Second of two parts
Postwar Japan was rife with polemics. Thick magazines such as Chuo Koron, Sekai and many others that carried in-depth analysis and cutting comment were read and discussed by people of all classes and shades of opinion, left, right and center. Antiwar films of the 1950s by directors such as Kon Ichikawa, Tadashi Imai and Masaki Kobayashi kept Japanese guilt, in its many guises, in the foreground of national debate.
By the 1960s, with the appearance of Nagisa Oshima's films about disaffected and alienated youth, the popularity of the new angura engeki (underground theater) movement and the rise of the New Left, the level of Japanese consciousness of social inequity was very high indeed.