SCAPanese Dynamics in the Recent Literature

Understandably, the American public—and, for different reasons, the Japanese as well—find compelling those historical moments in their bilateral relations that featured strong American leadership, in particular Commodore Matthew Perry's “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and General MacArthur's “remaking” of Japan in the wake of World War II. But Embracing Defeat told the story of early postwar Japan differently. For decades, historical scholarship of the Allied occupation on Japan's main islands (1945–52) focused on the high politics of the administration of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and its intersection with the Cold War, whether positively evaluated (in Carol Gluck's words: “what the well-intentioned United States had done for Japan in political and social reform”) or negatively critiqued (“what the United States had, for its own ideological and security interests, done to Japan in the way of economic and military involvement”).Footnote ⁴ This America-centric approach gained much complexity from the late 1980s on, when the academic “cultural turn” intersected with major political and economic realignments. For example, with the end of the Cold War the U.S.-Japan security alliance lost its original political and ideological raison d’être, while on the other hand “provincializing” the U.S.-Japan nexus within a broader framework that emphasized Japan's place in Asia.

In this context, Embracing Defeat was both symptomatic and exemplary of narratives that explored the often uncanny ways in which American and Japanese interests in fact dovetailed to co-produce the foundations of the postwar order. Recent monographs in this vein by authors educated in the United States include Lori Watt's 2009 study of Japanese repatriation from the former empire under the auspices of the Allied authorities and social reintegration thereafter.Footnote ⁵ It teases out the social and cultural remaking (with American help) of post-imperial national identities on which postwar Japan was founded. Takeshi Matsuda's 2007 book Soft Power and Its Perils analyzes a different postwar foundation, namely Japan's permanent dependence on the United States in the Cold War.Footnote ⁶ Of particular importance for contextualizing the three books under review here is Mire Koikari's 2008 book Pedagogy of Democracy. It revisits the U.S.-Japan relationship during the occupation through the lens of the occupation's gender reform, which she sees as “a complex instance of Cold War mobilization of women where Japanese and American racism, nationalism, and imperialism converged to enable a deeply problematic for feminism.”Footnote ⁷ Echoing John Dower's creation of suggestive oxymoron, Koikari coined the term “Cold War imperial feminism” to describe in particular the collaboration between middle-class Japanese women and their American women teachers.Footnote ⁸

More than a decade after the appearance of Embracing Defeat, it is clear that Dower's pointed focus on the occupation's hybridity—he called it the “SCAPanese model”—has deeply informed scholarship of the occupation since, especially as it relates to the legacies of that time. Of the three books under review here, Sarah Kovner's book Occupying Power most directly engages with the dynamics of the Japanese encounter with the Allied occupation and its long-term consequences, in this case with respect to the sex industry. The central event in this historical narrative was the de facto deregulation of prostitution by the Allied occupation in 1946, which constituted a major shift from centuries of regulated commercial sex in Japan and eventually led to its outright criminalization with the country's first anti-prostitution law in 1956. Like Dower, Kovner lays bare the deep ironies that bespoke deregulation and eventual criminalization of prostitution by Japanese lawmakers, which punished sex workers while guaranteeing the continued availability of commercial sex. By examining how the deregulation of sex markets came about as an Allied response to the rapid spread of venereal disease among U.S. and Commonwealth forces, various forms of fraternization between GIs and Japanese women, and the black market, Kovner draws two provocative conclusions. First, Allied social policies essentially continued European and American colonial policies elsewhere in Asia. Second, this may well have conditioned Japan's public amnesia regarding its own wartime system of sexual slavery—adapted, briefly, to meet the needs of Allied servicemen through the Recreational Amusement Association (RAA)—which could retrospectively appear as a “voluntary” system, like the RAA, and a “normal” component of colonial rule.

