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Just as Latin America in the 2000s manages creatively to escape U.S. hegemony, so China, Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan, among others, may have soon found a way to get away from Japan and invent new forms of democracy. It is highly plausible that these new forms might be more inventive, more substantive, and more in tune with twenty-first-century realities than the kind of democracy the United States would attempt to export repeatedly from 1945 to the early 2000s. All good things may not happen under Western control—another tenet of twenty-first-century thought.
Finally, making the mix even more interesting, Conroy adds the aforementioned memoir of his own days as a U.S. Navy intelligence operative in occupied Japan in 1945–1946. This addition (though perhaps frivolous from the standpoint of authoritative scholarship given the twenty-five-year-old author’s nonprofessional status and given that he rather naïvely positions himself as “bringing democracy” to the enigmatic Japanese) holds relevance for other reasons. First, it may interest some readers that the young Conroy was at one time not unlike American military men and women in the early 2000s in a foreign land as occupier trying to “bring freedom.” But moreover, the memoir crucially explains the point of the rest of the book—one might even say the point of Professor Conroy’s career. The position young Conroy found himself thrust into as a starting point differed from leftist or rightist armchair theoreticians: he starts from a real war, which interrupted a real family, with real uncertainty as to whether he would ever return to his wife and daughter. Ironically, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped his personal situation. Because of the end to the war that they brought in August 1945, he could cross the Pacific for the U.S. Navy in September as a member of an occupying and not a fighting force. Yet even this would become part of the problem. He began a lifelong reflection on his situation as a twenty-five-year-old, and on this type of situation for anyone: why am I here in someone else’s country, in utterly bombed-out Tokyo, with rumors of worse destruction and mysterious sickness in off-limit Hiroshima, when I do not even understand the global forces that brought the Pacific world to this point?