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Article: The old generation in (mid)Showa Japan: Hasegawa Nyozekan, Maruyama Masao, and postwar thought.(Country overview)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"THOUGH MORTIFYING IN THE EXTREME," Tokyo Imperial University law professor Yabe Teiji wrote in his diary on the day of Japan's surrender, "the Potsdam Declaration has been accepted, and with it, unconditional surrender. The time for endurance begins today." (1)
Of course, for the Japanese people, the time for endurance had begun fifteen years earlier, when they began to endure the privations of war, the repressive policies of their own government, and, for the previous ten months, Allied bombing of their major cities. The end of the war merely brought a new phase in the chronicle of endurance, for once the initial shock of defeat wore off, there came a period of ...