Occupying Power challenges the reader to think big. The above conclusions bespeak a broad view of “occupation,” which Kovner defines as “a condition of compromised sovereignty resulting from a foreign military presence” (p. 5). This invites comparisons with cotemporaneous occupations elsewhere (South Korea and especially Germany) as well as connections with prior colonial systems in Asia by European powers and Japan, and the subsequent American worldwide network of military bases. Kovner's narrative is hugely enriched by employing all three points of connection and comparison at various points of her analysis. She thereby makes an important historiographical intervention, namely to probe the ways in which international relations and intimate histories were interwoven through structures of imperialism and by individual agency. Furthermore, this brings up the question of memory in the perpetuation of social policies, here towards sex workers, across different regulatory regimes, as well as the political uses and misuses of history. In a hard-hitting last chapter, entitled “The Presence of the Past,” Kovner shows how the unintended consequences of the deregulation and criminalization of prostitution haunt today's international fight against sex trafficking. That the United States has emerged as a champion of this fight while feeding the sex industry by virtue of its overseas bases and exempting its own soldiers from prosecution for sexual violence is the ultimate irony. “Thus, while the State Department would fight trafficking, and thus ensure that the sex workers stay put, the Defense Department moves their clients from base to base all across the world” (p. 157).

Occupying Power also challenges the reader to think about the sex industry in a far more nuanced way than is commonly done. Social diversity, changing cultural norms, and an almost endless trail of adjunct business opportunities make sex work a subject through which to understand both the political economy and social change in early postwar Japan. Early chapters document through contemporary surveys and opinion polls the socially diverse background of women—and men—who worked as prostitutes in a war-ravaged land, where the materially well-off occupiers were an obvious source of opportunity. The reality of different short-term and long-term encounters—from rape to various kinds of commercial sex to marriage—called forth different official policies and interventions, complicated even further by the presence of not only the American but also the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. Kovner's inclusion of materials from Australian, New Zealand, and United Nations archives is an important reminder that social policies had to be negotiated among the Allies, even though the differences in policy were more a matter of degree than substance. Race further subdivided the sex trade in ways that mimicked Jim Crow America. Most important in the long run, however, seem to have been the many economic relationships and even political patronage intertwined with the sex industry that ended up worth preserving while the sex workers themselves were thrown under the bus in the name of anti-prostitution legislation. Japanese-Allied encounters during the occupation make up only half of Occupying Power; the rest of the book traces the political debates and maneuvers among Japanese activists and lawmakers, many of them newly enfranchised by the occupation reforms, as well as their long-term consequences.

Sensuality

Another legacy of Dower's Embracing Defeat and of others writing in the 1990s was a new concern with the sensuality of the occupation's lived experience. It was originally in this context that the panpan or the streetwalker and what Yoshikuni Igarashi called “the age of the body”Footnote ⁹ appeared as a new way to understand occupied Japan. While in many ways conditioned by the physical presence of Allied servicemen, this is to be understood primarily against the background of years of total mobilization for war, which had starved the populace of individual expression and romance. As Igarashi shows, in the absence of thought control, the devastation, exhaustion, pain, and humiliation, but also the liberation of defeat, was primarily felt as a visceral bodily experience. Writers like Tamura Taijirō and his “literature of the flesh” express this potently. Recent work on the visual arts and popular culture, but especially on literature during the occupation, has explored this dimension of Japan's early postwar experience in some detail. Sharalyn Orbaugh devoted at least two-thirds of her 2007 grand study of Japanese fiction under the occupation to “the body” as the site of identity struggles.Footnote ¹⁰ Across the Pacific in America too, politicians, journalists, and filmmakers reformed the American public's view of Japan from hated enemy to valuable ally by cultivating a sensualized, feminized, and immature image of the Japanese, as Naoko Shibusawa demonstrates in her 2006 study America's Geisha Ally.Footnote ¹¹ The second book under review here, Australian sociologist Mark McLelland's Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan During the American Occupation, fits in most appropriately with these studies, clearly inspired by John Dower's introduction of the pulp magazines that sprang up in Japan during the early postwar years. Whereas Dower referred to them as evidence of the culture of exhaustion (kasutori), McLelland reads them in detail as evidence of a rapid transformation of male-female relations, even of sexual liberation, albeit mostly for men.

