3 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "I have decided that Tsurumi Shunsuke for all of his useful insight about Japanese society is a sloppy writer and will likely not read anything more written by him in book form. This is only one example of the many grammatical puzzles that I have had to unravel in the course of completing his book. I am awarding my points to Yumiko for confirming that certain key grammatical elements are likely missing. In the end, I returned to several previous paragraph where I confirmed both parts of the subject and discovered that the thing that Japanese are prevented from doing is not contained in the sentence in which the notion of prevention is the verb. If I have finally understood Tsurumi properly, he believes that Japan's postwar individualism and its belief that the Japanese emperor is not infallible are both reasons for a diminished sense of nationalism, and its reluctance to assume a more aggressive military role in the world. The perhaps more obvious reason for this diminished sense of nationalism is that Japan continues to live under the US nuclear umbrella. Tsurumi discounts this latter argument, however, as insufficient to explain why Japanese offer little resistance to US military leadership. Of course, this was not always the case, as was evident during the Vietnam War when the Japanese public protested loudly about the military lead. With the above in mind. the sentence makes could sense, if it is rewritten as follows: 日本が米国の核の傘のもとにあるということは明白な事実であるにもかかわらず、民衆各人の自己への配慮と天皇不謬の国家神話への疑いとは日本人を阻んでいます。だから、「日本は」米国の軍事の圧力に対していかなる批判も行なわずに従って行く道に進んでいます。 Thanks to everyone for your great input. It truly took all opinions for me to unravel this one."