When most Japanese people talk of the West, they mean the United States. The American influences are very visible in Japan, if not always profound.

Baseball is the national game. The suburbs of Tokyo and Osaka, with their endless strips of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and flashy billboards, are like denser versions of Los Angeles. Hollywood dominates the movie theatres. Americans wrote Japan’s post-war constitution. And unlike Europeans, who have the European Union or Nato, Japan’s only formal tie to the outside world is with the US through a security treaty.

It was designed to be this way. When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan in 1945 as the supreme commander of the allied forces, he embarked on a mission to remake the country in America’s image. It was, in his own mind, a Christian mission as well as a political and military one. He saw it as his duty to educate the benighted natives in the ways of democracy.

He was, in this sense, a forerunner of our contemporary missionaries from Washington, who seek to spread democracy among the Arabs. And his record is used as a justification for the current efforts in Iraq.

After MacArthur returned to the US in 1951, he remarked that in terms of modern civilisation the Japanese were a nation of 12-year-olds. He thought they had only “stumbled” into militarism and, being in a “very tuitionary condition”, their politics and indeed their minds could still be shaped by more civilised, that is American, hands.

And by and large the Japanese were willing pupils. Few felt any nostalgia for the militarist regime that had led their country to ruin. The same might be said about the way most Iraqis feel about Saddam Hussein — though the Americans arrived under slightly different circumstances.

The US arrived in Japan as victors in a war the Japanese had unleashed, so it was hard to deny the legitimacy of their occupation. And the Americans were, on the whole, extraordinarily benevolent occupiers, especially when compared with the way the Japanese had behaved in China and other parts of Asia. The political freedoms they brought, or at least facilitated, were popular, along with chocolate bars and Glenn Miller.

One can understand why some Americans now look back with pride and are convinced it can be repeated in the Middle East. One of the pillars of American neo-conservatism is the belief that America’s destiny is to bring freedom to the world, with force if need be. It is a fine ideal, but one that tends to ignore history. For Japan in 1945 was not like Iraq in 2003.

One important difference is that whatever MacArthur thought, the Japanese had already had a multi-party parliamentary system, a sophisticated press and a lively intellectual culture. Censorship, right-wing extremism and an increasingly authoritarian cabal of bureaucrats, military leaders and imperial courtiers eventually crushed that culture in the 1930s. But the Taisho democracy in the 1920s, though not perfect, was already advanced well beyond the dreams of Iraqis, Syrians or Saudi Arabians today.

Nor did the Americans have to import a government of exiles, as they were forced to do in Iraq. Only very few Japanese fled Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. People who were liberal minded or democratically inclined preferred to keep their heads down at home. Some — mostly communists — were jailed. Others, often Marxists, subscribed to the official wartime aim of liberating fellow Asians from European empires and American capitalism.

But MacArthur’s people dealt with them brilliantly. When the occupation authorities freed the communists and encouraged the liberals and Marxists to organise trade unions, set up political parties and revive a free press, even the fiercest anti-capitalists were duly grateful.

Little, moreover, was directly imposed by America. Liberal institutions that had existed before were often improved and strengthened, and free speech, general suffrage and other civil rights were constitutionally guaranteed.

Some things could probably not have been done without the Americans, such as the land reforms that emancipated the farming population. But to a large extent the allied occupation of Japan was engaged in a superior restoration job, much as it was in West Germany. Japanese reformists were allowed to do what they had wanted to do anyway.