"The Boy and the Heron" couldn't be considered inflammatory to Western audiences plagued by guilt as opposed to presenting them with a question loosely meaning, "how do you live with yourself?".
Stop generalizing "The West" as if the West was just the USA.
I remember then internet users said that the West didn't get DBZ until 200s
where in Europe by ~1995 we already finished DBZ for months both in the manga and the anime.