Examining sixty years of performance history, Barbara Thornbury offers a detailed study of New York's reception of post-war Japanese dance, music and theatre. Thornbury focuses on the images, performance events and artists who make up the discursive construction of ‘America's Japan’ and attends to uses of artistic cultural exchange as a diplomatic tool.

Thornbury asks how we might classify ‘Japanese’ performance, and in response she presents three useful categories that conceptualize intersections of artistic profiles with attributions of nationality to specific art forms. ‘Cultural heritage artists’ are those whose birth, education, training and careers are based in Japan, including both ‘national treasures’ – Japan's designation of the foremost practitioners of traditional arts – and artists working in contemporary idioms. Popular reception of these artists often focuses on their continuity with aesthetics that have been deemed ‘authentically’ Japanese. As Thornbury demonstrates in her ‘America's Kabuki-Japan’ chapter, productions travelling to New York in the 1950s and 1960s positioned kabuki as representative of Japan, assuring audiences that the form's ‘untouched’ spectacle signified the ‘essence’ of Japan, in contrast to the enmity of the war and ongoing treaty negotiations.

This image of Japanese performance – as ethnically and geographically particular and fundamentally timeless – is challenged by performers who belong to Thornbury's other categories. ‘Internationalist and flexible-citizen artists’ are those whose training and careers are usually based outside Japan. Internationalists ‘work in what is typically regarded as a Western cultural idiom’ (p. 20) while both flexible-citizen artists ‘and their artistic practices are linked with and, by extension, considered representative of Japan’ (p. 21; italics in original). Finally, ‘American artists inspired by Japanese culture’ are performers of Japanese musical instruments and dance forms, directors of translated or adapted Japanese plays, and artists whose work is perceived as Japan-related.

Particularly valuable are the institutional histories of the Japan Society and La MaMa E.T.C., which demonstrate how different spheres of economic, political and social capital brought Japanese performance to New York's uptown and downtown scenes, helping first to ‘familiarize’ audiences with Japanese performance and then to ‘defamiliarize’ those expectations. Also noteworthy is Thornbury's take on the issue of translation. In contrast to scholars who criticize Japan's shift to shingeki – a theatre of primarily translated Western drama – as stunting theatrical innovation, Thornbury suggests that we might instead see translation as a form of resistance to Japan's isolation, and as an opportunity for audiences – often largely female – to enjoy ‘linguistically barrier-free consumption of the West’ (p. 169).

Thornbury examines how characterizations of Japanese art forms as ‘timeless’ reduce these forms to orientalist tropes, and she positions modern experimental work as earning more nuanced critical attention. However, she only addresses in passing how such modern performances might fall into the concomitant stereotype of ‘futuristic’ Japanese cultural production. This consideration, if developed, would connect Thornbury's study to Japan's contemporary role in sci-fi and fantasy-oriented digital media and popular culture.