estimated that, as of 1 February 1948, among the total number of 123,511 orphans, 22.9 per cent were war orphans and 9.2 per cent were repatriated children. The overwhelming majority of orphans, 86.7 per cent in all, were under the care of grandparents, elder siblings, relatives, and acquaintances, and 9.9 per cent were institutionalized. Only 3.4 per cent of orphans were classified as ‘those who lead an independent life without guardians’ and those who had merely experienced vagrancy comprised about 5.8 per cent (7,117). According to another survey undertaken by the Tokyo Central Child Consultation Office, from April 1947 to June 1948, 53.8 per cent of juvenile vagrants under custody were runaways from home and 40.7 per cent had been affected by war and repatriation. The proportion of runaways from home vis-à-vis war- and repatriation-affected juvenile vagrants was growing by June 1948.Footnote 30
According to national surveys conducted by the Children's Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, 15,501 juvenile vagrants were institutionalized or placed in the custody of guardians from April 1946 to April 1947. Out of 17,660 institutionalized children, 4,080 were juvenile vagrants as of 15 June 1947. Nationwide statistics on juvenile vagrants often provided only the number of institutionalized individuals. This number tended to change corresponding to the cycle of crackdowns on vagrancy and did not necessarily reflect changes in the total number of juvenile vagrants or non-institutionalized children.Footnote 31 Fortunately, the aforementioned Tsujimura Yasuo provided a useful estimate: as of September 1948, approximately 10,000 children were institutionalized, while the number of juvenile vagrants in the narrow sense of homeless children living ‘on the street’ was about 2,000. The number of war orphans among this figure was further estimated to be rather small, at less than 10 per cent.Footnote 32
The extraordinary attention given to this category of juveniles suggests the discursively constructed nature of its significance in occupied Japan. Bell Hill played an important role in refiguring these children as a serious issue, disproportionate to their relatively small number. According to Kikuta's recollection, people had shown little interest in the well-being of juvenile vagrants until the time Bell Hill came out.Footnote 33 Some of his contemporaries worried that ‘only juvenile vagrants among the nation's needy children were receiving extraordinary attention due to the radio drama Bell Hill’.Footnote 34
Moreover, Bell Hill served to reinforce the imagined association between juvenile vagrants and war orphans by setting up the main characters as homeless children who were forced out on the street after losing or separating from their parents and/or elder siblings due to war mobilization and damages, or the chaotic social situation of the early post-war era. The imagined association merits discussion, as the involuntary manner in which the characters became juvenile vagrants provided a convenient dramatic device for Bell Hill to unfold the positive theme of self-rehabilitation. The occupation designed the programme to show ‘how children without parents or a home, under the guidance of interested adults, may learn to make adjustments in their relations with society’.Footnote 35 By choosing these particular children, Bell Hill represented juvenile vagrants as unfortunate children who would not have fallen into their current situation under ordinary circumstances.Footnote 36 The image of juvenile vagrants as unfortunate victims of war but otherwise ‘normal’ children furnished a crucial platform for the drama's progressive and humanistic agenda to promote the self-rehabilitation of these children: the optimistic vision that these children could be saved if only given the proper guidance and aid.
The concept of juvenile delinquents as redeemable children was, in fact, neither wholly new in Japanese history nor peculiar to the post-war era. Studies of juvenile delinquency have pointed out that the progressive understanding of such had gained currency from the nineteenth century onward in various modern societies. Based on liberal ideas such as the inherent goodness of individuals, human imperfection, and the capacity for self-realization, it challenged the older pathological model for child regulation.Footnote 37 And, as David R. Ambaras has convincingly demonstrated, Japan was privy to such ideas.Footnote 38
Later, I will revisit the trans-war homology in this regard, which has often gone unnoticed in early post-war discourses of child welfare and Bell Hill. But, for now, I would like to focus on the fact that the enduring idea of human rehabilitation took on special significance given the sociopolitical conditions of occupied Japan against the context of an intensifying Cold War. The hopeful vision of rehabilitation carried enormous gravity and urgency not only in the field of juvenile delinquency, but also in the larger process of rebuilding the nation. Deeply concerned about the nation's future in the aftermath of war, most Japanese people wanted a fresh start. Importantly, many prominent intellectuals of the time identified child education as the key to rebuilding Japan as a new ‘cultural nation’, based on the premise that children would be much more easily re-educated than the older generations.Footnote 39 The war-affected juvenile vagrants imagined as easily redeemable children proved a highly effective trope to stand synecdochically for the reformability of the entire nation.
