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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2014
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.
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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.
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22 A U.S. military training film about Japan made in 1945 for American troops as the occupation began.
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25 See McLelland, Mark, Queer Japan from the Pacific Age to the Internet Age (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar.
