"During the war Westerners were told of the "child mind of the Jap conscript." After the war, the same newspapers and magazines spoke of "Seventy Million Problem Children"; and cartoonists had a field day depicting the Japanese as infants in the crib or, more often, children attending General MacArthur's School of Democracy. Such paternalism was unquestionably the essence of MacArthur's attitude toward the Japanese- and Oriental people in general. His guiding philosophy during the occupation, he stated widely in publicized Senate hearings in 1951, after President Truman had recalled him from Asia, had been to treat the Japanese as twelve-year-olds. This was not an incautious remark, for the former supreme commander went on to expound his position at some length, explaining in the process why he believed the Japanese might be more receptive to American-style democratic ideas than the "mature" Germans. "The German problem is a completely and entirely different one from the Japanese problem," MacArthur informed the senators. "The German people were a mature race. If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civization, they would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years. Like any tuitionary period, they were susceptible to following new models, new ideas. You can implant basic concepts there. They were still close enough to origin to be elastic and acceptable to new concepts...""