In America's Geisha Ally Naoko Shibusawa ingeniously combines social history and domestic history by discussing how American citizens contributed to the process of incorporating Japan into the US-led liberal capitalist framework in the years immediately after the Second World War. By analyzing a range of cultural texts, this book provides a nuanced understanding of the ways in which postwar ideologies in the United States supported American foreign policy.

Shibusawa labels the citizens who initiated the quick “reimaging” of Japan from a deceitful enemy to a close ally “Cold War liberals.” These men and women, though by no means unified in their political outlooks or cultural backgrounds, believed in their mission to spread “universal” values such as liberty, democracy, and freedom throughout the world so as to ensure the status of the United States as a global power confronting the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. Shibusawa analyzes many encounters between Japan and these Cold War liberals, using a wide array of sources including films, court records, and personal interviews. Some cases are relatively well known, such as the journalist Norman Cousins's work to help the “Hiroshima maidens” get their chances to have plastic surgery in the United States. Others are incidents that have largely been overlooked by previous scholarship, such as the movement to bring Japanese students to study at American colleges and an Army veteran's effort to establish an orphanage in Osaka.

While the individual actions of the Cold War liberals were often noble and produced happy outcomes for both the Japanese and the Americans involved, the overall effect was to confirm American power by transforming Japan into “America's geisha ally,” a feminized and infantilized nation in need of guidance and support by the benevolent and paternalistic American society. The use of such Orientalist imagery effectively served to position Americans as the natural leaders of the new global order. Japan, therefore, “held regenerative possibilities for Americans, with the potential to reconfirm the universality of western civilization's principles and the wisdom of its political and social organization” (92).

In recent years, many leaders of American studies scholarship have emphasized the need for “international perspectives.” Shibusawa's work is a significant contribution to the field, as its approach defies the conventional boundary between “domestic” and “international” histories by showing that a careful grasp of postwar US–Japan relations is actually integral to a fuller understanding of the contemporary social conditions of the United States.