The historical significance of the vision of rehabilitation must be also considered in the global context of the US occupation of Japan. The reconstruction of post-war Japan as a benign and useful member of the ‘free world’ became a pressing issue for the United States of America as the Cold War intensified. The successful rehabilitation of the Japanese constituted a necessary precondition for the readmission of the nation into the international community. American mass media and national character studies redressed the Japanese, whom they used to portray as pathologically wicked and hopeless during the war, with new images that represented them as immature but trainable. As John Dower demonstrated, pupils and children replaced the extensively publicized demonic and non-human portraits of the same populations from the wartime era.Footnote 40
The successful rehabilitation of the defeated former enemy was also crucial for the United States of America in refashioning itself as a liberator and benevolent helping hand rather than as a neo-imperialist power in its Cold-War rivalry in a decolonizing post-war world.Footnote 41 Bell Hill's portrayal of the juvenile vagrants and Shūhei easily overlapped with images of Japan as a troubled child and the United States of America as a respectful guardian in the occupation's reorientation of the Japanese. At this particular historical intersection of Cold-War rivalry and global decolonization, the post-war rehabilitation was conceptualized primarily as a process of reorienting the Japanese to liberal democratic and capitalist principles and attitudes in what Lisa Yoneyama identifies as ‘a biopolitical space of American governmentality’.Footnote 42 The self-rehabilitation of the Japanese was portrayed as the overarching principle for achieving this goal. In the following section, I will demonstrate this point in concrete terms by explicating the particular vision of rehabilitation articulated in Bell Hill.
Liberal guidance and sentimental connections: technologies of power and the self
Bell Hill's plot focused on the struggle of juvenile vagrants to renounce bad habits and adjust to a ‘healthy’ and disciplined lifestyle through liberal guidance and the care of a young, devoted repatriate soldier named Kagami Shūhei. Shūhei returns from the war to learn that his father has died and his younger brother Shūkichi, who had been left in the hands of his uncle, has been sent to a juvenile detention camp. Confused with what happened but keeping faith in his brother's good nature, Shūhei comes to Tokyo to discharge Shūkichi from the reformatory, only to discover that he has already fled the institution. In search of his brother, Shūhei ventures to Tokyo, where he meets a homeless orphan named Ryūta, who is about the same age as his own younger brother. Ryūta introduces Shūhei to the world of juvenile vagrants. Witnessing their miserable living conditions and their ill treatment by prejudiced adults, including police and social workers, Shūhei commiserates with these unfortunate children. He then takes Ryūta to his home village in Nagano Prefecture and starts an independent farm while encouraging Ryūta to rediscover his inner ethics and to rehabilitate himself. Later, Shūhei brings Ryūta's homeless friends from Tokyo to join them. Overcoming a series of difficulties, both financial and social, Shūhei finally creates a small community for juvenile vagrants named Bell Hill with some assistance from sympathetic private individuals in the village and reunites with his younger brother.Footnote 43
The specific ways in which Shūhei attempts to enlighten and motivate those children to redeem themselves merit discussion. He takes a liberal and humane approach. Instead of resorting to coercive means, he relies on self-directed principles of rehabilitation such as self-realization and self-discipline. These arts of self-care and self-governance—what Michel Foucault would call ‘technologies of the self’Footnote 44—were in line with liberal democratic principles that the occupation's ongoing ‘democratization’ campaigns were trying to revive and redress as the ‘new’ fundamentals for post-war Japanese society.
Shūhei's liberal approach comes to the fore in his first encounter with Ryūta. Right after Shūhei catches Ryūta stealing his shoes, Shūhei asks Ryūta to follow him. Ryūta assumes that Shūhei is going to report him to the police but notices that Shūhei is not going in the direction of the police station:
Ryūta: Aren't you turning me over to the police? Hey bro, I was going to steal your shoes. I busted your ass. … You won't get to the police station if you go that direction. You're an idiot.
Shūhei: You're afraid of the police, aren't you?
Ryūta: … (Pause) … Stop messing with me! I dare you to say that again. You're gonna pay for that. […]
Shūhei: I'm not going to the police. Come with me.
Ryūta: (Stunned) … Hey! you're putting on airs. Where are you going? (A little anxious) Where are you taking me? […]
Shūhei: I'm neither keeping you in a net nor grabbing your arm. If you want to run away, you can do so whenever it suits you.
Ryūta: … Huh! that's why I don't run away. If you bind me or grab me I'd run away any second. But you don't. […]
Shūhei: You're not gonna run away, are you?
Ryūta: (Frustrated) Stop bugging me. You talk too much. I won't run away. (Yelling) I won't run away!
Shūhei: Why?
Ryūta: What are you talking about? Because you're not binding me … so, I won't run away.Footnote 45
This scene foreshadows the ways in which Shūhei treats the juvenile vagrants in the process of rehabilitating them. Shūhei does not take the street children he meets in Tokyo to his hometown by force. Instead, he asks them about their goals and tells them that it is possible to realize their dreams like other ‘normal’ children, if they just try. To do so, he suggests they should discard their old habits and start a new life. But Shūhei waits until the children independently decide to go with him instead of imposing his will directly.Footnote 46 He maintains the same liberal principles while encouraging the children to work and to study for their own good.