McLelland approaches his subject matter armed with the theoretical contributions of Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and others with regard to understanding how social norms are embodied, and viscerally so during periods of dramatic change. Similar to Kovner, therefore, McLelland sees popular discourses about sex as a useful lens through which to analyze social change in Japan after defeat. For him, too, the occupation's policy of deregulating sex functions as the defining catalyst of the story he tells. More precisely, while mention of sexual relations between Japanese and Americans was censored, the discussion of such relations between Japanese went unregulated, leaving obscenity monitoring firmly in Japanese hands. As SCAP retreats to the background in Love, Sex, and Democracy, the “presence and actions of American bodies, fashions, and cultural products on the streets of Japan” emerge “as important as any political directive in bringing about a reassessment of Japanese male-female relations and of sexuality more generally” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Whereas Kovner assessed the direct impact American servicemen had on the lives of Japanese women, and Koikari saw in Americans modeling heterosexual norms strategies of Cold War containment, McLelland tunes his ear to the ways in which Japanese discussed sex and romantic love with an unprecedented intensity as they tried to make sense of what they observed in the streets, in print, and on screen. Mauss, Bourdieu, and others are useful in giving this popular discourse the historical weight it deserves, taking place, as it did, in the booming—even if largely fly-by-night—world of sex magazines between 1946 and 1949. No complex theory is needed, however, for the historical reconstruction and interpretation of this popular Japanese debate as an example of ordinary people seeking in the sensuality of sexual pleasure the obverse of the severe deprivations of life under militarism and war.

Love, Sex, and Democracy, however, goes further in arguing that the pulp magazine discourse about sexual intimacy acquired the same overall political meaning that the introduction of civil liberties, education reform, or debates on war responsibility incurred elsewhere in Japan. McLelland finds a ubiquitous rhetorical linkage between democratic reform and the open discussion of sexual behavior, whether in regard to American dating practices, Hollywood kissing techniques, or how to make marital relations more exciting. Central to these debates, especially among Japanese sexologists, was the publication of Alfred Kinsey's first academic (or rather anecdotal) report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in the United States in 1948, which was immediately translated into Japanese and widely read and discussed. Ignoring how controversial this publication was in the United States, commentators in the Japanese sex press were much impressed with the fact that it was at all possible to conduct and publish research of this nature, laying bare the astonishing diversity of sexual practices in the United States. The lesson of democracy, then, involved moving intimacy from the private to the public realm and, more importantly, supplanting the state's exclusive legitimation of sexual norms with the pluralism of popular opinions. In many ways, one might consider this consistent with the definition of democracy as an (American) way of life, not an attempt to change social norms. After all, American society at home and certainly abroad was rife with sexism and racism in the first postwar decade, and these asymmetric power relations shaped the “sexual liberation” celebrated in the pulp magazines, as McLelland readily admits. While men “were offered greater access to highly sexualized images of women” and were encouraged to explore a variety of sexual options, for women “the only legitimate expression of sensual desire” lay in “courtship leading to monogamous marriage” (p. 75).

Love, Sex, and Democracy nonetheless evaluates the renegotiating of gender roles in Japanese-Japanese sexological debates as inherently positive, if hardly complete, and takes their democratizing appeal seriously. Their liberating quality, as it was experienced at the time, is best appreciated against the sensual bleakness of the war years and the Japanese state's increasingly heavy-handed management of sexual norms for ideological purposes—from the Meiji civil code to the 1940 National Eugenic Law.Footnote ¹² At the same time, the vigor with which sexuality, courtship, and marriage were discussed in the immediate postwar years was spurred not only by the presence of American GIs but in fact harks back to “nativist strands” of prewar (and even premodern) Japanese sexology, which Mark Driscoll has recently explored.Footnote ¹³ On the one hand, the graphic eroticism of the Tokugawa era was expressed exclusively in the context of the pleasure quarters, and “recreational sex was viewed as a commercial transaction” (p. 40) by the majority of men long into the twentieth century. On the other hand, the notion of “romantic love as the ideal foundation for a heterosexual relationship” was well established in the Japanese media before the war (p. 26), while the erotic-grotesque movement of the 1920s suggested that sexual perversion was itself a symptom of “modernity,” with which Western puritanical views of sex were out of sync (p. 31). This was indeed fertile ground from which to resurrect an infatuation with sensuality that had atrophied during the war years. McLelland, himself an expert in queer studies, finds evidence of prewar continuities, especially in the flourishing of “curiosity hunting,” that is, the exploration of various alternative sexual practices, especially homoeroticism, even if the pulp magazines concerned themselves predominantly with heterosexual and especially marital sex. He contends that the American occupiers, in their role as media censors and custodians of Cold War containment policies towards women (as Mire Koikari has it), had far less impact on public notions of gender and sexual relations than previously assumed.

