Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law
Critics and cultural historians take Japan's postwar insularity for granted, rarely acknowledging the role of Cold War concerns in the shaping of Japanese society and culture. Nuclear anxiety, polarized ideologies, gendered tropes of nationhood, and new myths of progress, among other developments, profoundly transformed Japanese literature, criticism, and art during this era and fueled the country's desire to recast itself as a democratic nation and culture.

By rereading the pivotal events, iconic figures, and crucial texts of Japan's literary and artistic life through the lens of the Cold War, Ann Sherif places this supposedly insular nation at the center of a global battle. Each of her chapters focuses on a major moment, spectacle, or critical debate highlighting Japan's entanglement with cultural Cold War politics. Film director Kurosawa Akira, atomic bomb writer Hara Tamiki, singer and movie star Ishihara Yujiro, and even Godzilla and the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover all reveal the trends and controversies that helped Japan carve out a postwar literary canon, a definition of obscenity, an idea of the artist's function in society, and modern modes of expression and knowledge.

Sherif's comparative approach not only recontextualizes seemingly anomalous texts and ideas, but binds culture firmly to the domestic and international events that defined the decades following World War II. By integrating the art and criticism of Japan into larger social fabrics, Japan's Cold War offers a truly unique perspective on the critical and creative acts of a country remaking itself in the aftermath of war.
1101966233
Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law
Critics and cultural historians take Japan's postwar insularity for granted, rarely acknowledging the role of Cold War concerns in the shaping of Japanese society and culture. Nuclear anxiety, polarized ideologies, gendered tropes of nationhood, and new myths of progress, among other developments, profoundly transformed Japanese literature, criticism, and art during this era and fueled the country's desire to recast itself as a democratic nation and culture.

By rereading the pivotal events, iconic figures, and crucial texts of Japan's literary and artistic life through the lens of the Cold War, Ann Sherif places this supposedly insular nation at the center of a global battle. Each of her chapters focuses on a major moment, spectacle, or critical debate highlighting Japan's entanglement with cultural Cold War politics. Film director Kurosawa Akira, atomic bomb writer Hara Tamiki, singer and movie star Ishihara Yujiro, and even Godzilla and the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover all reveal the trends and controversies that helped Japan carve out a postwar literary canon, a definition of obscenity, an idea of the artist's function in society, and modern modes of expression and knowledge.

Sherif's comparative approach not only recontextualizes seemingly anomalous texts and ideas, but binds culture firmly to the domestic and international events that defined the decades following World War II. By integrating the art and criticism of Japan into larger social fabrics, Japan's Cold War offers a truly unique perspective on the critical and creative acts of a country remaking itself in the aftermath of war.
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Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law

Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law

by Ann Sherif
Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law

Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law

by Ann Sherif

Overview

Critics and cultural historians take Japan's postwar insularity for granted, rarely acknowledging the role of Cold War concerns in the shaping of Japanese society and culture. Nuclear anxiety, polarized ideologies, gendered tropes of nationhood, and new myths of progress, among other developments, profoundly transformed Japanese literature, criticism, and art during this era and fueled the country's desire to recast itself as a democratic nation and culture.

By rereading the pivotal events, iconic figures, and crucial texts of Japan's literary and artistic life through the lens of the Cold War, Ann Sherif places this supposedly insular nation at the center of a global battle. Each of her chapters focuses on a major moment, spectacle, or critical debate highlighting Japan's entanglement with cultural Cold War politics. Film director Kurosawa Akira, atomic bomb writer Hara Tamiki, singer and movie star Ishihara Yujiro, and even Godzilla and the Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover all reveal the trends and controversies that helped Japan carve out a postwar literary canon, a definition of obscenity, an idea of the artist's function in society, and modern modes of expression and knowledge.

Sherif's comparative approach not only recontextualizes seemingly anomalous texts and ideas, but binds culture firmly to the domestic and international events that defined the decades following World War II. By integrating the art and criticism of Japan into larger social fabrics, Japan's Cold War offers a truly unique perspective on the critical and creative acts of a country remaking itself in the aftermath of war.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231146623
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 03/05/2009
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Ann Sherif is professor of Japanese language and literature at Oberlin College. Her publications include Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Koda Aya (1999).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chronology of the Early Cold War
Introduction: The Strange Tension of the Cold War
1. The Meanings of War and Peace After 1945
2. Sex and Democracy: Lady Chatterley's Lover in Cold War Japan
3. Hara Tamiki: First Witness to the Cold War
4. "The World Lives in Fear": Kamei Fumio's Nuclear Films
5. The Aesthetics of Speed and the Illogicality of Politics: Ishihara Shintaro as a Cold War Youth
Conclusion: Cold War as Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Norma Field

Going on sixty-three years and counting, there is still no convincing end to Japan's 'postwar.' This state of historical and political shapelessness is sharply illuminated in Ann Sherif's book, where she uses the rubric of the Cold War to examine Japanese cultural production between 1945 and 1960. What a difference this decision makes—loosening the exclusiveness of the U.S.-Japan embrace, showing it to be an ideologically desired end rather than an ordained reality; exposing the multifaceted uses of a pacifist exceptionalism; and, most refreshingly, considering the role of the left in making the 'high Cold War' era a time for intense, creative contestation over the character of Japanese society.

Harry Harootunian

Japan's war with the United States and its ensuing peace permitted the nation to slide into the temporal tense of a permanent postwar, with a social order that peddled visions of prosperity, well-being, consensus, and the surety and stability of a timeless cultural identity. If this narrative sanctioned Japan's withdrawal from its world, as Ann Sherif's superbly executed book proposes, it also, as she correctly recounts, failed to prevent the historical reality of the contemporary Cold War from seeping into the concerns, texts, artifacts, and movies of artists and writers, whose witness was both a reminder of and a reproach to the country's complicity in its struggle to scratch the event from popular consciousness.

Michael Bourdaghs

Ann Sherif introduces what may well become a new dominant paradigm. What has been studied for the last forty years under the rubric 'postwar Japanese culture' must now be rethought as 'Cold War culture.' The framework she proposes is utterly persuasive and forces us to see Japanese culture of the 1940s and 1950s as something transcending national boundaries, as something arising out of a historical situation that was global in scope. Timely and innovative, Japan's Cold War deserves to reach a wide audience.

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Related Subjects

History
Asian History
Japanese History
Japanese History - 1945 - Present
History
Asian History
Japanese History
Japanese History - 1945 - Present

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