Bell Hill stresses the liberal and humanitarian nature of Shūhei's method of guiding the children by casting it as diametrically opposed to some of the supposedly ‘older’ practices that had focused on the strict reinforcement of discipline and rules in a unilateral and coercive manner. First, his non-coercive approach and respect for the child's will are contrasted with what the show depicts as the prevailing practices deployed by official institutions and law enforcement, which forcibly contain and correct juvenile delinquents. Bell Hill also features an oppositional protagonist who represents a non-official implementer of the ‘older’ model of child guidance: Kagami Kanzō—Shūhei's uncle and an authority figure in the extended family and village. Kanzō is a well-respected leader of the village, but a believer in punishment, who callously sent Shūkichi to the reformatory while Shūhei was serving in the war. As a parent and teacher of strict discipline, Kanzō educates the children by coercing them into submission. He is also a man of tradition who leads village children in a private reading group of The Chronicle of Great Peace (Taiheiki), a Japanese military epic. Kanzō, a middle-aged man, is prejudiced against juvenile vagrants, as are many other older-generation Japanese in the story.
A head-on collision between the two characters’ views occurs when Kanzō insults Ryūta in front of other ‘normal children’ during his tutoring session. Despite his enthusiasm to learn, Ryūta has a hard time keeping up with the other children due to his lack of education and fatigue from his farm work. Showing no sympathy, Kanzō accuses Ryūta of being ‘disqualified as a Japanese’ (Nihonjin ja nai) when the child fails to answer his question about The Chronicle. Witnessing the other children side with Kanzō and mock Ryūta to avoid Kanzō's scolding, Shūhei confronts Kanzō. Shūhei argues that Kanzō's strict and forceful manner merely terrifies the children, causing them to become liars or sycophants who willingly backstab other children in order to flatter Kanzō. Shūhei further states that Kanzō's way of teaching is responsible for nurturing ‘detestable, subservient, and selfish adults’.Footnote 47
The above scene suggests that, in featuring juvenile vagrants’ rehabilitation, Bell Hill sought to invoke the much larger issues faced by post-war Japanese society. Shūhei's practice of rehabilitating vagrant juveniles clearly resonated with the occupation's ongoing call to reconsider the basic principles of educating children into citizens of the ‘new’ nation. The clash between Shūhei and Kanzō mirrored and reinforced the dominant discursive framework of the early post-war era that represented Japan's past as ‘feudal’ and ‘totalitarian’ and stressed the discontinuity of the progressive present with former eras. Contemporary experts in the field of child education and correction often affirmed this discursively constructed dichotomy by treating it as if it were real. For example, Yamada Kiyoto at the Education Research Centre (Kyōiku Kenshūjo) claimed in a symposium on Bell Hill sponsored by the journal Education (Kyōiku) that Japanese social work had been ‘anti-humanistic’ and that this drama was criticizing the practice of social work within Japan from a ‘new, humanitarian perspective’.Footnote 48
Shūhei's guidance, based on mutual trust and care, and the voluntary will of the juvenile vagrants appeared liberatory when compared to the restrictive practices imposed on children detained in the reformatories or Kanzō's overbearing manner. However, it is imperative to note that Shūhei's guidance does not completely liberate these children. Even though he employs beneficent and non-coercive measures, Shūhei aims to drive ‘troubled youth’ to become good children and appropriate future citizens. For this purpose, Shūhei subjects the children to a type of power similar to what Michel Foucault has termed ‘pastoral power’ in his genealogical study on governmentality.
Pastoral power is a fundamentally beneficent power whose objective is the salvation of the flock. The pastor's role is to show the direction that the flock must follow and to watch over them. At the same time, pastoral power is an individualizing power. While a shepherd directs the whole flock, this job can only be accomplished so far as not a single sheep escapes him. Thus, pastoral power targets each sheep, its inner ethics and conduct.Footnote 49 Shūhei's role is comparable to that of a shepherd. He plays a benevolent guardian and watchman for juvenile vagrants and directs his gaze to the inner ethics of each and every child in his charge. He never tries to awe the children into obedience. Only his benevolence and care affect them to behave voluntarily in the ‘correct’ way that will enable them to become ‘good children’ and, by extension, ‘proper citizens’ in the future.