Broadening Occupation Studies

Since Dower's panoramic account of Japan starting over after a catastrophic defeat, the field has truly outgrown its formerly narrow focus on top-down reform policies and America-dominated Cold War politics. Attention to the social and cultural processes of memory and the transnational dynamics of Japan in Asia, however compromised, contributed to the broadening of Occupation studies. Historians began to explore social issues, social scientists, social groups, and social movements, often within transwar and transnational frameworks. The study of public health came to the forefront, with an emphasis on Japanese innovations, past and present, leading to positive developments while occupation policies seemed self-serving (see Kovner's chapter on venereal disease) and were also largely ineffective.Footnote ¹⁴ The ideas and work of leading economists and social scientists dedicated to growth and the more equitable distribution of wealth moved scholars to reflect on how Japanese understood and shaped the postwar imperative in social terms.Footnote ¹⁵ Studies of repatriation, migration, and border control have finally shed light on the ethnically marginal communities John Dower had introduced—resident Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans (daisankokujin)—and the political forces that made and kept them marginal.Footnote ¹⁶ My own work detailed how prominent civic organizations across the political spectrum secured legitimate public space for specific war memories in the early postwar years.Footnote ¹⁷ Mark Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita's edited collection Democracy in Occupied Japan features essays on diverse topics, such as universal health care, crime, labor, the fisheries, and resident Koreans.Footnote ¹⁸ French Japanologists put together a now translated volume reflecting on “Japan's Postwar” (also the book's title), by engaging prominent intellectuals, literary figures, artists, and social movements of the 1940s and 50s and into the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁹ A recent contribution to this diverse social history of occupied Japan is the third book under review here, Benjamin Dorman's Celebrity Gods. Here, occupation authorities watch from the sidelines as the Japanese media and the leaders and followers of new religions use and abuse each other on the new playing field of “religious freedom.”

New religions, like pulp magazines, “sprouted like bamboo shoots after the rain” in the early postwar years, according to contemporary popular sources, so much so that the media coined the term “the rush hour of the gods” (p. 5). Nevertheless, earlier work on religion in occupied Japan virtually ignored this phenomenon in favor of documenting what happened to the established religions after SCAP's abolishing of State Shinto. Dorman begins to fill this void by tracing the fortunes of two particularly media-prone new religions, Jiu and Tenshō kōtai jingūkyō, and their respective leaders, both women, during the early postwar years. As in Kovner's and McLelland's respective works, Dorman's story unfolds against the background of the occupation's deregulatory policies and their unintended consequences. SCAP's separation of state and religion spurred extensive reorganizing of Shinto and Buddhist religious institutions and produced a host of splinter groups, some of which were understood as “new religions.” Most new religions, however, were movements calling for world renewal that had formed around charismatic leaders since Japan's rapid modernization from the middle of the nineteenth century on. Their rise paralleled the development of the modern media, Dorman contends, which fueled the new religions’ antagonistic relationship with the state and society through negative images of “superstition” and “irrational thought” (p. 115). After the war, all religious groups had to work out—and compete for—new modes of public presence and legitimation, which Nancy Stalker calls “charismatic entrepreneurship.”Footnote ²⁰ In the absence of state regulation, the media played a doubly critical role in delineating how much of a public threat such new religions constituted. This, in turn, connects directly with the conundrum facing new religions—and the public—in the wake of the 1995 Aum shinrikyō sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. In that case, media coverage dehumanized the group and its leader to an extent that left no space for any meaningful examination of mainstream society, as the writer Murakami Haruki illuminated brilliantly in his reportage Underground.Footnote ²¹

