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We totally remade Japanese civilization. Before the bombs dropped, the Emperor was a god. Now he is a celebrity.

Not as much as you think. Read up on the concept of a Shogun. Because Douglas MacArthur sure as heck did. He even made sure to to stage the Emperor coming to his headquarters (as opposed to him going to the imperial palace) so as to resemble the old Japanese tradition of the Shogunate. He shaped Japanese culture and traditions into a Western mold, but they remained distinctly Japanese. Before the war Japan was an ethnically and culturally homogeneous well ordered society. After MacArthur got done with it it was a ethnically and culturally homogeneous well ordered society.

Americans tend to get hung up on visible details, but this is a big picture foundation issue. Japan existed before we got there. We did not have to create a sense of "Japanese" identity. The Japanese knew who they were. We just had to rearrange the deck chairs so that instead of being run by the military with the Emperor as a puppet it was being run by big business conglomerates with the emperor as a puppet. Look at the organization of Japan under the oligarchy that existed between the Meiji Restoration and the rise of the military after the Russo Japanese war.

And yet, it was changed. I used to work for a Japanese company, where some of the older executives grew up in WWII. They all said that Japan is not the same. For one thing, there is a parliamentary system in place. It is hard for use to imagine, but such a thing is very, very, alien to their culture.

Are some of the trappings the same? Yes. That is why it worked. We have a lot of the trappings of Rome and Greece, but our culture is more along the lines of the germanic tribes that took over Rome. Look deeper than the outward appearances.