This chapter examines how the Occupation authorities used the Shinto Directive and postwar educational reform to eliminate the Japanese spirit and strip Japan of its history.
At the same time, American children were made to pledge allegiance to their own flag every day.
It is a crucial passage that asks why Japanese educators failed to point out this obvious contradiction and hypocrisy.

2019-05-28
I do not know what they had actually seen, but so far as I know, no one pointed out the fact that although in America people pledge allegiance to the national flag, in Japan a situation was created in which even raising the national flag was no longer possible.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Chapter 4: The Occupation Forces’ “Educational Reform” That Deprived Japan of Its History.
The Elimination of the “Japanese Spirit.”
When the Occupation forces arrived, they carried out policies that no civilized nation up through the time of the First World War had ever undertaken merely because it had become a victorious power.
One was the “Shinto Directive.”
That was interference in religion.
The other was the theft of history from the Japanese people.
Through education, they humiliated Japanese history by portraying it as something dark and militaristic.
This was carried out in step with the Tokyo Trials, and it blackened not only the history of the Greater East Asia War, but even the history of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars.
These measures were hypocrisy on the part of America, but at the same time, as occupation policy, they were executed with remarkable insight.
When Admiral Spruance, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, came to Japan, he is said to have wondered how a country with no such natural resources could have fought a modern war.
In the end, that question led him to the “Japanese spirit.”
And it was not only Admiral Spruance who thought so.
What the U.S. government and General Headquarters incorporated into their occupation policy as the elimination of the “Japanese spirit” were the “Shinto Directive” and the “educational reform” that robbed the Japanese people of their history.
Americans pledge allegiance to the national flag.
In March 1946, an American education mission came to Japan.
Then, under the pretext that “Japan must be made into a democratic nation,” it compelled Japan to undertake educational reform.
This was an act that did not even conform to the Potsdam Declaration.
As noted earlier, Article 10 of the Potsdam Declaration states that “all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people shall be removed.”
In other words, at the time of the Potsdam Declaration, it was properly understood that democratic tendencies had existed under the Meiji Constitution.
And yet America, which came as an occupying force, carried out educational reform on the assumption that no democracy had existed in Japan at all.
At the time, I was already a middle school student, so I did not experience it myself, but I am told that all elementary school children remember blacking out their textbooks with ink.
This was the very height of American hypocrisy.
In American kindergartens and elementary schools, there are words that children are made to recite every day with their hands placed over their chests.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
Rendered literally, it means something like this: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
There are places where American primary education does not provide much serious instruction in academic subjects, but this alone is made to be said every single day.
I entered elementary school in the year the China Incident began, the war with America began when I was in the fifth grade, and by the time I was in the old middle school system, the nation had entered the period of total war.
All of them were public schools.
The old middle schools are said to have been militaristic, but we never once recited phrases like those used in America.
After the war began, there was something called “Taishō Hōtai Day” on the 8th of every month, and the principal would read aloud the Imperial Rescript declaring war.
“The Emperor of the Empire of Great Japan, who reigns by the grace of Heaven and upon the unbroken Imperial line for ages eternal, hereby makes clear to you, Our loyal and brave subjects: We hereby declare war upon the United States and Great Britain. We command Our army and navy to exert their full strength in battle, Our officials to perform their duties with utmost diligence, and Our people each to fulfill their proper role, so that with the united strength of the entire nation the aims of the war may be accomplished without fail…”
It went on and on.
It was truly very long.
At that time, the national flag was raised, but if it rained, the ceremony was canceled.
That monthly observance was about the only thing we did.
But in America, children are made every day to recite words pledging loyalty to their own country.
And America, while treating such acts of praising one’s own country and pledging loyalty to it as of the highest importance in its own land, thoroughly removed them from Japan through educational reform.
At that time, many Japanese educators must have gone to America.
I do not know what they had seen there, but so far as I know, no one pointed out the contradiction that although Americans pledged allegiance to their national flag, in Japan even the raising of the national flag was no longer possible.
As for Americans’ loyalty to their national flag, it was only Japanese expatriates and others, who had actually enrolled their children in American kindergartens or elementary schools, who told me directly from experience.
None of the educators who visited America or studied there noticed this crucial point.
To be continued.