This one is an opinion essay — less trivia, more argument. It starts with a Christmas tree in the ruins of Tokyo and ends at why anime's villains refuse to be evil.
December 1945
Picture the scene. Japan's cities are burned. Two atomic bombs have fallen. The emperor has announced surrender in his own voice. An American general rules from Tokyo, and hundreds of thousands of occupation troops are settling in for a project nobody had ever tried at this scale: rebuilding a defeated great power from the ground up.
And that very first postwar December — months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — Christmas appears in Japan. Not as a forced ceremony, but as something people simply did: decorations, gifts, festivity, celebrated with and around the same Americans who had just defeated them.
To American eyes, this looked like a miracle of hearts and minds. The enemy that had fought to the death on island after island was now stringing up Christmas lights. Surely this meant Japan was converting — embracing American values, American faith, the American way of life.
That reading was wrong. And the mistake turned out to be expensive.
What America thought it saw
The occupation of Japan (1945–52) went, by any historical standard, astonishingly well. There was no insurgency. Democratic institutions took root. A pacifist constitution was adopted. Within a generation, the defeated enemy was a stable democracy and a close ally.
General MacArthur, a devout man, believed something more was happening: a spiritual vacuum that Christianity would fill. He called for a thousand missionaries. A drive was organized to send ten million Bibles to Japan. He wrote that Christianity had "an opportunity without counterpart in the Far East."
The Christmas celebrations, the polite crowds, the eager adoption of American customs — it all seemed to confirm the thesis: give a broken society our values and it will become like us.
What actually happened
Here is the detail the thesis missed: Japan had already been celebrating Christmas for decades. A secular, commercial Christmas — cakes, decorations, department-store displays — took hold in Japan back in the Meiji and Taishō eras, long before the war. Celebrating it in 1945 didn't signal conversion. It signaled something far more Japanese: the effortless absorption of a foreign festival into a culture that has never demanded exclusive loyalty from its gods.
Japan is the country of the famous saying: born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist. A child is blessed at a shrine, the wedding is in a chapel, the funeral is at a temple — and nobody involved sees a contradiction. Religions in Japan are not competing truth-claims; they are tools, seasons, aesthetics, occasions.
So what happened to MacArthur's ten million Bibles? Japan read them politely and remained itself. Today, after nearly five centuries of missionary effort and seven years of occupation by a Christian superpower, roughly one percent of Japan is Christian. Christmas, meanwhile, thrives — as a romantic date night and a fried-chicken dinner. Japan didn't adopt the religion. It adopted the party.
The occupation succeeded — but for reasons that had little to do with spiritual conversion: an intact bureaucracy, the emperor's cooperation, exhaustion with militarism, international legitimacy, and enormous luck.
The expensive lesson
Now comes the part historians have argued ever since: America learned the wrong lesson from its best moment.
If you believe the occupation worked because American values are universally transplantable — rather than because of Japan's very specific conditions — then "nation-building" starts to look like a repeatable procedure. Flatten the bad regime, install the institutions, hand out the values, harvest a democracy.
That confidence echoed through Vietnam-era social engineering and reached its peak in 2002–03, when U.S. policymakers explicitly invoked occupied Japan as the model for post-invasion Iraq. The historian John Dower — author of Embracing Defeat, the definitive study of occupied Japan — spent that winter publicly begging them to stop, in essays with titles like "A Warning from History: Don't Expect Democracy in Iraq." Every condition that made Japan work, he argued, was absent in Iraq. He was ignored. The quagmire that followed is not a controversial memory.
The Christmas of 1945, misread as conversion, became the founding myth of an idea — we can remake anyone into us — that two generations of foreign policy paid for.
So what does this have to do with anime?
Everything — because the cultural machinery that quietly ate Christmas is the same machinery that produces anime's most distinctive feature: its refusal to believe in pure evil.
Think about the moral universe most Western pop culture inherited. A monotheistic grammar runs deep in it: one God, one truth, a final judgment, an adversary. From that soil grew the classic American superhero: the caped embodiment of Good punching the embodiment of Evil. (For decades the Comics Code literally required that good triumph and crime never pay.)
Japan's grammar is different. In a world of eight million kami, spirits are not sorted into angels and demons. They are like weather — powerful, local, moody, negotiable. A god can bless you or drown your village. A fox spirit can be a trickster, a guardian, or both before lunch. Nothing in this cosmology needs a Satan.
Watch what that produces on screen:
- In Princess Mononoke, there is no villain. Lady Eboshi destroys the forest — and shelters lepers and gives outcast women dignity. The forest gods are majestic — and they will kill you. Miyazaki's famous line about the film was that he wanted to depict a conflict where both sides are right.
- In Spirited Away, No-Face isn't evil; he's lonely, and he becomes what each environment makes of him. The witch running the bathhouse is a tyrant and a fair employer with a doting maternal streak.
- Naruto hands its most horrifying antagonist, Pain, a backstory so sympathetic that the hero ends up agreeing with his diagnosis and rejecting only his prescription.
- Attack on Titan performs the trick at series scale: spend three seasons hating the monsters, then wake up inside the monsters' homeland and discover they were children.
- Death Note makes its protagonist the self-appointed god of judgment — and lets the audience argue for twenty years about whether he was the villain.
- Even Madoka Magica's witches turn out to be the corrupted remains of the very girls fighting them: the enemy is your future self, not an external evil.
None of this maps cleanly onto a good-versus-evil framework — and that's precisely why so many Western fans describe anime as refreshing. It offers a moral physics their own pop culture rarely uses: conflict without an axis of evil, sympathy without absolution, endings where nobody is purely right and the world simply has to be lived in anyway.
The punchline of history
There's a neat symmetry to end on. In 1945, America set out to export its worldview to Japan — a thousand missionaries, ten million Bibles — and Japan, with a polite smile, kept the tree and declined the theology.
Eighty years later, the export runs the other way. Anime — steeped in a plural, ambivalent, eight-million-gods view of the world — has conquered global screens, and a generation of viewers raised on absolute heroes is voluntarily marinating in stories where evil has a childhood and gods have moods.
Nobody occupied anybody this time. That might be why it worked.
Agree? Disagree? That's what the contact page is for. For the shows mentioned: see our all-time rankings.
Sources: John Dower, "A Warning from History" — Boston Review, Dower, "Don't expect democracy in Iraq" — Japan Focus, Christianity in Japan — Wikipedia, A Little Faith: Christianity and the Japanese — Nippon.com