Japan in the American Century

Japan in the American Century
Author: Kenneth B. Pyle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674989082

No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to world power than Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy of unconditional surrender led to the catastrophic finale of the Asia-Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Japan in the American Century examines how Japan, with its deeply conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order. The price Japan paid to end the occupation was a cold war alliance with the United States that ensured America’s dominance in the region. Still traumatized by its wartime experience, Japan developed a grand strategy of dependence on U.S. security guarantees so that the nation could concentrate on economic growth. Yet from the start, despite American expectations, Japan reworked the American reforms to fit its own circumstances and cultural preferences, fashioning distinctively Japanese variations on capitalism, democracy, and social institutions. Today, with the postwar world order in retreat, Japan is undergoing a sea change in its foreign policy, returning to an activist, independent role in global politics not seen since 1945. Distilling a lifetime of work on Japan and the United States, Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of the two nations’ relationship at a time when the character of that alliance is changing. Japan has begun to pull free from the constraints established after World War II, with repercussions for its relations with the United States and its role in Asian geopolitics.

America and the Japanese Miracle

America and the Japanese Miracle
Author: Aaron Forsberg
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2003-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807860662

In this book, Aaron Forsberg presents an arresting account of Japan's postwar economic resurgence in a world polarized by the Cold War. His fresh interpretation highlights the many connections between Japan's economic revival and changes that occurred in the wider world during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of recently released American, British, and Japanese archival records, Forsberg demonstrates that American Cold War strategy and the U.S. commitment to liberal trade played a central role in promoting Japanese economic welfare and in forging the economic relationship between Japan and the United States. The price of economic opportunity and interdependence, however, was a strong undercurrent of mutual frustration, as patterns of conflict and compromise over trade, investment, and relations with China continued to characterize the postwar U.S.-Japanese relationship. Forsberg's emphasis on the dynamic interaction of Cold War strategy, the business environment, and Japanese development challenges "revisionist" interpretations of Japan's success. In exploring the complex origins of the U.S.-led international economy that has outlasted the Cold War, Forsberg refutes the claim that the U.S. government sacrificed American commercial interests in favor of its military partnership with Japan.

Consuming Japan

Consuming Japan
Author: Andrew C. McKevitt
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469634481

This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the "yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world? From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back
Author: Janice P. Nimura
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2015-05-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393248240

A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of the Year "Nimura paints history in cinematic strokes and brings a forgotten story to vivid, unforgettable life." —Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors—Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda—grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels and traditional clothing exclaimed over by newspapers across the nation. As they learned English and Western customs, their American friends grew to love them for their high spirits and intellectual brilliance. The passionate relationships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan—a land grown foreign to them—determined to revolutionize women’s education. Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, including decades of letters from between the three women and their American host families, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment.

America's Geisha Ally

America's Geisha Ally
Author: Naoko Shibusawa
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674043561

During World War II, Japan was vilified by America as our hated enemy. As the Cold War heated up, however, the U.S. government decided to make Japan its bulwark against communism in Asia. In this revelatory work, Naoko Shibusawa charts the remarkable reversal from hated enemy to valuable ally that occurred in the two decades after the war.

Japan Encounters the Barbarian

Japan Encounters the Barbarian
Author: Emeritus Professor W G Beasley
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300063240

For over a hundred years the Japanese have looked to the West for ideas, institutions and technology that would help them achieve their goal of 'national wealth and strength'. In this book a distinguished historian of Japan discusses Japan's 'cultural borrowing' from America and Europe. W. G. Beasley focuses on the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan's rulers dispatched diplomatic missions to the West to discover what Japan needed to learn, sent students abroad to assimilate information and invited foreign experts to Japan to help put the knowledge to practical use. Beasley examines the origins of the decision to initiate direct study of the West at a time when western countries counted as 'barbarian' by Confucian standards. Drawing on many colourful letters, diaries, memoirs and reports, he describes the missions sent overseas in 1860 and 1862, in 1865-1867 and in the years after 1868, in particular the prestigious embassy led by Iwakura in 1871-1873. The book also tells the story of the several hundred students who went overseas in this period. It concludes by assessing the impact of the encounters on the subsequent development of Japan, first by examining the later careers of the travellers and the influence they exercised (they included no fewer than six prime ministers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and then by considering the nature of the ideas they brought home.

How to Reach Japan by Subway

How to Reach Japan by Subway
Author: Meghan Warner Mettler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2018-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 149620686X

Japan's official surrender to the United States in 1945 brought to an end one of the most bitter and brutal military conflicts of the twentieth century. U.S. government officials then faced the task of transforming Japan from enemy to ally, not only in top-level diplomatic relations but also in the minds of the American public. Only ten years after World War II, this transformation became a success as middle-class American consumers across the country were embracing Japanese architecture, films, hobbies, philosophy, and religion. Cultural institutions on both sides of the Pacific along with American tastemakers promoted a new image of Japan in keeping with State Department goals. Focusing on traditions instead of modern realities, Americans came to view Japan as a nation that was sophisticated and beautiful yet locked harmlessly in a timeless "Oriental" past. What ultimately led many Americans to embrace Japanese culture was a desire to appear affluent and properly "tasteful" in the status-conscious suburbs of the 1950s. In How to Reach Japan by Subway, Meghan Warner Mettler studies the shibui phenomenon, in which middle-class American consumers embraced Japanese culture while still exoticizing this new aesthetic. By examining shibui through the popularity of samurai movies, ikebana flower arrangement, bonsai cultivation, home and garden design, and Zen Buddhism, Mettler provides a new context and perspective for understanding how Americans encountered a foreign nation in their everyday lives.

The Cambridge History of the Cold War

The Cambridge History of the Cold War
Author: Melvyn P. Leffler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 663
Release: 2010-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521837197

This volume examines the origins and early years of the Cold War in the first comprehensive historical reexamination of the period. A team of leading scholars shows how the conflict evolved from the geopolitical, ideological, economic and sociopolitical environments of the two world wars and interwar period.

The Philippines and Japan in America's Shadow

The Philippines and Japan in America's Shadow
Author: Kiichi Fujiwara
Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN:

Japan and the Philippines both spent part of the 20th century under American rule, and the experience left an indelible imprint on both societies. The authors in this volume examine the issue from a wide range of perspectives and suggest a different interpretation.