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 history. Paradoxically, its effect on many Japanese intellectuals was that of emancipation. Freedom of speech and thought was finally restored; unorthodoxy and radicalism received legal protection. No longer did the police have the power to suppress ‘suspicious’ literary works or to arrest their authors for ‘thought crimes’. Occupation censorship, being directed mainly at journalism and political writing, had relatively little effect on fiction.

The early post-war period was marked by a breakdown of the traditional values that had been systematically foisted on the country by the central government since the time of the Meiji Restoration. In their place the Occupation reformers attempted to instil a respect for the liberal democratic principles of the West. Democracy, however, was not something that could effectively be imposed from the outside like many of the more concrete Occupation reforms; despite the initial enthusiasm for demokurashi, especially among the youth, it was clear that considerable time would be needed before it became sufficiently implanted in people’s minds to take the place of official state nationalism as a guiding and inspiring force. Meanwhile the country was faced with what is frequently described as a spiritual vacuum. The staggering wartime losses and the prostration of defeat resulted in a period of economic chaos and political confusion.

The years following 1945 saw an impetuous reaction to the many-sided suppressions of the militarist era. There was a release of pent-up intellectual energies and a general sense of licence that inevitably affected the early post-war literature.

One important aspect was freedom to treat the subject of sex. After years of cavilling censorship, during which not only contemporary works but even some of the country’s great classics were bowdlerized or suppressed, writers were once more free to describe emotions and events that the militarists had frowned on as being decadent. As an inevitable result there was an outpouring of pornographic works. Yet serious authors