Celebrity Gods is a finely grained reconstruction of the early postwar histories of Jiu and Tenshō kōtai jingūkyō. It centers on the actions of their respective leaders, Jikōson and Kitamura Sayo, the two “celebrity gods,” and their relationships to public figures (pop stars and political authorities) as well as to newspaper journalists. We learn very little about the followers or the religious and spiritual quality of these new religions apart from the nature of their leaders’ communication—through oracles in the case of Jikōson, and dances and sermons for Kitamura—which is strangely reminiscent of Frank Capra's characterization of Japanese religion as “mumbo-jumbo” in Our Job in Japan.Footnote ²² Fascinating, in contrast, is Dorman's account of Jiu's celebrity hunting and the way in which well-established newspaper journalists both mediated and investigated those relationships. Dorman pieces together a complex narrative, complete with scandals, “incidents,” arrests, and trials, by pitting a journalist's account against the memory of an influential group member (attained from interviews decades later), and checking both against SCAP records, contemporary newspaper coverage, and biographies of the celebrities in question (go master Go Seigen and sumo wrestler Futabayama Sadachi). Tenshō kōtai jingūkyō's Kitamura, for her part, engaged more directly and confrontationally with political and religious authorities in her effort to publicize her radical views of fundamental world renewal after defeat. Important sources for this story are publications by the group in the 1950s and in 1970, especially Tenshō kōtai jingūkyō's own official history, Seisho (1970). A feisty farmer's wife from Kyushu who acquired the nickname “the dancing god,” Kitamura attracted the attention of Ōya Sōichi, Japan's most prolific transwar journalist and collector of popular magazines, whose critical if not outright dismissive writings on new religions from the 1930s through the 1950s constitute one of Dorman's important source materials for the book as a whole. Overall, Dorman paints a contrast-rich (and sometimes confusing) picture of social activism that hinges on charismatic leaders who, however differently styled, envisioned and lived out radical alternatives to the social chaos of the early postwar years. Of interest here is not the content of those alternative visions, the purview of intellectual history, but the multivectored public mechanisms through which they acquired social capital, however positively or negatively.

Celebrity Gods is a welcome reprieve from the Yasukuni Shrine-centeredness that usually dominates discussion of the public face of religion in postwar Japan. While many saw Yasukuni as a litmus test for the state abiding by the constitutional separation of religion from the state, public debates about new religions centered on how socially unacceptable behavior might qualify the constitutional right to freedom of religion. Both are rooted in historical memory and continue to inform the sociology of religion today, as Dorman argues in the framing chapters of his book, echoing a host of Japanese scholars and journalists who have reflected on this. The case of new religions highlights the crucial role of the media as both “watchdogs” and “servants” of the state and/or mainstream society, which began in the mid-Meiji period with the newspaper campaign against the new Shinto spin-off Renmonkyō and was still abundantly apparent in the media coverage of Aum shinrikyō in the 1990s. Dorman's examples reveal a continuous strand of negative stereotyping—irrationality, superstition, immorality, and now terrorism—that was targeted against new religions in general and their leaders in particular, no matter how different the historical context. New religions served the media's hunger for scandals, notoriety, or the opportunity to uncover a secret story. At the same time, the media also fulfilled a crucial role in the self-promotion of new religions. From Renmonkyō's founder Shimamura Mitsu in the Meiji period to Ōmotokyō's Deguchi Onisaburō in the 1920s and 30s, to Jikōson and Kitamura Sayo during the occupation, and finally Asahara, the leader of Aum shinrikyō, in the 1980s, Dorman observes a deliberate use of the media by religious leaders in order to gain maximum exposure as defenders of public interests and social justice, or to keep company with other media superstars or international dignitaries. But his main argument is more specific than that: the example of the public treatment of new religions in the early postwar years shows that in the sudden absence of state authority controlling religious groups as per SCAP's directive, the media stepped in to take on that role in a similar fashion as before the war until new legislation (the Religious Corporations Law) was introduced in 1951 that gave new religions a way to apply for official recognition as religious entities.

