American Propaganda Changes:

"The very notion of democratizing Japan represented a stunning revision of the propaganda Americans had imbibed during the war, when the media had routinely depicted all Japanese as children, savages, sadists, madmen, or robots. In the most pervasive metaphor of dehumanization, they were portrayed in word and picture as apes, 'jaundiced baboons,' or, most often, plain 'monkey-men'." (Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat, Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton, 1999, p. 213)

After the war, the Allied Occupation forces, led by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, were taught that the Japanese were a people "trained to play follow-the-leader" (Dower, p. 215). The occupying troops were told that by showing Japanese how to behave like Amerians they could undo the half century of indoctrination the Japanese had experienced

However, another approach used by the Occupation was to see the Japanese culture being one of Freudian obseesional neurosis that forced individual Japanese to act according to 'situational ethics.' MacArthur's staff interpreted the psychological approach to mean that they had to tell Japanese how to behave.
 

Japanese Propaganda Changes

During the 1930s children's films (anime) promoted the colonization of Asia, where the Japanese were extending their ideas about how to become modern nations. The Japanese war-time government called their empire, the Asian "Co-Prosperity Sphere". Propaganda promoted Japanese as self-sacrificing saviours and liberators of their fellow Asians from European and American imperialism.(source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~amnornes/anime.html)

In defeated Japan, the 'new order' proclaimed by the wartime government shifted to a 'new order' created by the occupying American forces. The Japanese slogan during the occupation was "enduring the unendurable" (Dower, p. 179), similar to when U.S. Admiral Perry arrived in 1856 to demand that the Japanese domestic market be opened to more foreigners. Other kinds of patriotic self sacrifice were asked of the Japanese people by the new government set up by the Occupation. Lower-class Japanese women were recruited to serve as "comfort women" (just as Korean, Filipino, Thai, and other women in Asia had been forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during the war). These 'volunteer' Japanese women worked in the "Recreation and Amusement Association" for about a year until the U.S. military urged that the comfort stations be closed due to the high rate of syphillis and gonorrhea among the women and the American soldiers. After the stations were closed, prostitution (mostly third-country women) was made legal by the Japanese government, because of the huge demand from the occupying troops and as a way to protect other Japanese women from rape or assault.

For some Japanese the Occupation seemed like more of the same authoritarian orders coming from above.  They wrote letters to their government and General MacArthur thanking them for rebuilding Japan.  Other Japanese, especially in the villages, found difficult the American expectation that Japanese behave like autonomous modern indidviduals, because it went against the centuries-old "good morals and manners" culture that was predominant in most villages.  "Good morals and manners" meant working and behaving according to the norms of the local or larger society not for oneself.   For a smaller, but extremely vocal group of Japanese, Marxism as a universalistic view, was easier to accept. And, many Marxist writers and leaders, who had spent most of the war in jail, emerged to offer another choice for Japanese searching for new identities.