whose complexity over time renders a synthetic judgment or bird's-eye view of the literature in question rather difficult. A major controversy surrounds the question regarding the affiliation of the post-war nihonjinron theories with the prewar conceptualization of Japanese cultural uniqueness. To what degree, that is, are these meditations under democracy on Japanese uniqueness innocent reflections of a popular search for identity, and in what measure, if any, do they pick up from the instrumental ideology of Japaneseness developed by the government and nationalists in the prewar period to harness the energies of the nation towards industrialization and global imperium? The questions are rendered more complex by the fact that in the early post-war period, the restoration of a 'healthy nationalism' was by no means something exclusive to right-wing cultural thinkers. An intense debate over the necessity to develop ideal, positive forms of national consciousness, regarded as a healthy civic identity, figures prominently in the early writings of Maruyama Masao, who called for a healthy , and in the prolific debates of members of the who preferred to speak of . These debates ranged from liberal center-left critics to radical Marxist historians. Some scholars cite the destruction of many Japanese national symbols and the psychological blow of defeat at the end of World War II as one source of nihonjinron's enduring popularity, although it is not a uniquely 20th century phenomenon. In fact the genre is simply the Japanese reflex of cultural nationalism, which is a property of all modern nations. The trend of the tone of nihonjinron argument is often reflective of the Japanese society at the time. Peter N. Dale, covering the period analysed by the Nomura survey, distinguished three major phases in the development of post-war nihonjinron discourse: First phase (1945–1960): Dominance of the Western model with a concomitant repudiation of Japanese specificity. Second phase (1960–1970): Recognition of historical relativity, of certain defects in Western industrial society, and certain merits in Japanese traditions, as they are re-engineered in Japanese modernization. Third phase (1970–?): Recognition of Japanese specificity as a positive model for a uniquely Japanese road towards modernity and its global outreach. Tamotsu Aoki subsequently finessed the pattern by distinguishing four major phases in the post war identity discourse. In Dale's proposal, this drift from negative uniqueness to positive evaluation of uniqueness is a cyclical trend, since he believes the same pattern can be detected in the literature