Shifting Power Dynamics of Occupation

Insofar as these three new books are representative of what I call the new social history of occupied Japan, that history is interdisciplinary, international in origin, and generally less focused on the American occupiers and the Cold War as the movers and shakers of early postwar Japan. The authors, two Australians (McLelland and Dorman) and one American (Kovner), bring the disciplinary expertise of history (Kovner), sociology (McLelland), and religious studies (Dorman) to bear on those years, although it is ironically the American historian alone who has utilized Australian archival materials. In a way, Kovner speaks for all three authors when she asks in her introduction, “If we do not assume that servicemen were always conquerors and Japanese women their permanent victims, how do the power dynamics of occupation shift?” (p. 10). They bring other power dynamics to the fore.

In Occupying Power, Kovner explores relations among the international Allied Forces and Japanese officials; between prostitutes and those managing the rest of the sex industry; and between politicians and lawmakers (including women), brothel owners (businessmen), and sex workers. It is one of the very few studies of occupied Japan that takes seriously the presence of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force with its multicultural troops, and the challenges of making policy on the ground “in the midst of chaos,” given MacArthur's hands-off approach and the commanders' different experiences controlling fraternization with “native” women elsewhere. More consequential, in analytical terms, is Kovner's treatment of women (from streetwalkers to parliamentarians) as historical agents in their own right, making decisions about their lives in increasingly more restrictive environments, as the deregulation of prostitution turned into its criminalization. She unearths rare materials that let us glimpse some prostitutes' own voices, but in later chapters focuses more on female Diet members, newly empowered by the constitution, who made their mark on politics by rallying behind efforts to make prostitution illegal. Here Kovner offers her perhaps most trenchant critique: women in the Diet advanced reasons for outlawing prostitution that defied any solidarity with the very real economic needs of sex workers but rather participated in their objectification by making them into symbols of defeated Japan. In this way, they were blind to the possibility of “a coalition based on the rights of sex workers [that] might have been far more effective in fighting exploitative proprietors and reducing the incidence of VD” (p. 153). Kovner goes even further in suggesting that “in helping to push sex workers to the margins [by passing the 1956 National Anti-Prostitution Law], female legislators themselves became more marginal in Japanese politics” (p. 153). The power dynamics described here are indeed far more complex and consequential than those typically assumed between conquerors and conquered.

In Love, Sex, and Democracy, the predominant agents are Japanese men—who in other narratives tended to be pictured as jealous onlookers as their women, made up and dressed like foreign dolls, walked off with American GIs. It is as if Japanese men, as writers and readers of pulp magazine articles, asserted themselves via the discursive exploration of male and female sexuality in new settings introduced by the foreigners around town: on dates, in marital relations, but also via a variety of unconventional, “curious” relationships. McLelland mentions the problem of fraternization between Allied servicemen and Japanese panpan, but because this topic was censored by the occupation, it hardly enters his purview of reading Japanese popular magazines. Of greater importance is the dynamic between claiming Hollywood-style sexual scripts and “reclaiming the sexual knowledge of Japan's past,” as Sabine Frühstück put it in her endorsement on the back cover. The perceived freshness of this discourse in the late 1940s was in fact undermined by highly conservative attempts in the Ministry of Education to reestablish sexual norms as “purity education” and later the New Life Movement. It seems clear, however, that even though sexual practices may not in fact have changed much, the availability of a variety of sexological discourses, apart from the military prostitution conundrum and including non-normative sexual practices (ryōki), reveals a far richer and more varied landscape of imagined possibilities, albeit predominantly for men.

