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Chapter XI
Nationalism, Militarism, and War
The political and intellectual liberalism of the 1920’s was for the most part limited to the cities. Peasants and residents of the thousands of villages and small towns, who still constituted the bulk of the population, looked on at what was happening in the cities with wonderment and often with disapproval; and certain elements among the more educated classes regarded the liberal and sometimes radical political theories of the city intelligentsia and the antics of the moga and moho with growing hostility and resentment. Army and navy officers, rural landowners, lower middle class citizens of the smaller towns, and many petty government officials found it quite impossible to accept or even to tolerate the growing challenge to established political and social authority.
These men, too, were members of the new generation and products of the new education, but with them the heavy nationalistic and militaristic indoctrination of the school system had weighed more heavily than the opening of new horizons and the influences from