Foucault's discussion of pastoral power helps to illuminate the specific ways in which Shūhei exercises his influence on each of the children. Without directly imposing his will, he suggests ways in which a juvenile vagrant can become a ‘normal’, ‘good child’ and always leaves some room for the children to make choices. Yet Shūhei's power is constantly in operation and guides the children of Bell Hill to make the ‘right’ choice as if out of their own free will. To directly borrow from Foucault, Shūhei ‘structure[s] the possible field of action’ of ‘free’ juvenile vagrants. He exerts a specific type of power—‘a mode of action upon the actions of others’ or the ‘conduct of conduct’ that Foucault calls ‘government’.Footnote 50
But what if a child chooses not to follow the pastor's guidance out of his/her free will? What would Shūhei do? If he forces the child to obey, his liberal principles, which distinguish his guidance from the ‘old’, authoritarian disciplinary model, would be ruined. If he leaves the defiant child alone, his rehabilitation project would end in failure. In this regard, it should be noted that not all the juvenile vagrants are receptive to Shūhei's method of self-correction. In a scene when Shūhei meets juvenile vagrants institutionalized in a detention centre, he tries to persuade them to come with him and ‘become good children’ alongside those already under his guidance. One detained child refuses his offer while arguing that Shūhei is doing essentially ‘the same thing as the detention authorities’.Footnote 51
Once juvenile vagrants build human connections with Shūhei, however, they become highly susceptible to his guidance. It is imperative to note that Bell Hill delivered its moralizing theme through a touching human story of friendship and emotional bonding between Shūhei and juvenile vagrants. The drama's emphasis on the sentimental connections between the characters deserves discussion, as it reveals an important mechanism of Shūhei's power. The sentimental narrative and the particular mode of power embodied in Bell Hill therefore open a new inquiry into intersubjective and emotional dimensions of the imagined process of rehabilitation under liberal tutelage. Foucault's discussion of power and governmentality seldom engaged with the realm of emotion, instead defining technologies of power primarily in rational terms, as ‘a matrix of practical reason’.Footnote 52 However, recent scholarship suggests that emotional and affective technologies are instrumental in the operation of power and governmentality.Footnote 53 As this scholarship reminds us, Foucault explicitly mentioned ‘the help of others’ as one means that the subject mobilizes in exercising technologies of the self. The interpersonal dimensions of subject formation therefore must be properly addressed.Footnote 54
In this light, sentimentalism can be critically rearticulated as a technology of power and subjectification. Drawing upon critical studies of sentimentalism, I consider it not as shallow emotionalism, but as a particular mode of representation that is anchored in an optimistic overemphasis on human altruism, empathetic caring about others and expression of such feelings in one's actions. While valorizing sensibility and spontaneous passion over reason and judgement, sentimental narratives often champion human connection as the highest achievable gain, and stress the forging of bonds and solidarities across the divides of race, class, gender, nation, and religion. The sentimental human connections are in principle characterized by reciprocity and exchange, and emotions act as an important intermediary for this exchange. In particular, sympathy for another person's suffering is often a major channel for bridging differences. While opposing direct conquest of the other, sentimentalism serves as a representational strategy for another type of power that operates through the arts of reciprocity and mutual benefit. Studies of sentimentalism have shown that this specific narrative mode has served historically as an important technology of power in a variety of social control programmes, colonial enterprises, and global hegemonic projects specifically because of its non-coercive and reciprocal manner of communication across the lines of class, race, and gender.Footnote 55 Bell Hill encourages us to examine Japanese re-education under the US occupation as one such case.Footnote 56
Bell Hill's narrative is sentimental in several respects. The drama begins with a scene in which ‘normal’, innocent kids encounter seemingly dangerous and vicious vagrant boys—runaways from a reformatory. At this initial moment, the gap between ‘ordinary’ children and juvenile vagrants seems unbridgeable. But the story unfolds to discover that these ostensibly dangerous juvenile vagrants share the same humanity as other children. Despite their bad language and unruly attitudes, these homeless children are not inherently ill-natured, but simply the unfortunate victims of war and/or neglectful adults. Kikuta makes this point clear in the closing narration of Act Four, when he writes about Shūhei's little brother Shūkichi in the following terms:
When he was left in his uncle's home, Shūkichi injured a man who had hit his head by stabbing him with a knife. This could be considered a bad thing to do. Shūkichi then not only disobeyed the authorities of the reformatory but also fled, taking another younger boy named Keiichi with him. This could be considered a bad thing to do as well. Yet, if someone had asked about his pitiful situation with warm words before all this happened, he might not have done these things. He was not loved by his parents, and his elder brother Shūhei, who had loved him, was taken by the war. … He was not able to trust anyone except his brother Shūhei who loved him.Footnote 57
