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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]
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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 

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References

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