from the wreckage of this war. If it is to our interest to
see a new Japan emerge, we should be willing to fa-
cilitate its birth. And the first step in that direction is
to take note of the alternate roads which Japan can
follow.

The pressures produced by defeat are many and con-
fusing, perhaps nowhere more confusing than in Japan.
Nevertheless the political and economic forces at play in
a defeated Japan tend to point the way to either of two
divergent roads.

One of these roads has many well-known guides and
familiar signposts -- for it is the road which is at bed-
rock a slightly altered version of the one which led to
Pearl Harbor and disaster.

The other is a new, largely uncharted road with few
signposts, and guides who are little known. It is one
which various groups in Japan have sporadically at-
tempted to pioneer during the last seventy-five years
without success, but which will be thrown open once
again by the blast of defeat. This is the broad highway to
self-purification, democratization and social and eco-
nomic reform -- in short, a road away from aggressive,
repressive militarism and toward a peaceful and demo-
cratic solution of Japan's problems.

The cataclysmic shock of an unprecedented defeat is
capable of jarring loose the psychological blinders and
strait jackets which have been imposed on the Jap-
anese by three quarters of a century of authoritarian
rule. With the blinders dislodged, and a measure of firm
but sympathetic guidance, it is but a short step to a
revulsion against the disproven and hackneyed slogans
of the militarists, and thence to a searching criticism of
the forces which led Japan to the abyss of defeat.

One of the groups strongly subject to disillusionment

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