While appealing to listeners’ sympathy toward juvenile vagrants, the drama follows Shūhei's journey of making sentimental connections with such children. The process through which Shūhei and Ryūta form strong, emotional bonds follows the sentimentalist formula mentioned above. First shocked at Ryūta's unruly behaviour and violent language, Shūhei asks: ‘How come you're such a bad boy?’ Not giving in to Shūhei, Ryūta replies: ‘Aren't adults also all bad?’ Then the story centres on how these characters overcome the initial glaring distance and distrust of each other displayed in their first encounter. The initiative to break this impasse comes from Shūhei. Shūhei follows none of the patterns of behaviour that Ryūta's previous experiences with other adults have led him to expect. Shūhei refuses to call Ryūta a juvenile vagrant—a pejorative category into which other adults would automatically put him in order to differentiate him from ‘normal’ kids. After Ryūta pretentiously claims that he is a gangster to scare Shūhei away, Shūhei says: ‘You're not a gangster, but just a kid.’ Nor does Shūhei beat Ryūta as others would easily do. Instead of taking Ryūta to the police, Shūhei offers to buy him a meal. The series of sympathetic gestures urges Ryūta to give adults a second chance.Footnote 58
Their relationship is strengthened when they stand up together against the jaundiced view that other adults hold of juvenile vagrants. Shūhei takes Ryūta to a restaurant but the owner refuses to let Ryūta in and the customers humiliate both Shūhei and Ryūta, overtly displaying their bigoted bias against juvenile vagrants. Frustrated, Ryūta steals money from the restaurant as revenge and runs away. Watching the police arrest Shūhei for what he has done, Ryūta regrets his own behaviour. He returns the money to the restaurant and spends the night outside of the police station, waiting for Shūhei to be released. Shūhei, disappointed by Ryūta's behaviour and advised to stay away from vagrant children by a police officer, tries to break their tie. But this time, Ryūta makes a reconciliatory gesture by apologizing and promising that he will never steal again. By this point, their incipient emotional tie is obvious to listeners. Ryūta confesses that he ‘likes’ (suki) Shūhei and wishes to stay with him. Shūhei feels deep sympathy toward Ryūta, finding this boy ‘pitiful’ (kawaisō) and ‘lovable’ (kawaii) at the same time, just like his own younger brother.Footnote 59
The developing personal connections between Shūhei and the other homeless children then play a significant role in the unfolding of the drama's moralizing plot. Shūhei's deep sympathy for the vagrant children leads him to the moral conviction that he must do something for them. Likewise, the children's strong affection for Shūhei motivates them to voluntarily try to adopt a ‘normal’ and self-disciplined lifestyle.Footnote 60 Thus, the mutual attachment between Shūhei and the juvenile vagrants in Bell Hill enables Shūhei's power to operate effectively. In exchange for the emotional and material support provided by Shūhei, the children under his benevolent hand are obliged to show a genuine effort to rehabilitate and discipline themselves. Otherwise, they could lose their emotional bond and human connection with Shūhei, which would be a traumatic experience for those who are in a sentimental relationship.Footnote 61
It is no coincidence that Shūhei's debate with Kanzō about child-educating principles ends with a scene in which Shūhei, in tears, laments why Kanzō cannot affectionately guide children.Footnote 62 Shūhei's ability to make emotional bonds with the homeless children distinguishes him from other old-fashioned adults and makes him a new type of guardian who can altruistically convince the juvenile vagrants to transform themselves into self-disciplined and good children as if from their own will.
Sentimental commitment, the national community, and post-war subjectivity
Bell Hill's sentimentalism not only served as a channel for Shūhei's liberal power to reach each juvenile vagrant's subjectivity, but also enabled the redemption story to elicit very emotional, empathetic reactions from listeners. Many listeners expressed sympathy with the show's view of juvenile vagrants as unfortunate but redeemable children who deserved social attention and aid. The intense feeling for the child characters, which Bell Hill's sentimentalism encouraged, constituted the base for creating a strong sense of commitment to help real juvenile vagrants in occupied Japan. In this section, I will examine how Bell Hill's vision of rehabilitation affected Japanese listeners to engage with its message and served to promote concrete actions to implement it. Such audience responses will be discussed in terms of the constitution of post-war subjectivity—a process in which individuals came to refigure themselves as responsible and empathetic members of the newly imagined national community.Footnote 63
According to a survey of listeners conducted by the Public Opinion Research Institute in Tokyo's Sakurada Elementary School on 12 July 1948, 76.1 per cent of the 284 respondents ‘felt sorry for’ the children in Bell Hill.Footnote 64 At a roundtable discussion on Bell Hill, Hieda Ryō, the child voice actor who played the role of Kagami Shūkichi, stated that, when he visited vagrant children housed in a juvenile detention camp to entertain them with a picture-card show, he ‘felt sorry for’ them. He thought: ‘Those children would be able to become just like us only if they had mothers as we do.’Footnote 65 This feeling of sympathy based on the redeemability of the juvenile vagrants stimulated the listeners’ urge to reach out to such children. Watanabe Fumiko, a voice actress who played the role of Hatano Yurie, Kagami Shūhei's supporter, testified that the show ‘opened’ her ‘eyes to the children's world’. After joining the show, she began to observe and follow homeless children whom she encountered on the streets. She felt drawn to them: ‘I felt like somehow I should go further inside juvenile vagrants’ lives.’Footnote 66
