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1 results

  • 7 - The Militarized City

  • Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Williams College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Tokyo
    Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025, pp 127-150

  • Summary

    From the years of total war through the postwar American occupation of Japan, the inescapable presence of a state and military conditioned the day-to-day lives of Tokyoites. As imperial Japan prosecuted the Asia Pacific War, both the state and community organizations used coercive mechanisms to mobilize society in support of war, from conscripting labor for manufacturing weapons to admonishing wasteful behavior. In the postwar, the occupation commandeered buildings, remade spaces, and constructed housing for its personnel in support of the project to demilitarize and democratize Japan. From the 1940s into the 1950s, the physical capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and then hastily reconstructed to restore the basic functions of the city. And Tokyo went from being the spiritual, military, and political center of gravity in Japan’s wartime empire to an occupied capital of a war-torn nation where struggling Tokyoites could see in the occupiers a model of affluent, middle-class lifestyles.