The difficult mission of a regime change: Toshio Nishi gives an account of how America converted the Japanese mindset from war to peace following World War II.

The difficult mission of a regime change: Toshio Nishi gives an account of how America converted the Japanese mindset from war to peace following World War II.

Six decades after the end of the occupation of mainland Japan, this volume approaches the theme of the occupation’s legacies. Rather than just being a matter of administrative practices and international relations, the consequences of the US occupation of Japan transcended both the seven years of its formal duration and the bilateral relations between the two countries. Rich with fresh analyses on a range of topics, including transnational and comparative views on the occupation, the influence of Japan on the United States as well as the reverse, international perspectives on this “odd couple”, and the memory of the occupation in both countries, this book provides a greater understanding of the transtemporal, transnational and transcultural legacies of one of the crucial events of the 20th century.

Post-conflict reconstruction is one of the most pressing political issues today. This book uses economics to analyze critically the incentives and constraints faced by various actors involved in reconstruction efforts. Through this analysis, the book will aid in understanding why some reconstructions are more successful than others.

This book documents Japan's psychological deterioration caused by its defeat in August 1945. Also, Japan’s traumatic transformation from authoritarianism to democracy is detailed. The study exposes an ideological war between the Soviet Union and the USA within American-occupied Japan, which triggered violent polarization among the Japanese. Under General MacArthur’s tutorage, the defeated Japanese were expected to become a peace-loving people, but the Cold War derailed Japan’s progress toward freedom and democracy. The “Red Purge,” instituted by MacArthur's Headquarters (GHQ) from 1949 to 1950, triggered the devastating side effects on Japan's academic freedom and freedom of speech. Stanford University Professor Dr. Walter C. Eells (1886–1962) served at the GHQ as an influential education adviser and became the most vocal advocate of the Red Purge. Japanese Marxist historians have constructed the popular postwar narrative of the Red Purge, blaming the GHQ for every failure. The vast archival materials, including the GHQ papers, Eells papers, and Japanese-language documents, revealed that the Red Purge was a serious propaganda battle between the Americans and the Soviets in a war-torn Japan. This propaganda war engendered the violently polarized political climate, in which the conservative Japanese government behaved according to the dictates of US Cold War policy. By revealing feverish tensions within the GHQ regarding communist influences in Japanese universities, this study sheds bright new light on the Red Purge and its lasting impact on Japan's political future.

A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.

In 1945 Emperor Hirohito signed Japan's unconditional surrender to the United States and its allies. Tackling a timely subject this work takes the controversial stand that the constitution of Japan was not imposed as a document of defeat.