Such an emotional impact induced numerous members of the national audience to also take concrete actions to help those in situations similar to those experienced by the drama's main characters. Several schoolchildren in Saitama Prefecture became involved in a very famous case, when about 20 children at Ōmiya Elementary School raised money for juvenile vagrants after they had listened to Bell Hill and brought the contribution to Kikuta personally. They proudly informed him that they had collected the money without consulting their teachers, implying that they had voluntarily initiated fundraising. This story became a favourite anecdote for Kikuta and other NHK personnel, as it seemed to demonstrate that ‘the show's ethos was actually working’. Perhaps this confident assessment was not an exaggeration. At the time of the collection, each child also put in a note explaining why he or she had donated: ‘I picked up fifty-sen in the school corridor, so I donated’ or ‘I was going to buy candy but instead I put the money in the contribution box’. No matter how childlike such reasons may appear, this note-taking indicated that a level of conscious, moral decision-making was involved in the process, and the children somehow figured it important to show this fact to Kikuta and the juvenile vagrants with whom the ‘normal children’ were hoping to make connections.Footnote 67
The testimonies of their contemporaries, however, suggest that actual juvenile vagrants were further removed from the direct impact of Bell Hill. Listening to the radio was a common home or community practice in Japan. Due to their obvious lack of access to radios and their unsettled lifestyles, however, it was not easy for juvenile vagrants to listen to regularly scheduled broadcasts. For instance, Sano Mitsuru, a writer who was a juvenile vagrant during the occupation era, testifies that it was almost impossible for him to listen to any radio serial drama and that he has little memory of having listened to Bell Hill on the radio.Footnote 68
Institutionalized juveniles had a better chance to catch the show. Yet, many could not easily empathize with the characters. In one incident noted by Kikuta, within a detention centre known for housing ‘the worst kinds of vagrant children in Tokyo’, every single detainee crouched around the radio and ended up breaking down in tears. In response to this outburst, a staff member asked them: ‘Well, don't you think it's time for you to become good kids just like those in the drama?’ The children scoffed, saying ‘Ha, this is cloying (amae ya)’. Upon hearing this story, Kikuta admitted that the drama had ‘not reached the hearts of those children yet’.Footnote 69 An observation from Nishimura Shigeru, a former juvenile vagrant interned in Tokyo's juvenile detention centre during the early post-war years, indicates that Kikuta's remark accurately reflected reality. Nishimura had a chance to watch a theatrical version of Bell Hill alongside many other institutionalized juveniles. These children sent loud cheers in support of a juvenile vagrant character when he was accused of stealing by a happy child in the play, shouting: ‘Kick his ass!’ One detainee yelled out: ‘Do it cleverly, come on!’ In contrast, the scene in which Shūhei was speaking up for the juvenile vagrants in warm tears drew no response from the institutionalized children.Footnote 70
Sano Mitsuru's recollections give us a clue about what might have initially moved the children to tears, and also prevented them from being able to identify with the drama's characters or story. Sano remembers crying while watching the film adaptation of Bell Hill. But it was not because he was touched by the theme of self-rehabilitation or the ideals that Shūhei was teaching the children. He cried because he felt himself ‘too pitiful’ and his reality ‘too miserable’ compared to the redeemed vagrants in the drama. If a community like Bell Hill had existed in reality, he would have happily joined, but he knew that it was merely ‘a fiction’ and that ‘reality was more brutal’.Footnote 71
The above testimonies illustrate that the show probably failed to inspire many disillusioned juvenile vagrants. And, it may be true that Bell Hill's idealism appealed more to ‘normal’, happy children than the homeless children who had to face the cold reality of life. In this respect, Sano even suspected that the normal children's tears of pity toward their vagrant counterparts were ‘nothing more than tears of joy based on the recognition of their own superior position’.Footnote 72
But it is undeniable that the show deeply affected some children who were deemed vagrants or who were institutionalized in detention centres, and a number of adults who enthusiastically responded to the drama's call to reach out to these children. For these children and their guardians, Bell Hill was not a fantasy, but an inspiration. Bell Hill provided a concrete narrative and personified examples, no matter how fictional, as models for interested individuals to follow. Newspapers and popular magazines reported a number of cases of newly built boys’ homes in various private locales, mirroring the example of Bell Hill. For instance, Hachijōjima's local newspaper Nankai Times (Nankai taimuzu) featured a nursery school built by former schoolteacher Yanagino Yoshikuni as one case of a ‘private Bell Hill’. Here, Yanagino, his wife, and another elementary-school teacher took on eight children, including former juvenile vagrants, under their care.Footnote 73
Perhaps the most remarkable example was the Boys Town of Bell Hill (Kane no Naru Oka Shōnen no Ie)—a community created by five former juvenile vagrants housed in a detention centre for orphans and juvenile vagrants in Hamamatsu City of Shizuoka Prefecture. A former staff member of the institution, Shinagawa Hiroshi, was their guardian. In his memoir, Shinagawa writes that Bell Hill had inspired him from the time that he served at the detention centre.Footnote 74 He taught the detained children the drama's theme song and even performed his duties as if he was Kagami Shūhei. Shinagawa even contacted Kikuta Kazuo to request an introduction to the real model person for Shūhei's character, only to hear that Shūhei was a strictly fictional figure. Yet, far from dispiriting Shinagawa, Shūhei's fictive status boosted his motivation to put what Shūhei did in the drama into practice. If Bell Hill was a fiction, Shinagawa and his boys thought: ‘OK! Then we will make it real by building a boys’ town of Bell Hill for ourselves.’Footnote 75 As the name of their community implies, additional inspiration was derived from Father Flanagan's Boys Town.
