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Show PROLOGUE In August 1945 Japan fall; the Marinas landed, and the Occupation began its seven-yaar term. Within a few months a country within a country extended across Japan like an auxiliary nerve system. Forbidden to mingle with the Japanese, the Americans set up their enclaves, a modified suburbia among shrine and pine. Like the British in India, they built their bungalows and bossed their servants, moved about (in special railroad cars) like the Raj, and took entourages of siblings and servants to army-run hotels. Tokyo was headquarters, the office buildings of the Maru-nouchi district the Pentagon of the Occupation. Scattered about the hinterland were divisions and regiments; the larger cities were passive hosts to the larger units, and every sizable town had its Military Government team. Japan itself was cold, and dark, its cities a scrabble of newly-rebuilt huts, its villages hunger-smitten and still. Its people were harassed by haikyu (food rationing), teiden (power outages), worms and Americans, whose middle-class luxury seemed, in contrast, baronial. Faced with such disparities, the foreigners felt guilt and frustration, along with the excitement of the new and the alien. In the aftermath of a war whose origins were so intertwined with history and man's belligerence as to seem an affliction from the |