The task of reconstructing Europe after World War II was divvied up among the handful of victorious nations. But in the Pacific, the job of rebuilding Japan fell, effectively, to a single man: U.S. General Douglas MacArthur. And for five-and-a-half years, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers ruled from his office at the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Building in central Tokyo with an imperiousness to make emperors blush as he sought to transform Japan from a theocratic military dictatorship into a liberal capitalist democracy. It was an exercise without precedent and, more than half a century later, it remains the most...
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