The boys whom Shinagawa oversaw at the Boys Town of Bell Hill had lost their families and homes during the war and fallen into vagrancy, before being rounded up and housed in the Hamamatsu City juvenile detention centre. Although they found that the institution was indifferent to their welfare and future, they did not desire to return to a life of vagrancy. At first, six of these boys set up a plan to build themselves a home by working for themselves with Shinagawa as their guardian and left the detention centre. They began to make money working as shoeshine boys in Ueno Station. Although one boy ran away, the rest finally built a small community at Ōko Town, Seta County, Gunma Prefecture in December 1947. They released ‘Our Oath’ (Watashitachi no chikai), a jointly signed declaration of their determination for self-rehabilitation, and a code of conduct for their community, based on self-help and self-discipline. They swore not to do bad things like pickpocketing, extortion, or chain-snatching. The boys agreed to dress appropriately and use civil language, keep their bodies clean, collect and save all their money from work and not use it for themselves, share joy and sorrow and be kind to each other, and never fight. In the process, the boys were conceived as autonomous subjects who worked to rehabilitate themselves without any external imposition.Footnote 76
As well as turning themselves into self-rehabilitating subjects, the boys also became active agents who evangelized the liberal and humanitarian ideals and optimism that Bell Hill proposed. The boys reached out to other juvenile vagrants and requested sympathy and aid from society. Calling for juvenile vagrants in the Tokyo area to join them, they stated: ‘We believe that if we make a sincere effort, the people of wider society will appreciate how we feel, and cooperate and support us.’ They promised to work cheerfully and vigorously to accomplish their goals, tightly holding each other's hands, and preaching that ‘love and sincerity can overcome any obstacles’. The details of their oath revealed the boys’ awareness that their efforts to rehabilitate themselves was directly linked to their ability to gain recognition from society that they were proper members of the nation. They vowed: ‘We must keep in mind our pride in remaining upstanding boys of Japan (tadashii Nihon no shōnen) although we have neither home nor family.’ Numerous individuals and religious groups responded to these boys’ call for sympathy and aid.Footnote 77
The story of the Boys Town of Bell Hill furthered the sensation created by the radio drama Bell Hill by offering living evidence of individuals who had fought for their own redemption against all odds. Three of the boys turned out to be very successful in their careers, embodying the notion of upward mobility within the liberal meritocratic capitalist system. One grew up to be a paediatrician at Shōwa University Medical School Hospital and another became head of a small commercial company, with a third emigrating to the United States of America to become a French and Spanish teacher at Fort Atkinson High School after graduating from Laurence University. Twenty years after the establishment of the Boys Town of Bell Hill, Shinagawa admitted in a magazine interview that the majority of war orphans and war victims were ‘unsaved’ and, unlike those three lucky individuals, had to live hard lives with little protection. Even two of the boys who originally established the community lost touch with Shinagawa after one was adopted by a building contractor and the other became a taxi driver. However, the three successful individuals from the community remained in the spotlight, often obfuscating the fact that they were rather exceptional cases.Footnote 78
The rather extraordinary reactions provoked by Bell Hill should be considered within the specific context of occupied Japan. The years immediately following the lost war were an era of exhaustion and despair (kyodatsu). Most Japanese were so absorbed in their own survival that they could not afford to pay much attention to others.Footnote 79 Restoring a sense of community was therefore considered an important social task. In such a situation, the process of building solidarity among individuals who used to be total strangers and forming brotherly ties made Bell Hill an inspiring and emotionally gratifying drama, offering a vision of a new beginnings and self-rehabilitation for the national community.
Many listeners testified that Bell Hill offered hope and rekindled their will for life in the depressing social atmosphere of the early post-war era. For instance, in her letter to the ‘Voices’ (koe) column of Tokyo Asahi Newspaper (Tokyo Asashi shinbun) that featured on 18 June 1948, first-year middle-school student and war orphan Hayata Masako wrote:
Bell Hill was the show that entertained me and cheered me up every day. … I felt as if the author was saying to me from his heart, ‘Get a grip on yourself’ (shikkari yaru no yo) and it enabled me to get through the day, full of energy. So I would like to request Mr Kikuta Kazuo to continue [the show] until the world actually becomes completely delightful.Footnote 80
The aforementioned writer Hatayama Hiroshi recalls that, when he listened to the show as a child, he felt that some kind of transformation was coming. He was especially impressed by the scene in which the main characters expressed their determination to build a home for juvenile vagrants using the four-year-old trees on the green hill as the foundation. Hatayama wrote: ‘I felt as if someone was tapping me on the shoulder saying that it was about time to end the war play.’ It was from that moment that he ‘began to consider the new coming era seriously’. Hatayama noted that the scene's image of making a fresh start also produced a deep impression on many of his contemporaries.Footnote 81
Overall, the sensation that Bell Hill generated in early post-war Japan reflected the prevailing desire for visions of rehabilitation. As some listeners’ comments show, contemporary individuals often considered their emotional and actual commitment to such visions as analogous to the nation's rebuilding effort under the occupation. The fact that individuals even volunteered to make Bell Hill's visions a reality demonstrates the drama's power to inspire young Japanese people to constitute themselves as self-helping and community-minded post-war subjects in occupied Japan.
Final thoughts: ‘endangered children’ and the trans-war continuum of human-rehabilitation projects
In this article, I have argued that, through a moralizing and sentimental redemption story of war-affected juvenile vagrants, the CIE-designed radio drama Bell Hill suggested a larger vision of rehabilitation for post-war Japan—a vision strongly shadowed by the US occupation's liberal model for the reorientation of the nation and the wider American hegemonic project in Asia and the Pacific region. If, as this study proposes, we consider the major precepts of liberal guidance delineated in the programme as technologies of the self and sentimentalism as a technology of power, we can avoid a simplistic view of Japan's post-war reorientation as either complete liberation from a totalitarian regime or externally imposed indoctrination. Instead, the historical experience can be rearticulated primarily as a process of self-rehabilitation within the biopolitical order of American Cold-War governmentality. This refiguring looks beyond the repressive hypothesis of power underlying both the self-celebratory narrative of liberation that prevailed among the American public and the claims of post-post-war historical revisionists that this was a ‘masochistic view of history’ forced on the Japanese.
