Ray Moore, one of America's preeminent Japanologists and professor emeritus of history at Amherst College, has written a highly readable, short popular history on an interesting sidelight of Douglas MacArthur's approach as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers to the task of reforming Occupied Japan: his advocacy of Christianity. The naïve hope of MacArthur and American Christian leaders that Christian principles and values would come to play an important role in Japanese life reveals a gormlessness that is refreshing and stands in sharp contrast to their remorseless prosecution of the war until the Japanese unconditionally surrendered.
Professor Moore points out that MacArthur believed that “democracy could not exist without Christianity” (p. 139) because it was Christian principles coupled with the American experience that formed the “spiritual core [of democracy] that gave meaning to the formal institutions and political processes of a nation” (p. 54). This view, like MacArthur himself, had...
