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This year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the postwar period of Japan. After Japan lost the war, the shape of its postwar regime was prepared and arranged mostly by the victor, the United States, which occupied Japan. The ideal of freedom and democracy served as the core principles during the Occupation.

The Japanese Constitution was also established along the lines of this ideal, which was a noble cause for the Americans. During the war, they answered the question of Why we fight? by playing the role of the worlds police against fascist and totalitarian evils.

The ideal also accorded with postwar Americas general strategy as the hegemonic power leading all liberal countries, or the West.

We Japanese have struggled to find our own way of living under this regime. But it was only with the constraint of imposed freedom and democracy the command to be free, independent and self-governing even if it sounded contradictory as a concept.

In this sense, we were congeners of postwar Europeans under the Marshall Plan, of Latin Americans and Asians under the Point Four Program, and even of the Afghan or Iraqi people in more recent years.

In many of these countries, the ideal was internalized in due course and its original imposition lost its meaning. But we Japanese seem to have somehow failed to digest this history of imposition until now, even though the governments white paper on the economy stated as early as 1956 that the Japanese no longer lived in the postwar period.

This statement was issued only in connection with the economic growth of Japan, without referring to any political consideration or discussion among people of the ideal of freedom and democracy of American origin.

Although the economic growth of Japan, as well as of Germany and Europe in general, was what America intended, Japan, Germany and Europe in general have outgrown much more than Americas original expectations.

In the political arena, the ideal is not fully upheld. For example, the conclusion and renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the U.S. and Japan the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was done over relatively strong opposition among the people.

The treaty was signed between two mutually independent nation-states on equal footing as far as the institutional viewpoint is concerned. But in substance, thats not the case. The treaty was signed under circumstances in which the U.S. was overwhelmingly strong politically, economically and militarily vis-a-vis Japan.

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Survival of freedom, democracy