In Celebrity Gods, the power dynamics of interest are between female religious leaders and male journalists, to a lesser degree between leaders of new religions and their followers, and between representatives of the Japanese government or religious institutions and SCAP. Just like SCAP's deregulation of the sex industry, so its idealistic Religious Corporations Ordinance, which established freedom of religion, caused more chaos than it solved, as SCAP left the religious world essentially to its own devices (pp. 99–100). And while the press stepped in, reviving its old role of bashing new religions as “evil cults” or “superstitions,” SCAP watched the Japanese press. The latter power dynamic is not well explored, which also leaves open the questions of censorship versus self-censorship on the part of the media. Dorman portrays the “celebrity gods” Jikōson and Kitamura as unconventional, charismatic, powerful women who were as much in control of their organizations and their public images as the media appeared to be. And yet, the fact that they were women whose consequential interactions took place exclusively with men—the celebrity followers they attracted as well as the many journalists from the major newspapers who wrote about them—is not explored. This stands in contrast to Dorman's discussion of Renmonkyō's female leader in the Meiji period, whose gender was extremely important for the way the media portrayed this new religion. As Helen Hardacre has argued, female-led new religions “openly challenged the orthodox gender ideology of Japan, which was founded on the notion of patriarchal authority, in law and often in practice” (p. 29).Footnote ²³ There is no indication, however, that Jikōson or Kitamura availed herself of feminist language or in other ways drew attention to herself as a woman, or that journalists and established religious leaders employed misogynist arguments in seeking to destroy their reputation. Indeed, the gender neutrality in these two cases is puzzling.

All three books advance our understanding of society in occupied Japan in new and exciting ways. Occupying Power offers the academic researcher a treasure trove of facts, materials, and provocative interpretations, which scholars with particular interests can use selectively. It fits in well with recent volumes like Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War II to the Present Footnote ²⁴ and is accessible enough for undergraduates, although the later chapters on Japanese legislative politics are better geared towards specialists. The book does not offer a sustained comparative perspective, but it makes a few useful comparative interventions (mainly with Germany) that help draw out what was specific to Japan. It is bold and unflinching in its conclusions and is likely to spur fruitful classroom discussions. Love, Sex, and Democracy is highly accessible, well situated in the relevant secondary literature, and therefore useful for undergraduates, particularly in sexuality studies (perhaps less so for the history of occupied Japan). Mark McLelland is a prolific writer and editor of books on queer culture in Japan, especially media depictions of queer culture.Footnote ²⁵ This book applies similar methodologies to a slightly different set of materials and presents them in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner. The focus on discursive treatments of sexuality without an anchor in lived history does less for social historians, however, and the editorial mistakes in the bibliography and elsewhere pose small but unfortunate hurdles.

Finally, Celebrity Gods presents an impressive exercise in piecing together an idiosyncratic and somewhat elusive story from a number of contradictory sources, usefully framed in terms of three relevant literatures: the public construction of religion in the media age, the social psychology of celebrity and fame, and new religions in Japan. This is an ambitious project, both from a theoretical and a research perspective. The historical frame, which delves into the history of prewar and wartime new religions but also connects with the Aum shinrikyō disaster in the 1990s, makes this both historically and sociologically relevant. At times it can be a frustrating read, however, when the story is too often interrupted by various accounts of events without an attempt to reconcile them. Dorman remains too close to his Japanese secondary sources, all of whom interpret the early postwar events from their perspectives, so much so that the conclusion amounts to a literature review rather than the author's own interpretation. Even so, this book will appeal to specialists in religious history and sociology and will take its place on graduate-level syllabi.

Social history rarely conforms to the neat periodization of political history. Political reforms may have immediate effects on society, but those consequences are meaningful only as experienced or interpreted against the longue durée of social change, extending well beyond Japan's early postwar years of military occupation. McLelland takes a perhaps conventional view when he explicates the discourse of the occupation years against the immediately preceding war years of material and sensual deprivation. Kovner is more provocative in taking a hard look at the very real short-term and long-term consequences of occupation legislation that continue to critically impact the global present. Dorman ambitiously situates the early postwar entanglement of new religions with the public media in the middle of the long twentieth century, but without imbuing it with clearly distinctive characteristics. If the occupation period was once elevated as an “American interlude” in Japanese history or distinguished as a “cross-cultural moment” of particular intensity, then the new social history takes a more somber look at the ways in which the Japanese paved their own paths in response to a set of historical circumstances that happened to include defeat and foreign military occupation. But what, I wonder, are the implications of “normalizing” such an intervention in the longer sweep of modern history?