"Intellectuals at an "overcoming modernity" conference proclaimed that prior to the Meiji Restoration, Japan has been a classless society under a benevolent emperor, but the restoration had plunged the nation into Western materialism (an argument that ignored commercialism and ribald culture in the Tokugawa era), which had caused people to forget their nature, which the war would enable them to reclaim.Baseball, jazz, and other Western profligate ways were singled out in government propaganda to be abandoned for a pure spirit of sacrifice.