This history of cultural relations programming in postwar Japan narrates the intended and unintended impacts of the binational construction of the long, “soft” peace that defined U.S.–Japan relations after 1945. While aspects of Matsuda Takeshi's argument are underdeveloped, and a few rudimentary points overly so, the book is nevertheless valuable for its significant realignment of a robust scholarship on U.S. cultural imperialism by placing Japan at the center of the discussion.

Matsuda begins his narrative by recounting the early Cold War context of the Allied occupation and the immediate years after. The book comes into its own in the fourth chapter by engaging the central role of John D. Rockefeller III in developing the institutions that were at the heart of the U.S.–Japan cultural exchange initiatives fostered under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. While the purpose of the cultural diplomatic initiative in Japan was to staunch what many Americans thought to be a Red tide flowing from the Soviet Union, the primary impact seems to have been the creation of institutions that fostered the emergence of a trans-Pacific intellectual elite who were unable to perceive Japan's interests outside the context of U.S. Cold War policy.

Matsuda demonstrates the important role that individuals who were deeply invested in the global U.S. Cold War offensive, such as Rockefeller, Ikeda Hayato, and Ichimada Hisato, played in the development of Japan's cultural exchange institutions. Matsuda argues that the original initiative was partly a response to the offense taken by many Japanese elites at General Douglas MacArthur's “patronizing and condescending view of the Japanese rooted in racism.” Rockefeller reasoned that a cultural diplomatic mission would “redress their injured feelings” by showing that “foreigners appreciated and respected their culture” (p. 105). Importantly, Matsuda illustrates how many of the institutions that were at the center of Rockefeller's plan to shape the U.S.–Japan relationship are still prominent today.

Initially conceived as two separate institutions, one in Tokyo the other in Kyoto, funding concerns forced organizers to build the International House of Japan (Kokusai Bunka Kaikan) as a joint cultural exchange and international student housing facility on a piece of land in the Azabu district of Tokyo. The founding of the International House is assumed by many today to have been a foregone conclusion, but well into the planning process, Rockefeller Foundation president Dean Rusk developed some reservations about the extent to which the affair was going to appear to be a Japanese initiative. The Japanese planning committee, handpicked by Rockefeller, had been slow to submit its proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, and in April 1952, Rockefeller flew to Japan to broker the final parts of the deal by informally advising the senior members of the planning committee, Matsumoto Shigeharu and Takagai Yasaka, “that the Rockefeller Foundation would be willing to extend financial support of the cultural center project upon receipt of the specific plans for organization” (p. 133). Importantly, Rockefeller had to seal the deal with his family's foundation in New York by funding the entire $600,000 matching grant with an anonymous donation from himself.

Building the International House was only one part of the overall U.S. cultural offensive in Japan. Many Allied occupation and U.S. State Department officials believed that the Japanese suffered from a “spiritual vacuum” in the wake of the ultranationalist and militarist ideologies that had dominated public discourse during the war. American officials were further dismayed by the reemerging strength of Marxist scholarship and presumed that it was the result of simple naiveté on the part of an intellectual elite who had lived under a totalitarian state for too long. Oddly, their solution was to sponsor an eerily Orwellian “Campaign of Truth,” which focused on distributing targeted propaganda to Japanese historians who were perceived to labor amid hotbeds of Marxism. The effort met with limited success, but it did lay the groundwork for significant private initiatives that had far longer-lasting influence. Private philanthropic organizations such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations collaborated with the U.S. State Department initiative by funding Japanese scholars who would promote the ideological viewpoints preferred by American officials.

American philanthropic institutions also funneled funding and institutional support to establish American studies research centers in Tokyo and Kyoto. The semiofficial sponsorship of American studies curricula and scholarship played a crucial role in developing a business and political elite with a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. When the rise of popular antinuclear and anti–Security Treaty movements during the late 1950s threatened to destabilize the U.S.–Japan relationship, prominent members of the American studies seminars attempted to salve relations at the most elite levels. Matsuda argues, however, that their cozy relationships with American organizations that were too closely implicated in the American Cold War effort resulted in a lopsided pro-Americanism that marginalized critique and rewarded subservience to an extent that retarded Japan's potential to develop as a democratic state.

While not specifically addressing the impact that the U.S.–Japan cultural exchange missions had on popular culture, Matsuda's study does point toward a much-needed historicization of the culturalist framework for thinking about Japan's role in the world that seems, even now, to dominate international discourse. In 2008, the Foreign Ministry attempted to appropriate intense international interest in Japanese pop culture by making Hello Kitty its official tourism ambassador, a decision that was greeted with some skepticism and a touch of derision in the popular press outside Japan. Hello Kitty, which celebrated her thirtieth birthday in 2004, has not proven to be the foreign tourism magnate hoped for by the Foreign Ministry. Matsuda's study might open the door to further investigation into the failure of the Hello Kitty initiative, which may be the result, in part, of institutionalized notions of Japan rooted in the cultural missions of the early postwar era. This book points toward the need for further study into how the global marketplace for Japan as a cultural icon has been influenced by perceptions of “Japaneseness” sculpted by the Cold War.

Matsuda has done a good job of narrating the emergence of the various cultural programming initiatives at the heart of the U.S.–Japan relationship during the early postwar era. Yet the foreword by John W. Dower is crucial to setting the context of Matsuda's study, and the book would not communicate many of its key points without it. Oddly, Matsuda's appendix reviewing the state of scholarship on U.S.–Japan relations might have served to overcome some of these shortcomings had it been included as part of the opening chapter. Despite these weaknesses, this book establishes the significance of American cultural diplomacy initiatives in Japan and serves as an important cautionary tale to those who cite the early postwar U.S.–Japan relationship as a model of how diplomacy in the aftermath of conflict ought to be conducted.