Bell Hill was a cultural production embedded in the specific atmosphere of the early post-war years and should be treated as such. The idea of turning problematic children into productive citizens of the nation through liberal means perfectly fits into both the fundamental rationale of the US occupation's re-education programme in the escalating Cold War and the longing for a new start within post-war Japanese society. Yet it is equally important to question whether some of the key principles publicized by Bell Hill as ‘new’, and therefore conducive to the nation's ‘fresh start’, were foreign to pre-US-occupation Japan. As a closing point, I will discuss this issue in some detail. In so doing, I aim to locate this study within recent scholarly efforts to address the discursively constructed nature of the wartime–post-war divide and the trans-war continuities in the imaginary and actual practices of human reformation in Japan and beyond.Footnote 82
Although juvenile vagrants served as an ideal trope for post-war rehabilitation under the US occupation, the imaginary of children, and especially ‘endangered children’, as the object of tutelary interventions had inspired numerous reform projects in Japan and its colonies. As Stefan Tanaka suggests, Japanese intellectuals since the Meiji period afforded children ‘the focus of a developmental notion of human life’ while treating them largely as ‘an empty vessel … in need of direction before becoming participating members’ of society.Footnote 83 As David R. Ambaras shows, a similar liberal idea of ‘correcting’ juvenile delinquents to render them responsible imperial subjects became a significant site of social concerns during the interwar and wartime periods. Importantly, the practices associated with the reform of ‘bad youth’ served as a long-standing template for various rehabilitation programmes implemented in Japan and its colonies such as the internal colonization of ethnic and political minorities and colonial assimilation, further extending to post-war anti-delinquency activities.Footnote 84 As both studies indicate, a liberal mode of power prevailed, operating through new technologies such as ‘the socialisation of protection’ and what Jaques Donzelot theorizes as the ‘tutelary complex’, while more coercive and judicial measures continued to inform these educational projects.Footnote 85
In his study of interwar and wartime rehabilitative projects that modelled juvenile correction to convert Japanese ‘thought criminals’ into loyal and productive imperial subjects, Max M. Ward provides an excellent insight into the coexistence of these different modalities of power and technology. Rather than viewing the overlap of different modes of power as an indicator of Japan's ‘backwardness’ or ‘compressed modernity’, he invokes Foucault's triad of sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality. In so doing, he reminds us that these three logics of power operated simultaneously in a range of trans-war rehabilitation projects in Japan and its colonies, and that this overlap was a typically modern phenomenon shared by other ‘advanced’ democracies.Footnote 86
Returning to Bell Hill, even though the drama represented Shūhei's liberal tutelage as a ‘new’ way of guiding the juvenile vagrants for national renewal, it was not entirely novel for the Japanese public. In reality, that tutelage worked more effectively alongside what Bell Hill identified as ‘old’ modes of correction and guidance, represented by Kanzō and the reformatories, rather than by replacing them. To that extent, we can clearly see the discursively constructed nature of the binaries imagined in Bell Hill as two clear modes of power representative of the wartime and post-war eras.
It is not my intention to suggest that wartime and post-war rehabilitation practices were the same. Rather, my concern is to note that the dominant post-war rearticulation of human rehabilitation exemplified by Bell Hill conceivably succeeded in representing itself as ‘new’ by deliberately disremembering some important historical precedents from Japanese history. The forgetting of these circumstances, which probably mediated the process of post-war rebuilding in one way or another, can be seen to have contributed to reducing the Japanese to an ‘empty vessel’ in need of discipline and education from the United States of America as a benevolent guardian in the dominant post-war discourses produced by both the occupiers and the occupied.
Interestingly, the story of Bell Hill itself seems, perhaps inadvertently, to attest to the absent presence of pre-war and wartime legacies. Although the drama never raises this issue in any meaningful way, it seems worth noting that, before the story begins, two of the main characters, Shūhei and Shūkichi, have already been exposed to not only oppressive means of power, but also disciplinary and governmental techniques in the imperial army and the juvenile reformatory, respectively.Footnote 87 Without being subjected to any post-war rehabilitation process, how else could a repatriated solder readily apply all those liberal techniques for guiding a group of juvenile vagrants into self-government? Why would listeners find the story plausible?
It seems worthwhile here to consider the possibility that listeners found Bell Hill's rearticulation of post-war rehabilitation palatable at least in part because they were familiar with some of the basic presumptions and the tutelage techniques and practices it portrayed. The case of Bell Hill therefore urges us to consider the US occupation's liberal guidance for Japan's rebuilding not as a fundamentally new approach transplanted to the nation from a more ‘advanced’ democracy, but as a post-war rearticulation of parallel imagery and practices common to Japan and other trans-war societies.Footnote 88
