Thank you, Yukihiro Ikeda, for this point. Perhaps my term "cultural shock"  
was not the best. I wish simply to say that Japan had a tradition, going  
back not very far in time, of relying on land taxation, and a reformer could  
call on this tradition to make reform more acceptable in 1946.  
  
We know from the U.S.A. how quickly traditions can be reversed, and pushed  
down the memory tubes. Few know today that there were no state general  
retail sales taxes to speak of before 1931 or so, and states as well as  
localities depended on property taxation. Few know that the federal income  
tax, before World War II, exempted almost all wage and salary income, making  
it more a tax on property income. Propose that today and people would be  
incredulous - or feign incredulity. And yet the U.S.A. fought World War I  
that way, hewing more than ever before or after to "pay-as-you-go", and  
loaned money to allies besides. "Impossible!" economists would say today,  
yet it happened.   
  
So, I suppose what happened in Japan in the 1930's was wiping out the memory  
of the Meiji finance system. Orwell explained how this happens everywhere.  
The mind-bending power of the establishment is, well, mind-bending. Thank  
goodness for historians of economic thought to help check this tendency.  
  
Mason Gaffney