Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:47:05.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A New Social History of Occupied Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2014

Franziska Seraphim
Franziska Seraphim*
Affiliation:
Boston College
*
[email protected]
Get access

Extract

In the introduction to his 1999 masterpiece on Japan under U.S. occupation, John Dower wrote, “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Indeed, no other history of occupied Japan before or since has managed to capture, in such a cinematic way, what it meant to “start over” in 1945 after a devastating war and at the behest of the victor. Embracing Defeat won no less than nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And while Dower's book has remained the one book to go to for a comprehensive history of the occupation, it has truly inspired “the next generation of occupation scholarship,” which Mark Selden predicted would focus on social and cultural issues. The three books under review here are the latest addition to this literature.

Type
Review Essay—Japan
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 187 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 23Google Scholar.

2 Bix, Herbert P., Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001)Google Scholar.

3 Selden, Mark, “Two Emperors and a Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 50 (1999)Google Scholar: 3510 (a review of Embracing Defeat).

4 Gluck, Carol, “Entangling Illusions: Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in New Frontiers in American-East Asian Relations, ed. Cohen, Warren I. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 177Google Scholar.

5 Watt, Lori, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Matsuda, Takeshi, Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependence (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 2007)Google Scholar.

7 Koikari, Mire, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 5Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 190.

9 Igarashi, Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

10 Orbaugh, Sharalyn, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 Shibusawa, Naoko, America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

12 This is laid out in chapter 1 based on a variety of secondary sources, including, importantly, Frühstück, Sabine, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

13 Driscoll, Mark, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism 1895–1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Aldous, Christopher and Suzuki, Akihito, Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945–52: Alien Prescriptions? (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

15 Hein, Laura, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar; O'Bryan, Scott, The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home, op. cit. note 5; Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Rabson, Steve, The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

17 Seraphim, Franziska, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Caprio, Mark and Sugita, Yoneyuki, Democracy in Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.

19 Lucken, Michael, Bayard-Sakai, Anne, and Lozerand, Emmanuel, eds. Japan's Postwar (New York: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

20 Stalker, Nancy, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

21 Murakami, Haruki, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (London: Vintage, 2001)Google Scholar.

22 A U.S. military training film about Japan made in 1945 for American troops as the occupation began.

23 See Hardacre, Helen, Shinto and the State 1868–1988 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 82Google Scholar.

24 Höhn, Maria and Moon, Seungsook, eds. Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War II to the Present (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See McLelland, Mark, Queer Japan from the Pacific Age to the Internet Age (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar.