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World War II ended in tragedy and devastating loss for the Japanese. Their country’s infrastructure and economy were largely demolished and they faced military occupation by their former enemies. In the sweep of Japanese history, the occupation years (1945–52) stand with the national reunification under the Tokugawa and the Meiji Restoration as one of the country’s great turning points. During those seven years, Japan experienced changes as profound and rapid as those found in any revolutionary period in modern world history: people’s rights became constitutionally guaranteed, the military was limited to national self-defense, and massive land and labor reforms improved the prospects of the working classes. The occupation, nevertheless, also represents years of hardship and deprivation for many Japanese. The legacy of being made second-class citizens in their own nation left long-lasting scars.
In 1956, the Japanese government famously declared that the postwar period was “over.” Indeed, beginning in the late 1950s, there was noticeable improvement in the lifestyles of ordinary Japanese as economic growth began to benefit the masses. Consumption of appliances, fashionable clothes, and varied diets containing more meat, dairy, and processed foods represented a “bright new life” (akarui seikatsu) based on the American lifestyles made visible through imported movies and TV programs. The notion (or myth) that Japan was composed of middle-class consumers leading homogeneous lifestyles—possessing the same consumer goods and engaging in the same leisure activities—became prevalent. This “middle mass” society was celebrated as a demonstration of Japanese achievements in creating a democratic, equality-oriented society. This image, however, ignored both the continuity of conservative gender norms, based in prewar ideals, and the voices of the disaffected, which erupted in major protests on several occasions through the decades.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
The Battle of Midway, in June 1942, cost the Imperial Japanese Navy four irreplaceable aircraft carriers; afterward, Japan’s shipbuilding and pilot-training programs could not keep pace with military losses. More significantly, American industry had responded very positively to the challenge of war. American war-related manufacturing churned out ten times as many weapons as Japan.
Its resources depleted, the Japanese military turned to desperate tactics, sacrificing its soldiers in a heroic but tragic attempt to slow the enemy’s advance. In autumn 1944, special attack squads (tokkōtai), popularly known as kamikaze, were created as a national strategy for a final defense of the homeland. The term kamikaze, or “divine wind,” referred to the storms caused by Japanese deities to drive off Mongol attacks in the thirteenth century. Twenty-three volunteers took off on the first mission to crash-dive their bomb-laden Zero fighters into American battleships. They succeeded in sinking one carrier and damaging several others. More squadrons were then quickly recruited, and new vehicles of attack, including mini-submarines and motorboats, were equipped with bombs, but very few managed to inflict any damage. The kamikaze became the principal means of self-defense in the final years of the war, but their sacrifices did little to slow the Americans. By the end of the war, nearly five thousand young men had died on their missions.
When the Americans were within striking distance of Japan’s home islands, they directed a ferocious attack on the Japanese people. High-altitude B-29 bombers designed for industrial targets would instead fly low over major cities, dropping incendiary bombs on civilian populations. Japan’s residential districts were highly flammable and tightly packed, so the damage was immense. Americans hoped their new strategy, raining death and destruction on the innocent, would break Japanese morale. The first raid in February 1945 destroyed around one square mile of Tokyo. On March 9 and 10, over three hundred B-29s converged on Tokyo’s densely populated Asakusa district and dropped nearly four million pounds of incendiary bombs, completely obliterating around sixteen square miles of the city. In a single night, a fifth of Tokyo’s industry disappeared and over a million people were left homeless. The heat from incendiary bombs was so intense that rivers bubbled and steel beams melted. General Curtis LeMay later described how firebombing victims were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”
The B-29s then took their campaign to Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. The Japanese had few defenses remaining to stop the attacks. Throughout the summer of 1945, sixty-six cities were firebombed; many were effectively leveled. In total, a quarter of the nation’s housing burned. Nearly 250,000 Japanese died, and 300,000 more were maimed or injured in the firebombings. Officials urged people not needed in war-related factory production to evacuate the major cities; children were relocated to vacant inns and temples in rural areas, separated from their families and forced to help out on nearby farms.
In April 1945, American forces reached Okinawa, the jump-off point for the invasion of the mainland. The Battle of Okinawa involved some of the fiercest fighting of the war, lasting eighty-two days and resulting in 49,000 American casualties, the most ever experienced in U.S. military history. Japanese losses were higher still; over 120,000 Okinawans died and 11,000 were taken prisoner. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, committed suicide rather than face the anticipated horrors the Americans would bring. Most of the main island became a scorched wasteland; important cultural artifacts and buildings, including the ancient Shuri Castle, were destroyed.
The Japanese cabinet decided to approach the Soviet Union to broker a settlement with the United States, but Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already meeting with British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Harry Truman to discuss Japan’s surrender. On July 26, the allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally or face utter destruction; the fate of the emperor was not mentioned. Although the Japanese hoped to end the war, they could not accept such an open-ended surrender, allowing a foreign army to occupy Japan, dismantling the imperial system, and possibly indicting their divine monarch as a common criminal. When they did not respond to the allies’ demands, President Truman authorized use of America’s expensive new weapon, the atomic bomb.
At 8:15 A.M. on August 6, the Enola Gay, a B-29 named after the pilot’s mother, dropped a ten-foot-long bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. The bomb generated energy equivalent to 15,000–20,000 tons of dynamite. The temperature at its epicenter reached more than 7,000 degrees, incinerating everything and everyone within a mile-and-a-quarter radius. A wall of shock waves spread from the epicenter at the speed of sound, obliterating concrete buildings; the wind velocity at ground zero was five times stronger than winds generated by the severest hurricanes. There are no accurate figures for the number of deaths caused by the bomb, but estimates range between 140,000 and 200,000. Two days later, the Soviet Union announced its intent to declare war on Japan and to invade Manchuria and Korea. To help contain the Soviet advance into Asia, the United States responded by dropping a second atomic bomb, called “Fatman,” on Nagasaki, killing another 74,000 individuals. The decision to use a nuclear weapon on a second Japanese city represents one of the first salvos of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In all, nearly 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed in U.S. bombings of Japanese cities. It is worth noting that nuclear weapons today are over a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped in 1945.
Survivors in the vicinity of the bombings began to suffer from acute radiation poisoning. Symptoms began with vomiting, followed by hair loss, reduction of blood cells, and temporary sterility. Victims who received high doses of radiation died of bone marrow disorder two or more months after exposure. Many first responders and others who entered the cities well after the bombings also suffered and succumbed to the sickness.
While most of the cabinet wished to surrender, military leaders refused, as they still had millions of soldiers successfully waging war in China. The emperor finally broke the deadlock, demanding that the military accept surrender. He recorded a message to the nation to be broadcast the following day—the first time that an emperor spoke directly to his subjects. As the nation gathered around their radios, static crackled around the emperor’s words; his voice was high-pitched, and he spoke in a formal, classical style that many did not fully understand. Their neighbors translated the bad news—Japan had lost the war. Hirohito never spoke explicitly of either surrender or defeat but presented Japan’s capitulation as an act that might save humanity: “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”1 The emperor called on his subjects to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable,” meaning military occupation by a foreign power.
The Allied occupation forces arrived two weeks after the broadcast, led by U.S. general Douglas MacArthur, designated the supreme commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (or SCAP, an acronym that represented all occupation authority in Japan). MacArthur, sometimes called the “Blue-eyed Shogun,” held unprecedented powers, including authority to dissolve the Diet, censor the press, disband political parties, and issue laws by fiat. Five thousand Americans worked under his command at SCAP; more than 350,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed throughout Japan. U.S. forces immediately assumed control of central Tokyo, taking over nearly all the buildings still standing.
FIGURE 61. Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito. U.S. Army photo by Lt. Gaetano Faillace, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Allied leaders wanted to prevent the reemergence of militarism and resist communist influence in Japan; since the United States dominated the occupation, MacArthur’s agenda of democratization was based on an American model. American mass media during (and after) the occupation often portrayed the U.S.-Japan relationship in terms of gender or maturity: Japan was immature and childish, in need of America’s paternal guidance so that it could grow up into a “real,” modern, capitalist democracy. Alternatively, Japan was conceived of as an exotic “geisha” subservient to U.S. masculine desires. The new power structure in Japan was visually captured in a photo of the first meeting between MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito. The monarch, dressed in formal attire for the momentous occasion, appears stiff and diminutive next to the general, who gazes sternly into the camera while adopting a casual pose. Dressed in khakis, MacArthur apparently did not consider the meeting important enough to don a full-dress uniform.
During the first phase of the occupation, between 1945 and 1947, sweeping policies were enacted, focused on the “Three D’s”: demilitarization, democratization, and decentralization of wealth and power. MacArthur began by dismantling Japan’s colonial empire and destroying its potential to wage war. SCAP stripped Japan of all territorial holdings outside the four main islands. It abolished the army and navy and began the huge task of demobilizing more than five million troops, nearly half of whom were still overseas.
Loss of the colonies also required the repatriation of three million civilians, who had migrated throughout the empire as administrators, entrepreneurs, farmers, and workers. In 1945, nearly 9 percent of the home islands’ total population resided in imperial outposts. In turn, several million former colonial subjects who resided in Japan were deported back to their countries of origin. One result of SCAP’s repatriation and deportation programs was the recreation of more ethnically homogeneous East Asian nations. Japan was no longer the center of a multiethnic empire in East Asia; it became instead a monoethnic nation on the far edge of America’s sphere of influence.
Demilitarization also entailed a purge to remove personnel associated with militant nationalism from public office. More than two hundred thousand police officers, newspaper publishers and reporters, and political figures were forced out of work. SCAP placed around six thousand individuals on trial as war criminals for atrocities committed in battle and executed more than nine hundred throughout the former empire. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, convened in May 1946, prosecuted twenty-eight high-ranking government and military officials, including members of the cabinet. After two years of deliberations, the tribunal sent seven men to the gallows, including the wartime prime minister, Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948). Some critics charged that the Tokyo trials were nothing but a forum for “victor’s justice” (i.e., vengeance, vindication, and propaganda) because, from the perspective of international law, it was not technically a war crime to participate in a nation’s decision to wage war. Judge Radhabinod Pal of India agreed, dissenting from all guilty verdicts and dismissing the legitimacy of the tribunal altogether. Judge Pal believed that the indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property through the U.S. firebombing and atomic bombs constituted more heinous war crimes. Emperor Hirohito and all members of the imperial family were exonerated from any charges because MacArthur hoped the imperial family would help provide postwar stability and encourage people to cooperate with SCAP directives.
The second “D” of early occupation policies was democratization. U.S. leaders decided that the Meiji constitution required revision in order to guarantee civil liberties. MacArthur appointed two dozen Americans—military officers, lawyers, professors, journalists, and businessmen—to a committee tasked with preparing a model constitution. The document that resulted from the unprecedented task of rewriting the national charter of a defeated enemy shocked the Japanese leadership. The constitution’s first article deprived the emperor of sovereignty, converting the monarch into a powerless “symbol of the State and of the unity of the people,” with duties limited to ceremonial functions. Article 9, the famous peace clause, renounced war and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. No other state in modern history had renounced its right to wage war. Other articles strengthened civil rights, providing for universal adult suffrage, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press.
The third “D” was decentralization of wealth and power, which included breaking up the zaibatsu (multi-conglomerate industries that had worked with the military to enlarge the empire), fostering labor unions, and carrying out land reform. The zaibatsu dominated three-quarters of Japan’s wartime industrial and commercial activities. SCAP dismantled giant firms like Mitsubishi and Mitsui, which were later reconstituted in modified form. MacArthur envisioned a strong labor-union movement as an essential step toward creating a stable middle class supportive of SCAP reforms. New labor laws set minimum wages and maximum work hours, provided for paid holidays, and mandated plant safety and training. Japanese workers responded by organizing on a massive scale. By 1948, nearly half the workforce—6.7 million—belonged to over thirty-three thousand different unions. Land reform deeply transformed the lives of rural residents, who still made up nearly half the populace. Tenant farmers cultivated over two-thirds of farmland, paying around half of their harvest to a landlord. SCAP confiscated fields from absentee landlords and sold them at low prices to the tenants. Resident landlords were allowed to keep only as much land as they could farm themselves, plus five acres to rent. By 1950, three million poor tenant farmers had acquired their own land, helping to dismantle rural power structures dominated by wealthy landlords.
Despite the explicit promise of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, censorship was extensive in occupied Japan. SCAP’s Civil Censorship Detachment employed over six thousand individuals to monitor newspapers, radio scripts, magazines, and other media. The lists of taboo topics included any criticism of SCAP, the United States, or other allies; mentions of crimes committed by Allied military forces; reports on the atomic bombs; and discussion of the black market, starvation, or fraternization between Allied personnel and Japanese women. Media could not refer to the huge cost of the occupation for Japan or the contradictions between the American rhetoric of freedom and democracy and actual conditions on the ground, where Americans lived luxurious lives while the Japanese experienced hunger, deprivation, and discrimination. Finally and ironically, the mention of censorship itself was forbidden.
By the late 1940s, the specter of communism had grown with Mao Zedong’s victory in China, the creation of Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, and bitter hostility between the two Koreas. U.S. leaders began reconsidering SCAP’s priorities. If they looked to Japan to be a staunch ally against communism in East Asia, it would require political stability and economic revival, best cultivated with different approaches. The reorientation in U.S. policy was so distinct that some historians have called it the “Reverse Course.” Under the new strategy, the “Three D’s” of 1945–47 gave way to the “Four R’s” of 1948–52: reconstructing the economy, restraining labor, rehabilitating purged individuals, and rearming the military.
The new agenda suited conservative Japanese leaders, including Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967), the curmudgeonly former British ambassador who served as prime minister from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954. Yoshida believed that the occupation should enact only slight reforms focused on economic rehabilitation and restoration of Japanese status within the international community. Early on, he quipped that GHQ, the acronym for SCAP’s general headquarters, stood for “Go Home Quickly.” As prime minister he emphasized economic recovery and reliance on U.S. military protection, even at the expense of independence in foreign affairs—positions known as the Yoshida Doctrine, which strongly shaped Japanese foreign policy during the Cold War era and beyond. Under Yoshida’s leadership, earlier SCAP laws favorable to labor were scrapped in favor of statutes restoring power to management and giving the state more power over unions.
The occupation drew to a close with the signing of a pair of treaties on September 8, 1951. The Peace Treaty provided for withdrawal of occupation personnel, restored sovereignty, and spelled out Japan’s right to self-defense, placing no limits on its future economic development. The second, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, known in Japan as ANPO, permitted the United States to station troops in Japan indefinitely and to veto military privileges for any third nation. Most Japanese supported the Peace Treaty but objected to ANPO, fearing that it subordinated national defense needs to U.S. policy and compromised Japan’s rights as a sovereign nation. Critics charged that Yoshida had condemned Japan to “subordinate independence,” and the public agreed; a 1952 poll revealed that only 18 percent of Japanese considered their country truly independent under ANPO.
Yoshida’s political party merged with another to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955. The LDP dominated politics for nearly four decades, keeping a firm hold on power with fifteen members serving consecutively as prime minister. It received millions of dollars in covert financial aid from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, intended to support conservative pro-American forces in Japan and undermine left-wing politics. The stability of LDP rule aided postwar financial recovery, and Japan’s remarkable growth from the late 1950s to the ’70s has often been called an “economic miracle.” By the beginning of the ’60s, Japan’s gross national product (GNP) was the fifth largest in the capitalist world; before the decade was over, Japan’s output was second only to that of the United States. Calling this rapid recovery a miracle, however, is something of a misnomer. Japan took longer to return to prewar levels of per capita GNP than Germany and the rest of Western Europe. Its return to the ranks of the great powers was not miraculous but based on a legacy of its prewar commercial accomplishments, shrewd state planning, individual determination to succeed, and unanticipated events that stimulated the economy.
The first significant event in Japan’s recovery was the Korean War (1950–53). Japanese companies received nearly $2 billion worth of contracts for textiles, lumber, paper, steel, and vehicles to support American and United Nations forces fighting on the peninsula, spurring investment in new plants and equipment and returning the economy to full capacity. In the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War resulted in a new round of procurement orders from the United States that provided another major stimulus. In addition, because of conversion to war-related production, American manufacturing firms were unable to meet consumer demand for electronics, auto parts, chemicals, and machinery, providing Japanese companies with opportunities to increase exports.
Economic growth was also fostered by the close relationships between the LDP, bureaucracy, and big business—the so-called Iron Triangle. These three groups worked in tandem to ensure that economic growth was the nation’s highest priority. A cabinet-level council of experts assessed Japan’s strengths and recommended future business and import/export strategies; their reports were translated into action by other government agencies, politicians, and designated corporations. Under such coordinated direction, the level of national income doubled between 1960 and 1967. During the 1950s, the shipbuilding and steel industries were designated targets for growth; in the ’60s, sectors that would enhance export trade, such as autos and electronics, were emphasized in economic planning. Thus, Toyota, Nissan, and other carmakers automated their factories, improved inventory control, and introduced stylish new models. The oil shock of the ’70s incentivized U.S. consumers to try the smaller, more fuel-efficient Japanese autos. By 1980, Japan produced more cars than any other country; by 1989, it controlled nearly a quarter of the U.S. auto market. Electronics firms such as Matsushita and Sony began to flourish in the ’50s. Matsushita teamed up with Dutch manufacturer Phillips to begin mass production of a huge line of electrical appliances for the home under the brand names National and Panasonic. They aggressively marketed refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and every other conceivable home appliance both domestically and abroad. The electronics giant Sony was founded by Morita Akio (1921–99), named one of the twenty most influential business geniuses of the twentieth century by Time magazine. Sony’s first hit product was an affordable transistor radio; it has continued to produce innovative, high-quality video and audio gear over the decades, from TVs and video recorders to Walkman portable stereos and gaming consoles.
FIGURE 62. Advertisement for Sony portable TV, 1960s
Japan’s postwar economic growth was thus no miracle, but the result of multiple factors, including national prioritization and the creative efforts of major corporations. Small and medium-sized businesses, too, filled an important niche in the industrial structure as subcontractors to large firms, which could rely on supplies of high-quality parts without making additional investments. A global environment encouraging free trade also played a role in helping the Japanese economy, as did Japan’s relationship with the United States. Under the security treaties, Japan spent less than 1 percent of its national budget for defense. In addition, the legacy of Japan’s past was undeniably important. An educated and talented labor pool and prewar commercial experience contributed to rapid postwar growth. Finally, the domestic consumer market was critical to the success of Japanese businesses. As incomes rose, the middle-class masses acquired numerous appliances and other consumer goods deemed essential for comfortable family life.
Protest Movements
The improvement in living standards for ordinary Japanese eventually helped diffuse swelling movements of popular protest that arose in the 1960s against renewal of ANPO and in opposition to the Vietnam War. As the Diet deliberated on ratification of ANPO, leftist opposition parties staged filibusters and sit-ins to delay approval. Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, an indicted war criminal, resorted to heavy-handed tactics to pass the bill, ordering police to drag opponents from Diet chambers, then calling a snap vote among the remaining LDP supporters. Enraged at this disregard for democratic procedure, labor went on strike across Japan and hundreds of thousands of students swarmed the streets in protest. They developed a distinctive repertoire of protest tactics, including snake-dancing, a zigzag style of marching and chanting. The death of a young woman, crushed in a clash between students and police, unleashed even more popular anger.
Another large protest movement crystallized in opposition to the Vietnam War. A nationwide rally in June 1965 attracted over a hundred thousand, and subsequent monthly demonstrations, held until late 1973, drew up to seventy thousand protesters each. From 1967 to 1969, antiwar rallies and demonstrations involved nearly nineteen million people. One of the largest occurred in January 1968 when a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier arrived in Japan to support the war effort. In response, the generally pro-American prime minister, Satō Eisaku (1901–75), declared Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles: no manufacture, possession, or introduction into Japan of nuclear weapons. Satō was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this stance.
A second, virulent wave of anti-ANPO protest arose as the treaty approached renewal in 1970. These protests were more extensive, complex, and violent than those of 1960 and reached deeply into Japan’s universities. Tactics included the secretly planned, sudden occupation of a symbolic space such as Haneda Airport or the Diet building. By the late ’60s, an elite police force of twenty-nine thousand devoted most of its time to controlling student riots and gathering intelligence on student organizations.
Citizens’ movements proliferated as hundreds of groups formed to protest widespread pollution and environmental damage, the result of all-out prioritization of rapid economic growth. Pro-business policies allowed factories to pollute the air and water with impunity, resulting in respiratory diseases among residents of industrial cities and exposure to chemical poisons for those living along polluted waterways. Lax oversight resulted in two major food-contamination scandals. In 1955, arsenic-contaminated powdered milk sold by the Morinaga Milk Company caused diarrhea, fever, and leukemia among some twelve thousand individuals and caused the deaths of over a hundred infants. And Minamata disease, caused by consuming mercury-tainted fish, was discovered in 1956 and afflicted over ten thousand victims, causing thousands of deaths.
Minamata Bay in southern Kyushu, famous for the abundance and variety of its fish, was home to the Chisso chemical manufacturing plant. After the war, when food production was of highest priority, Chisso’s fertilizer and agricultural chemical products made it a leader in the industry. Its chemical waste was dumped without treatment into the bay. In the mid-1950s, fishermen began to notice a drastic decline in the amount and quality of their catches. Dead fish floated in the bay, and local cats began exhibiting strange, contorted movements; some threw themselves into the sea. People also began suffering from an unknown disease, with severe convulsions, intermittent loss of consciousness, lapses into insanity, and, finally, permanent coma or death. All victims had eaten large amounts of fish from Minamata Bay, and while many believed the problem was related to Chisso, it was taboo to speak of this possibility because of the community’s economic dependence on the company. Chisso worked closely with the Japanese government to deny responsibility for decades. When evidence mounted, the firm consented to small amounts of compensation for victims who would pursue no further legal action. As negotiations stalled in 1971, a group of victims staged an eighteen-month sit-in, the longest and largest sit-down strike in Japanese history. The Minamata affair, still not fully resolved, provides a tragic example of how the strong bond between government and business could harm ordinary people.
FIGURE 63. Victim of Minamata disease, 1973. Source: AP Images.
Minamata was just one case of industrial pollution. In 1965, a similar mercury-poisoning case came to light in Niigata; in 1967, wide-scale chronic asthma resulted from Mitsubishi-owned plants in Mie prefecture that released sulfurous fumes; and in 1968, cadmium poisoning in Toyama prefecture contaminated water used to irrigate rice paddies. Along with Minamata, these cases are known as the “four big pollution lawsuits” and became enormously significant in spurring antipollution citizens’ movements. Their activism resulted in the enactment of some of the strictest antipollution laws in the world. By 1980, Japan spent more of its GNP on antipollution measures than any other country.
Other citizens’ movements involved rural resistance to industrial development and urban opposition to high-rise construction that threatened the “right to sunshine.” In the ’60s and ’70s, farmers dramatically opposed construction of Tokyo’s new international airport in the town of Narita. As authorities began to forcibly expropriate their lands, some chained themselves to their homes, built fortified encampments, and refused to leave. They were joined by students and anti–Vietnam War protesters who engaged in violent clashes with police. Narita airport was finally completed in 1978, seven years behind schedule, but its opening was delayed when a group armed with Molotov cocktails drove into the control tower. On its opening day, over six thousand protesters attacked security forces with rocks and firebombs; police responded with water cannons. The long conflict over Narita was a major factor in the decision to build Osaka’s Kansai International Airport offshore on reclaimed land, instead of again trying to expropriate land in heavily populated areas.
OCCUPATION-ERA CULTURE
Material Culture
In the autumn of 1945, everything was in short supply for most Japanese, whether housing, food, medicine, or hope. The war had cost Japan one-third of its total wealth and a quarter of its housing. Meanwhile, nearly six million soldiers and civilians were returning from around the empire to a ruined economy, creating brutal competition for jobs. People survived or coped in a variety of ways, some becoming homeless drunks, others joining the yakuza—crime-syndicate families who also dealt in illegal drugs, prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. (Yakuza remain active today and are well known for their intricate, full-body tattoos, some of which take a lifetime to complete.) Many women turned to prostitution, servicing the occupying forces. Some were widows or war orphans; others were eldest daughters working to feed their families. Rather than directly exchanging sex for money, many accepted goods, such as cigarettes or liquor, which they might barter or sell on the black market.
Deaths from starvation and malnutrition were common; around a thousand Tokyoites succumbed within three months of surrender. Food shortages became acute before the war’s end, when U.S. advances cut off access to food imports from the colonies. Authorities urged people to supplement carbohydrates with acorns and sawdust and address protein deficits by eating silkworm cocoons, insects, and rodents. After surrender, conditions further deteriorated. U.S. food rations, consisting largely of wheat, supplied only one-third to one-half of required daily caloric intake. Wheat was commonly made into ramen noodles or wrappers for dumplings sold at food stalls, often run by returnees from China. Nevertheless, extreme hunger remained a constant for most Japanese until 1949. Rations could be supplemented by food purchases on the black market (yamiichi), but these were exorbitantly priced and technically illegal. Over a million ordinary people were arrested annually for transactions on the black market during the first three years of the occupation. In 1947, a shocking incident demonstrated the extent of the food crisis: when a thirty-three-year-old judge responsible for prosecuting black-market offenders vowed to eat no more than his rationed allotment, he soon died of starvation. Urbanites traveled to the countryside to barter their possessions with farmers for rice or other produce. Their situation was described as a “bamboo shoot” or “onion” lifestyle because people wept while peeling off layers of their clothing, jewelry, and other valuables to trade for food.
The black market was often the only venue available to purchase food and necessary goods or to earn a living. By October 1945, seventeen thousand open-air markets existed throughout the country, mostly in the large cities, and the total value of black-market goods on offer exceeded the annual national budget. Food and drink stalls sold everything from stews made of garbage from U.S. military bases to cheap alcoholic concoctions (kasutori) that could blind or kill. Other stalls sold or bartered household goods or clothing. Clever entrepreneurs converted military goods into useful kitchen items, making cutlery from swords and transforming helmets into cooking pots. Former military officers and corrupt officials grew rich through sales of stolen military goods such as coal, gasoline, cigarettes, cement, and steel. Overall, the markets were tightly controlled by the yakuza.
Housing shortages affected the working classes the most, because U.S. bombings had devastated the areas where they lived, while leaving many of the wealthiest neighborhoods intact. Shantytowns housed tens of thousands of homeless families, crowded together in makeshift shacks of charred wood, corrugated tin, and other available debris. Some took shelter in burned-out trolley cars and buses, in the underground passageways of the train stations, and even in caves burrowed into urban rubble. By 1950, millions still lacked decent housing.
Disease further decimated the Japanese. In the squalor that developed following defeat, communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, and polio burgeoned, but the health-care system had largely been destroyed, and medicine was in scarce supply. Between 1945 and 1948, some 650,000 succumbed to such diseases.
During the early weeks and months of the occupation, Allied troops terrorized the population. In Kanagawa prefecture, U.S. soldiers committed 1,336 rapes during the first ten weeks of the occupation. Perpetrators went unpunished; stories about rapes and robberies committed by soldiers were censored. Japanese officials, alarmed by the threat to female chastity, acted quickly to provide sexual services to their conquerors. The number of professional prostitutes available was insufficient, so ordinary women were recruited via a vague advertising campaign calling on “new Japanese women to participate in the great task of comforting the occupation force. Housing, clothing and food supplied.”2 Many women, unaware of the wartime system of military comfort women and desperate to survive, applied. Most left when they learned the truth about their expected duties, but 1,360 women in Tokyo initially enlisted in what would become the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA). Like their wartime sisters, postwar comfort women were forced to service fifteen to sixty men per day, and some committed suicide or deserted in despair. Nevertheless, over thirty additional RAA centers quickly opened in Tokyo; many more were established in twenty additional cities. In all, the RAA employed up to an estimated seventy thousand women to “entertain” the occupying forces.
The RAA did not survive long. In 1946, facing antiprostitution pressure from the United States and spiking rates of venereal disease among his forces, MacArthur dismantled the RAA and outlawed prostitution. But the world’s oldest profession was unlikely to disappear with a massive military occupation afoot. Brothels in red-light districts surrounding military bases continued to operate privately, and freelance streetwalkers, known as panpan girls, spread throughout the cities. Prostitution paid far better than most jobs then available for women, so tens of thousands took to the streets. All Japanese women were considered potential prostitutes by American military police, who periodically rounded up any females found on the streets at night, forcing them to submit to humiliating VD examinations. Most panpan girls were teenagers and were easily identified through their colorful dresses and heavy makeup. Like the modern girls of the 1920s, they were a source of both public consternation and media fascination, criticized for consorting with the Americans and for their self-indulgent eroticism and consumerism.
In the popular view, there were two main types of panpan girls: batafurai (butterfly), who flitted indiscriminately from client to client; and onrii (only), loyal to a single patron. It was no secret that many American soldiers, married or not, kept such mistresses, whom they supplied with treasured goods such as liquor, cigarettes, and chocolates, and with feminine items like lipstick and nylon stockings. Panpan girls were stereotyped in Baby-san, a cartoon in Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for U.S. military personnel in Japan. Baby-san was depicted as money-hungry and duplicitous, begging for consumer goods in her broken English, but she was also sexy, servile, and irresistible to American military men. She was the occupation’s version of Madama Butterfly—a toy to be left behind in Japan, especially since many American states still enforced antimiscegenation laws criminalizing interracial marriage.
The black market and panpan girls dominated the public imagination during the occupation. In his monumental, Pulitzer Prize–winning work on the era, Embracing Defeat (2000), John Dower notes how children’s games poignantly mimicked social situations. With toys scarce, children played games of pretend; the most popular included GI and prostitute (panpan asobi), mock black market (yamiichi-gokko), and left-wing political demonstration (demo asobi). In the train game, the designated conductor picked riders for a special train designated for occupation personnel only. Rejected players rode the “ordinary train,” pushing, shoving, and crying for help.
FIGURE 64. Bill Hume, Baby-san, 1952.
While the Japanese lacked adequate shelter, food, and health care, and many turned to crime and prostitution for survival, American occupiers and their families lived sumptuously, in homes confiscated from purged elites or in housing complexes constructed to American standards at the Japanese government’s expense. The homes were equipped with the latest modern appliances—some even had swimming pools—while the complexes contained amenities such as schools, churches, shops, clubs, and movie theaters. Military families enjoyed lifestyles far more luxurious than most could afford at home, employing one or more servants and spending their weekends at luxurious hotels throughout Japan, commandeered by the military, where they feasted on beef sukiyaki. The Americans shopped for pearls, antiques, and souvenirs in department stores declared off-limits to the natives. Restaurants, theaters, and other facilities reserved for occupation personnel enforced Jim Crow–style segregation with signs declaring “Japanese Keep Out.” While some pitied Japanese impoverishment, the occupiers were usually giddy over their new entitlements, and most firmly believed that locals were inferiors who should be grateful for American benevolence. U.S. diplomat George Kennan, however, denounced them as parasites with “monumental imperviousness” to the “suffering and difficulties” of the Japanese people. He condemned occupation personnel for monopolizing “everything that smacks of comfort or elegance or luxury,” and he contrasted their “idleness and boredom” with the “struggles and problems of a defeated and ruined country.”3
Religion under the Occupation
One month after arriving, MacArthur kicked off a recruitment drive to bring two thousand American missionaries and evangelists to Japan to help fill its “spiritual vacuum.” Like many Americans, the general believed wartime propaganda that the Japanese literally worshipped Hirohito as a “living god.” Despite intense efforts, Christianity made little progress in Japan. At the end of the occupation, Christians numbered around half of 1 percent of the population, no more than had existed before Pearl Harbor. The postwar Japanese did not reject religion in general, however. With freedom of religion guaranteed under the postwar constitution, a flood of new religious movements emerged and several grew rapidly, with memberships reaching into the millions. One writer called the phenomenon “The Rush Hour of the Gods.” SCAP authorities gave enhanced legal protections to religions to avoid the types of suppressions that had occurred against Oomoto and other groups in the 1930s and ’40s. Japanese authorities, fearful of missteps in an area so important to occupation authorities, tended to take a hands-off attitude toward religious groups, allowing them to engage in questionable fundraising schemes and political activities without losing their privileged tax-free status.
Postwar new religions, like their predecessors, usually centered on charismatic personalities and often involved healing or spiritualist activity. Because of the large number of new groups, they competed fiercely to attract new members by hosting elaborate events, constructing impressive headquarters, and recruiting aggressively through extensive use of mass media. The mainstream press and general public largely held new religions in disdain, in part because of the involvement of some in tax-evasion and embezzlement scandals. Members of new religions were subjected to ridicule and discriminatory treatment. Nevertheless, several major groups succeeded in recruiting millions of people after the war, because so many were disillusioned or impoverished or had lost their entire families. Established religions and state and local agencies failed to offer real social support, but new religions provided a community with impressive activities and facilities that bespoke power and success. In many, individuals joined intimate groups for self-reflection and counseling, where they could find outlet for their daily frustrations. Thus, the new religions—though much maligned—helped many Japanese regain a sense of identity in a new and confusing era.
One infamous sect was Tenshō Kōtai Jingukyō, popularly known as the Dancing Religion. The foundress, Kitamura Sayo (1900–1967), known as Ogamisama, was a farmer’s wife who claimed she was possessed by the absolute god and preached a millennial message. Her street sermons included singing and ecstatic dancing and began to attract media attention in 1947. Ogamisama was a charismatic figure who dressed in men’s suits and openly denounced both the emperor and MacArthur in coarse language. Other new postwar groups were spin-offs from older sects. After the war, the Shintoist Oomoto began to recover from its 1935 suppression but was quickly outpaced by groups founded by former members who borrowed from its teachings and practices. The largest were Sekai Kyūseikyō, PL Kyōdan, and Seichō no Ie, which claimed over 1.5 million members by the late 1950s. Nichiren Buddhism (see chapter 4) was the root of several large new religions, including Reiyūkai, Risshō Kōseikai, and Sōka Gakkai.
Sōka Gakkai was founded in 1930 by educators Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944) and Toda Jōsei (1900–1958), who wanted to reform Japan’s militaristic education system into a more humanistic one. In 1943, both were sent to prison for refusing to enshrine Shinto talismans in their homes. Makiguchi died there, but Toda was released and rebuilt the organization. Sōka Gakkai engaged in militant conversion tactics known as shakubuku (literally, to break and flatten), harassing family and friends to join and threatening divine punishment through illness or misfortune if they refused. This approach netted the group over a million members by the time of Toda’s death in 1958 but also earned it a bad reputation in mainstream society. Ikeda Daisaku (b. 1928) became the group’s leader in 1960 and began a campaign stressing world peace, culture, education, and expansion abroad. Under Ikeda’s leadership, the group grew to over twelve million members in 190 countries. Sōka Gakkai also became heavily involved in national politics, founding the Komeitō (Clean Government) political party in 1962, which successfully mobilized the large membership base to support candidates. Its initial platform opposed corruption and nuclear weapons, generally supporting Socialist Party positions. In 1971, the religion and the political party legally separated, but they continue to be closely associated. Over time Komeitō has moved rightward, toward social conservatism, and has been part of ruling coalitions with the LDP.
Literature and Film of the 1940s–1950s
After the war, under occupation censorship, many writers turned to expressing pacifist themes in their work; some of their novels were adapted into feature films. Michio Takeyama’s 1946 novel Harp of Burma (Biruma no tategoto) was adapted twice by director Ichikawa Kon, in black-and-white in 1956 and in color in 1985. The novel and film depict the plight of a platoon of Japanese soldiers in Burma who surrender to the British when they learn the war has ended. Mizushima, the group’s harp player, is selected to deliver the news to a group of soldiers holed up in a cave in the mountains, but they violently reject his pleas to accept defeat. When the cave is attacked, a local monk aids Mizushima. Wishing to return to his men, Mizushima steals the robes of his rescuer and disguises himself as a monk, shaving his head. On his journey, he encounters scores of Japanese corpses and resolves to remain in Burma and devote his life to burying the dead and studying Buddhism. His platoon mates suspect that their harp player has abandoned them. They train a parrot to repeat the phrase “Mizushima, let’s go back to Japan together,” asking a village woman to deliver the bird to a local monk they believe is their comrade in disguise. She returns with another parrot that replies, “No, I cannot go back,” and a letter explaining Mizushima’s new mission of peace.
Ichikawa also adapted Ōoka Shōhei’s 1951 novel Fires on the Plain in the film Nobi (1959), a brutal depiction of a desperate soldier in the Philippine jungles. The protagonist, Private Tamura, has tuberculosis and is abandoned by his unit as a useless burden. He sets out on his own, stealing and killing a young Filipina girl to survive, and eventually joins a group of starving soldiers heading toward an evacuation point while trying to evade the enemy. Tamura encounters two men from his unit who claim to be surviving on “monkey meat,” but he soon discovers that they have resorted to cannibalism. The film ends ambiguously, with Tamura collapsing as he walks toward fires on a distant plain, which he believes signal the evacuation site that can return him to “normal life.” The bleak, grisly account of the horrors committed by individuals in the name of survival provides a disturbing, unforgettable antiwar message.
Atomic literature (genbaku bungaku), written both by survivors (hibakusha) and nonsurvivors of the bombs, is another postwar genre. Survivors’ works include testimonies, poetry, and fiction. Poet Hara Tamiki’s memoir Summer Flowers (Natsu no hana), written days after the bombing of Hiroshima, opens with the unvarnished claim “I was saved because I was in the toilet.” The most significant writer among survivors is Ōta Yōko, who penned a quartet of angry novels about the Hiroshima bombing. The first, City of Corpses (Shikabane no machi), was completed by autumn 1945 but censored by SCAP and published three years later, with many portions deleted.
It is nonsurvivors, however, who have authored the best-known works of atomic literature. Ibuse Masuji wrote the most critically acclaimed work of fiction, Black Rain (Kuroi ame). This 1966 novel recounts the experience of a family of three survivors, weaving together their journal entries in a story about how the niece of a rural couple is unable to arrange a marriage because she has been exposed to radioactive black rain; the families of potential husbands fear its effects. Director Imamura Shōhei’s 1989 film adaption won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and several other awards from the Japanese academy. Nobel Prize–winning novelist Ōe Kenzaburō’s book of essays and simple line drawings, Hiroshima Notes (Hiroshima nōto, 1965), explores the humanity and heroism among survivors, such as medical personnel who labored to save others despite suffering from radiation sickness themselves, and individuals who publicly embraced their victimhood for the cause of antinuclear activism. The work most widely read by international audiences is Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), originally a manga comic (1973–85) but later published as a book that has sold over 6.5 million copies in a dozen languages and was adapted into a 1983 animated film. The autobiographical story opens in Hiroshima during the final months of the war, as six-year-old Gen’s family is struggling to survive. After the bombing, Gen witnesses horrifying scenes of death and disfigurement, but the overall message of the work is one of hope. Barefoot Gen expresses a strong pacifist perspective through negative portrayals of both Japanese wartime militarism and depraved activities by occupation forces.
Another popular film inspired by antinuclear sentiment is Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (1954), the first film about the monster better known as Godzilla. The opening scene depicts a fishing boat destroyed by an ancient creature awoken by hydrogen bomb testing, reflecting an actual incident. In March 1954, the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese tuna boat, was exposed to nuclear fallout from a U.S. thermonuclear device tested in Bikini Atoll, near the Marshall Islands. Its twenty-three crew members were afflicted with acute radiation poisoning, and several died. The United States tried to cover up the incident, but the tragedy gave rise to fierce grassroots antinuclear protest—with more than thirty million Japanese signing petitions opposing nuclear testing—and to the establishment of the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyō). In the movie, Gojira—whose name combines the words for gorilla and whale (kujira)—is a metaphor for the terror and destruction of the atomic bomb. Human attempts to stop Gojira are futile; he breaks through a towering electrified fence erected by the Self-Defense Forces and rampages across Tokyo. Scenes depicting the urban destruction wrought by the beast closely resemble photographs of the atomic-bomb aftermath. The first Godzilla movie was intended as a dark, somber reflection on war and the dangers of atomic weapons. It was heavily edited and reworked for American release as Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956), which diluted the antinuclear and antiwar messages. In subsequent films, the monster, rather than the message, took center stage, battling other creatures like Mothra, Rodan, and the three-headed Ghidorah in a series of kitschy, low-budget features. Over thirty Japanese and U.S. feature films have starred Godzilla, including Shin Godzilla (Godzilla Resurgence), Japan’s highest-grossing live-action film in 2016.
Although he began making feature films in the 1930s, director Kurosawa Akira gained international prominence for Rashōmon, which won the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and opened foreign markets to Japanese movies for the first time. Kurosawa released a film each year through the 1950s and early ’60s, including such classics as Seven Samurai (1954) and Yōjimbō (1961), and continued to create internationally acclaimed films over the following decades, earning a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1990. Several of Kurosawa’s early postwar films, including No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), and To Live (1952), were produced under SCAP censorship but nevertheless captured the ethos of their time. No Regrets provides a critique of wartime political oppression. Its protagonist, Yukie, is a young woman whose father, a college professor, is forced to resign in the 1930s for his antifascist views. She falls in love with one of his radical students, Noge, who is imprisoned and subjected to tenkō conversion by the Special Police. After Noge’s death, Yukie travels to his village, where his parents are being persecuted because of their son’s reputation as a traitor. After the war, Yukie’s father is reinstated and Noge is posthumously honored for his antiwar activism. Drunken Angel was Kurosawa’s first collaboration with the dynamic Mifune Toshirō (1920–97), who portrays a young yakuza gangster with tuberculosis being treated by an older, alcoholic doctor with a feisty temper. SCAP censors prohibited films from engaging in social criticism, but Kurosawa slipped in several references to occupation-era conditions, including damning depictions of panpan girls and the black market. In Stray Dog, Mifune plays Murakami, a rookie detective who loses his handgun to a pickpocket. The young thief uses the pistol to commit robbery and murder. A well-known sequence employs documentary footage of war-ravaged neighborhoods to follow the detective, disguised as a destitute war veteran, as he searches for the criminal in the backstreets of Tokyo. To Live centers on Watanabe (Shimura Takashi), a middle-aged bureaucrat in a tedious job who learns he has terminal stomach cancer and will die within a year. Watanabe reacts by indulging in clubs and nightlife but soon realizes that such distractions are ultimately unfulfilling. After meeting a young woman exhilarated by her new job making toys, he decides to dedicate his remaining life to a single cause: getting the slow, ineffective bureaucracy to build a children’s playground. In summary, Kurosawa’s occupation-era films realistically convey both the pain and social dislocation experienced by ordinary Japanese and the sense of hope and opportunity under the promise of a new era.
FIGURE 65. Movie poster for Honda Ishirō’s Gojira. © 1954 Toho Company. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Literature that expressed feelings of humiliation and helplessness during the occupation, often using dark humor—by writers such as Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006), Nosaka Akiyuki (1930–2015), and Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935)—could be published only after censorship ended. Kojima’s 1948 short story “On the Train” was acceptable to SCAP, as it did not comment directly on the American presence. In this story, a teacher who lost everything during the war rides the train back from the countryside, where he had obtained some black-market rice, but is robbed by another traveler who pretends to be his friend. The tale demonstrates the selfish, dog-eat-dog world of the occupation, shattering wartime illusions of Japanese unity under propagandistic slogans like “One Hundred Million Souls Working Together.” By contrast, Kojima’s story “The American School” (1954) could more openly point out the economic and social disparities between Americans and Japanese during the occupation. The plot revolves around three main characters, all Japanese teachers of English, who have been ordered to visit a school for American children run by occupation personnel, requiring a long, arduous walk to the facility. The protagonist, Isa, feels inadequate in the language and wants to avoid having to speak with Americans, toward whom he feels both resentment and fear. His nemesis, Yamada, is a nationalistic bully and sycophant who wants to curry favor with the Americans by giving lessons in English to demonstrate his proficiency. The only female in the group, Michiko, speaks the best English and receives gifts and catcalls from soldiers passing by in jeeps. The satirical story reveals mutual cultural misunderstandings and the contrast between the hardships faced by the Japanese and the relative luxuries enjoyed by their overlords.
FIGURE 66. Movie poster for Kurosawa Akira’s Drunken Angel. © 1948 Toho Company. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Ōe’s short story “Sheep” (1958) viscerally addresses the indignities imposed by occupation forces, compounded by the actions of other Japanese. The narrator is a young man who boards a crowded bus, also being ridden by drunken American soldiers and their boozy, disheveled Japanese female companion. She flirts with the narrator and begins to insult the occupiers in Japanese. The soldiers retaliate by forcing the narrator to drop his trousers and bend over, exposing his butt to the biting cold, and proceed to make other passengers and the driver assume the degrading pose while they chant “Sheep Killer! Sheep Killer! Bang! Bang!” over and over again. After growing tired of their game, the soldiers depart with the girl, and their victims try to regain their composure. But the unmolested passengers, led by a teacher, gather around them, expressing rage and disgust, urging the victims to report the incident to the police to “teach those bastards a lesson.” The narrator comments: “Surrounding us like dogs out for the kill in a rabbit hunt, the passengers talked among themselves in loud angry voices. We sheep looked down meekly, sunk in our seats and suffered in silence.”4 As the unmolested continue to clamor for action, one sheep rises and punches the teacher in the face, draining the urgency of the spectators. The teacher returns to his seat but later follows the narrator off the bus, dragging him to a nearby police box to report the incident, where the young man refuses to talk. The teacher recounts the humiliating episode to the police, who are reluctant to get involved in matters regarding American soldiers. When the narrator runs off without revealing his identity, the teacher chases him. The story ends as the teacher threatens: “Don’t worry—I’ll find out who you are. . . . And I’ll heap shame on both you and the soldiers so that you’ll want to die. . . . You’ll never get away from me.”5
Critics have read “Sheep” as an allegory for atomic-bomb victims who wish to forget their horrific experiences but are unable to do so because of pressure by antinuclear activists. The story also illustrates the psychological scars of the occupation experienced by writers who were then teenage boys, such as Ōe and Nosaka, author of the short stories “Grave of the Fireflies,” about a brother and sister who succumb to starvation during the war, and “American Hijiki,” in which the protagonist, a successful TV producer in the 1960s, must face and relive the sense of inferiority and servility he felt as an adolescent during the occupation when he pimped Japanese girls to soldiers.
1950S–1970S CULTURE
Conditions improved as the occupation ended and policymakers turned their focus to economic growth, making rapid strides. The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 acted as a symbolic event demonstrating Japan’s recovery from defeat and reentry onto the world stage. Olympic preparations cost over a billion yen and included major improvements to highway infrastructure; development of the bullet train (shinkansen) and new subway lines; installation of new systems for water supply and waste disposal, necessary for Tokyo to appear modern and hygienic; and construction of Haneda Airport and state-of-the-art broadcast facilities.
National symbols associated with imperialism, war, and defeat could be erased or transformed via association with the Olympic games, which embodied international peace and friendship. The main stadium was constructed in Yoyogi Park, on the site of a U.S. military housing project; removal of the facilities allowed Japan to expunge painful reminders of the occupation. Emperor Hirohito gave the opening address, followed by a release of doves, thus demonstrating his new postwar role as a symbol of peace. The controversial national flag (hinomaru) flew alongside those of other nations as a patriotic symbol of Japanese identity. At the opening ceremony, seventy-five thousand spectators filled the national stadium as jets of the Self-Defense Forces inscribed the five Olympic rings in the sky and seven thousand participants from nearly ninety nations marched onto the field. The crowd stood in reverential silence as Sakai Yoshinori, the “Atom Boy”—a nineteen-year-old college student born in a Hiroshima suburb on the day the atomic bomb was dropped—ran into the stadium bearing the Olympic torch. Who could better represent how Japan had successfully overcome its wartime defeat? The opening ceremony was broadcast live across the globe for the first time in Olympic history. Japanese citizens followed the games closely on TV, enthusiastically cheering on their nation’s athletes, who won sixteen gold medals. The dramatic final match in women’s volleyball, won by Japan against the Soviet Union, was watched live by 95 percent of the populace.
Six years later, Japan further demonstrated its growing affluence by hosting Expo ’70 in Osaka, the first world’s fair ever held in Asia. The theme of the Expo was “Progress and Harmony of Mankind”; exhibits focused on advances in science and technology and forecasts for the future. Site development and construction of a monorail and the Japan Pavilion cost a phenomenal $2 billion. Major manufacturers such as Mitsui, Toshiba, and Mazda invested additional millions for their own pavilions. The Expo attracted over sixty million visitors, over 95 percent of whom were Japanese. They came from every corner of the islands to witness the “magnificent months-long celebration of the Japanese industrial miracle” with their own eyes.6 Expo ’70 elevated the international profiles of several Japanese architects and artists. Architects Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) and Isozaki Arata (b. 1931), who designed the master plan and festival plaza, became two of the most celebrated and award-winning architects of the twentieth century. The Tower of the Sun, an anthropomorphic sculpture standing 229 feet tall by avant-garde artist Okamoto Tarō (1911–96; see below), became the symbol of the Expo.
Material Culture
The rise in the standard of living enabled by the economic growth of the 1960s gave rise to the widely accepted notion that Japan was a homogeneous, middle-class society. Surveys routinely indicated that 90 percent of the Japanese considered themselves members of the middle class. A relatively narrow income gap, with those in the top 20 percent earning under three times what the bottom 20 percent earned, accounts for this perception. High-speed economic growth accelerated the pace of urbanization as more people left rural lives as farmers, miners, and fishermen to take manufacturing or management jobs in and around urban centers. Thirty-eight percent of the population lived in cities in 1950; this percentage had almost doubled by 1972, reaching 72 percent. Nearly half the population was squeezed into just 6 percent of the country’s total land area: the Kobe-Osaka-Kyoto triangle was home to more than fifteen million, while thirty-nine million were jammed into the Tokyo metropolitan area. Within those huge urban centers, the bleakness of the immediate postwar years soon gave way to a “bright life” of consumerism. From the late 1950s onward, Japan’s economic boom translated into better housing and food and more fashionable clothing. With new affluence, such basic expenditures required a lower percentage of household income, meaning that more discretionary funds remained for recreational activities, travel, and education.
The population’s concentration in a few urban centers resulted in serious housing problems, especially in Tokyo, where buying a single-family house remained out of reach for most families. In the mid-1950s, public housing authorities began constructing concrete apartment complexes (danchi) in urban suburbs. They contained modern conveniences like flush toilets, stainless steel sinks, and separate bedrooms for parents and children. The demand for the units was so enormous that people entered lotteries for the chance to move in; the odds of winning a lottery in 1957 for a danchi apartment in Chiba, a far suburb of Tokyo, were 25,000 to 1. Those determined to own single-family homes moved farther and farther away from the city and took out mortgage loans averaging ten times their annual income. Crowded commutes lasting up to two hours each way were often the breadwinner’s cost of providing his family the luxury of a home.
Homes were filled with new electrical goods. Even the poorest bought radios, irons, and toasters. By 1960, most families had also purchased vacuum cleaners and electric fans, along with three appliances nicknamed the “three sacred treasures”—a refrigerator, washing machine, and black-and-white TV. They soon swapped the last of these for color models as Japan introduced color broadcasting. During the ’70s, the sacred treasures evolved into a car, air conditioning, and color TV. Other household must-haves revealed the particular tastes of the domestic market, including automatic rice-cookers, introduced by Toshiba in 1955, and electrically heated low tables (kotatsu) to sit at during winter.
Men adopted Western-style suits as their daily work uniform during the prewar years, but the majority of women maintained traditional kimono dress throughout the war. In the postwar era, however, nearly all women adopted Western-style dress, made quickly and economically at home, and more comfortable and easier to launder than kimonos. Domestic textile industries began to recover in 1949 and cloth rationing ended in 1951, leading to a boom in Western dressmaking. In Tokyo the number of dress shops grew from around thirteen hundred in 1943 to fifteen thousand by 1955. They needed seamstresses, so dressmaking schools proliferated, teaching helpful skills to would-be brides, housewives, and those seeking paid work. Almost all households bought sewing machines. During the ’50s, housewives devoted nearly three hours daily to home sewing projects. Many also engaged in home-based sewing piecework as a source of extra income that did not jeopardize their identities as full-time housewives.
Food consumption changed in significant ways. Consumption of rice, which had provided over 70 percent of daily calories for most people in the 1930s, declined significantly as eating patterns diversified, incorporating more meats, dairy, breads, and processed foods. Daily average caloric intake doubled between 1946 and the late ’80s. Many households swapped rice for toast at breakfast and for sandwiches at lunch, but the formula “white rice plus three side dishes” remained the norm for most family dinners. Those side dishes, however, were increasingly available in processed or pre-prepared forms, including varieties of pickles, instant miso soups, and canned or frozen foods. Older generations often continued to consume a diet heavy on rice, vegetables, and fish, while younger people ate fewer carbohydrates and more protein. As a result, adolescents in 1989 were four inches taller than their grandparents, on average.
Momofuku Ando (1910–2007), a Taiwanese who remained in Japan following the war, invented instant ramen noodles in 1958. During postwar food shortages, authorities encouraged the populace to eat bread made from U.S. surplus wheat, but Ando believed that Japanese would favor wheat as noodles, a more familiar food. He aimed for a processed ramen product that was tasty, inexpensive, and easy to prepare, with a long shelf life. It took years of experimentation before Ando perfected a method of flash frying that created a wavy, dried noodle, easy to rehydrate and flavor with a packet of seasoning. His company, Nissin Foods, grew rapidly as instant ramen exploded in popularity. Exports were soon being shipped to Asian nations and the United States. Sales abroad grew further with Ando’s next major invention, Cup Noodle, which provided instant noodles in a Styrofoam cup so that a dish was no longer necessary. Today instant ramen is a cheap commodity food, manufactured globally by a handful of companies in a dizzying variety of chemically enhanced flavors appealing to local palates, from pizza to tom yum to classic masala. In 2015, nearly a hundred billion servings were eaten worldwide. Although it’s considered unhealthy for the high sodium and fat content, the poorest peoples of South and Southeast Asia often rely on instant ramen as a cheap staple food.
Another striking change in food habits was the increased frequency of dining out, especially among families. During the 1950s and ’60s, dining at restaurants was considered a luxury for most middle-class families. By the ’70s, greater discretionary income, increased leisure time, and widespread acquisition of automobiles made it possible for families to enjoy regular outings to family-oriented chain restaurants (famiresu). One of the first was the American chain Denny’s, where diners could choose from a variety of Western or Japanese favorites from large, colorful menus with pictures. Famiresu were relatively inexpensive and kid-friendly, offering children’s menus and toys, making them attractive to families. American fast-food chains also quickly gained popular followings. Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was the first, opening an outlet at Osaka’s Expo ’70, followed by a hundred others over the next two years. By 1990, there were over a thousand KFCs in cities and towns across Japan. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Ginza in 1971 and expanded even more rapidly. Both chains were among the first “glocalizers,” catering to local tastes by altering recipes or developing special products for the Japanese markets, such as McDonald’s teriyaki and “moon-viewing” (tsukimi) burgers, the latter topped with a fried egg. KFC and McDonald’s have become so naturalized in Japan that most children don’t consider them “foreign” fast foods. Another American restaurant, Shakey’s Pizza, opened in Tokyo in 1973 and became popular for its all-you-can-eat buffet (baikingu) lunch, a formula adopted by many other restaurants of different genres that remains popular today. Japanese firms developed their own competing fast-food chains, such as Lotteria and MOSBurger, both founded in 1972 and both successful in expanding throughout East Asia. MOSBurger, the second largest fast-food franchise after McDonald’s, offers the unique rice burger: a bun made of two compressed rice patties filled with traditional favorites like sautéed burdock and carrot (kinpira gobo).
Gender Norms
From the 1950s to the ’70s, the sarariman, or white-collar businessman working for a major corporation, earned iconic status as a masculine ideal, a corporate warrior who enabled Japan to regain prosperity. University-educated males aspired to this position more than any other. The sarariman identity first appeared in late Meiji, but from the late ’50s forward such white-collar jobs were more available to larger numbers of men. These careers were not easy, as the sarariman was expected to commit body and soul to the company, working overtime daily and joining his boss and colleagues for drinks at bars and hostess clubs after work. He sometimes had to accept temporary transfers to regional branch offices, often leaving his family behind in Tokyo to avoid disrupting his children’s education. Yet the payoffs for his sacrifices were high: he was assured of lifetime employment in a seniority-based system that guaranteed salary raises and promotions independent of actual performance. The sarariman spent weekends and holidays playing golf or vacationing with his family at company-owned resorts. He received large annual bonuses and a sizable chunk of money at retirement. In all, the sarariman served as a model for Japanese men because his secure, affluent lifestyle could realistically be achieved.
The typical sarariman hoped to marry a woman who embodied the earlier “good wife, wise mother” feminine ideal, but he wished to find a “love match” rather than resorting to a traditional marriage arrangement. His salary was sufficient to take care of his family’s needs, allowing his spouse to be a full-time housewife (shufu) tasked with providing a comfortable home environment and serving her family. She spent her days cleaning and doing the shopping and cooking, and was also expected to manage household expenses and pay bills, setting aside enough for savings. Since her husband was often absent, she was almost single-handedly responsible for raising the children, ideally two. The stereotypical mother earned the nickname “education mama” (kyōiku mama) by hovering over her children’s homework at night to make certain they could scale the education ladder to a respected high school and college. The life of a middle-class housewife brought women both frustration and gratification. Many regretted that their husbands spent so much time working and commuting. Yet most mass-media accounts depicted the full-time housewife as the female gender ideal, finding satisfaction through financial security and taking pride in nurturing the future of her children.
The sons and daughters of sararimen and education mamas were expected to follow in their parents’ footsteps. For boys, this meant studying hard to pass rigorous school entrance examinations, often attending cram schools (juku) in their free time. If they weren’t successful in gaining entrance to the college of their choice, they might spend a year or more after graduation as “rōnin” (masterless samurai), studying full-time for the next year’s exam. Girls usually followed a different path. Many parents considered junior college the suitable end point for girls’ higher education, since few professional careers were open to women. Junior college graduates often worked as “OLs” (office ladies) who performed clerical work or menial tasks, such as serving tea or sharpening pencils, for male colleagues. Young women who wished to enhance their bridal credentials often took lessons in polite arts like flower arranging and tea ceremony, just as they had done in the prewar period.
Mass Culture: TV and Manga
The advent of television was enormously significant in Japan, providing a new forum for national consciousness about desirable lifestyles and values and helping rebuild national pride. When the first commercial TVs were produced in 1953, they were unaffordable by the vast majority. To create a viewing audience, hundreds of TV sets were installed in outdoor public spaces where crowds congregated, such as at busy stations, on the grounds of major temples and shrines, in front of department stores, and in Ueno and Asakusa, where urbanites gathered for entertainment. In addition, many of the twenty to thirty thousand small electrical-goods stores located in urban neighborhoods featured a TV in their shop windows. As many as a million people gathered around such “street TVs” for popular broadcasts, such as baseball games and, especially, professional wrestling. Rikidōzan (1924–63), a Korean-born wrestler initially trained in sumo, became Japanese TV’s first superstar. In 1951, he debuted as a pro wrestler who specialized in defeating villainous American opponents with his signature “karate chop” move. Rikidōzan understood the need for theatricality in the farcical bouts and became a hero who symbolized an alternate world where Japanese could triumph over the all-powerful Americans.
FIGURE 67. Pro wrestler Rikidōzan. Photo in Asahi gurafu, September, 21, 1955. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
By the end of the 1950s, TVs had become more affordable and moved indoors to restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, which installed them to attract customers, and into middle-class homes. Much of the early programming was imported from the United States, including shows such as I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, and Lassie and cartoons like Popeye and The Flintstones. The live-action shows gave the Japanese a glimpse of attractive American lifestyles, including appliances and consumer goods considered standard for middle-class families. Public interest in the 1959 royal wedding further spurred demand for home TVs, as did the 1964 Olympics. Media frenzy arose over the engagement of Crown Prince Akihito and Shōda Michiko, a wealthy commoner whom the public embraced as “Mitchi.” Over two million TVs were sold in the year before the wedding, many in anticipation of its TV coverage. The marriage procession, ceremony, and other related coverage were broadcast from 6 A.M. until 10 P.M. on the day of the wedding; many viewers watched ten or more hours of the programming on their new sets. Intense interest was attributed to public excitement over the Cinderella story of the prince’s true “love match” with a modern and well-educated commoner. The marriage was thought to symbolize Japan’s transformation into a progressive, democratic society. It also helped to reforge public ties of loyalty and affection to the imperial family, badly frayed by defeat and occupation.
During the 1960s, Japanese-produced programming grew in both quantity and quality. In 1961, NHK established its still-popular morning drama format, yearlong productions of serialized novels broadcast in fifteen-minute daily segments. In 1963, it began to air year-long Sunday-night dramas (taiga dorama) based on popular novels set in premodern times, centered around a famous historical figure. Animated programs, often based on popular manga comics, targeted not only children but the whole family. Sazae-san, the world’s longest-running animated series, was first broadcast in 1969 and still consistently places among the top ten most-watched shows. The title character is a full-time housewife who lives in a suburban multigenerational household with her parents and siblings, along with her husband and young son. Episodes portray everyday life and problems at work, in school, or in the neighborhood, presenting a nostalgic, conservative vision of ideal family life, with sarariman husbands, wives devoted to family matters, and studious, polite children. Depictions of family celebrations during the New Year, cherry blossom season, summer festivals, and the beginning of spring (setsubun) instructed viewers on how to properly observe traditional holidays. Electrical-goods manufacturer Toshiba has been the main sponsor of the show since its inception, an appropriate arrangement since Sazae-san uses vacuum cleaners, rice-cookers, and other appliances in most episodes.
FIGURE 68. Photo of the imperial family, commemorating the wedding of Crown Prince Akihito and Shōda Michiko. Supplied by the Imperial Household Agency, 1959, and printed in the Sunday mainichi. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Another successful animated series that supported national values was Astro Boy (Tetsuwan atomu, 1963–66), based on a manga by the renowned Tezuka Osamu (1928–89; see below), about a boy robot built by a scientist to replace his dead son. In his battles against evil, the conscientious Astro Boy demonstrates both the power of science and the merit of more traditional values such as hard work and cooperation. Ultraman (Urutoraman, 1966–67), another science-centric series, became an international cult favorite. The story is set in the 1990s and features a benevolent alien superhero who fights off giant monsters and evil aliens that threaten the earth. Both Astro Boy and Ultraman have enjoyed numerous remakes and re-releases and spawned myriad collectible figures and other merchandise. A cartoon for young children, Anpanman (1973–2013), is about the exploits of a superhero whose head is made of a bun filled with sweet bean jam. While entertaining, the series also teaches children lessons in hygiene, etiquette, and interpersonal relations. Popular characters from the series, including the title character, his nemesis Bacteria Man (Baikinman), and his pals like White Bread Man (Shokupanman), adorn a vast array of children’s toys, clothing, and snack foods. Anpanman books have sold over fifty million copies, and there are five dedicated Anpanman museums across Japan.
FIGURE 69. Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy. Courtesy of Tezuka Productions.
Genres and styles of manga comic books multiplied rapidly in the 1950s and ’60s. Scholars debate whether manga are rooted in historical precedents—such as the Chōjūgiga illustrated scrolls (see Figure 20), Edo-period kibyōshi and woodblock prints, kamishibai, and Meiji-era comic strips—or whether they are a new genre of mass culture more influenced by trends in American youth culture such as Disney films and comic books. The two largest influences on the work of Tezuka Osamu, the “godfather” of modern Japanese manga and anime, were Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, who brought cartoon characters like Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman to life. Tezuka reportedly saw Disney’s Bambi (1942) eighty times. Like most of his mentors’ creations, Tezuka’s characters tend to have cute, rounded features and glistening, saucer-shaped eyes. Tezuka created more than seven hundred volumes of manga and over five hundred episodes of anime. His first best-selling manga was 1947’s New Treasure Island (Shin takarajima), which used exciting sound effects and cinematic techniques like close-ups, fade-outs, and montage to make the story flow across the pages. He followed up with Kimba the White Lion (Janguru taitei, 1950)—the purported model for Disney’s The Lion King—which was adapted into an animated series in 1965. The iconic Astro Boy emerged first as a manga (1952–68); its associated animated series began in 1963. Tezuka also authored two epic manga projects: the fourteen-volume Buddha (Budda, 1972–83), a novelized account of the life of the historical Buddha Gautama; and Phoenix (Hi no tori, 1967–88), a twelve-volume work with each book set in a different era, switching back and forth between historical times and the distant future. Each volume involves a quest for immortality, which characters seek by pursuing the titular bird of fire with underlying moralistic messages about karma and reincarnation. Volume 1 takes place in the prehistoric era of Himiko, Queen of Yamatai, while the second volume leaps to the year 3404, when a young man and his alien girlfriend face nuclear war. Later volumes take place during the Nara period and the twelfth-century Genpei War between the Taira and Minamoto. Tezuka considered Phoenix his life’s work, but it was left unfinished when he died in 1989.
Comic books of the ’50s and ’60s tended to target preteen boys and girls. They were (and are) commonly published in thick magazines on low-grade paper, containing up to fifteen different story lines. Some stories are drawn in cute, rounded styles, but others use a more realistic style known as gekiga (dramatic picture). Top magazine titles sell well over a million copies per issue. Boys’ comics (shōnen manga) tend to focus on adventure, samurai, science fiction, gangsters, or sports. Sports comics teach boys about cooperation and teamwork and praise masculine traits like courage, perseverance, and remaining tough and cool in the face of adversity. Star of the Giants (Kyojin no hoshi, 1966–71) depicted actual baseball stars and Japan’s favorite team, the Tokyo Giants, in a story about a young pitcher’s strenuous climb to the top of the game. The boxing comic Tomorrow’s Joe (Ashita no Joe, 1968–73) was one of the most popular sports comics of all time, following Joe’s triumphant victories and heartbreaking defeats in the ring. The controversial finale, in which Joe dies during a championship bout, became a hot topic of discussion in the wider mass media.
Girls’ comics (shōjo manga) also spanned genres like science fiction, historical dramas, and sports but were more typically romance oriented. Tezuka Osamu’s Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi, 1953–56) was pioneering among girls’ comics in the bold, martial character of its heroine, Princess Sapphire, who pretends to be a male prince to protect her kingdom and who masquerades as the crime-fighting Phantom of Night. As women manga artists came of age, girls’ comics diversified and became more sophisticated. Chikako Urano’s Attack no. 1 (Atakku no. 1, 1968–70) capitalized on Olympic fervor over women’s volleyball, following the travails of a gifted young player who must negotiate rivalries among her teammates. Attack no. 1 was adapted into the first TV anime about female sports and was subsequently made into four anime feature films and a live-action drama. It inspired numerous other manga and anime on girls in other sports, such as tennis and judo.
Manga employ certain conventions in depicting sound and style. Sound effects are indicated with onomatopoeic words boldly written across the drawn panel. For example, the word guooo represents a roar, like that of a fire; agu agu accompanies someone munching enthusiastically on food; and shiiin indicates silence or motionlessness. Most girls’ comics use standard visual conventions, depicting their female characters as slim, long-legged beauties. Their faces are often interchangeable, characterized by pert noses, sharp chins, and especially huge eyes, often with twinkling stars inside. To distinguish between them, characters’ fashions and hairstyles are often drawn with painstaking precision.
Today, people of all ages and backgrounds commonly read manga, though sales have declined somewhat from their peak in the ’80s. Frederik Schodt reports that over a billion comics were published in 1984, representing about ten for every man, woman, and child in Japan.7 New categories have evolved for different target audiences, including young men’s comics (seinen manga), often featuring violence, pornography, or psychological distress; and ladies’ comics (josei manga) that generally center on interpersonal relationships, especially among beautiful gay men, but that sometimes have dark aspects, portraying rape and violence against women.
FIGURE 70. Contemporary example of a female manga character, illustrating typical features: “Niabot, with the reason in mind, that prudery shall not take over the world.” Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Visual and Performing Arts
As individuals and families became more affluent, they spent their increased discretionary income on recreational and leisure activities. Many in the emerging middle masses took lessons in pursuit of self-improvement, studying English conversation, music, or some form of traditional art. The numbers engaged in traditional cultural activities reached such unprecedented levels from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s that these years are sometimes referred to as Shōwa Genroku, in reference to the golden age of Edo culture when urban commoners increasingly participated in the arts. Women streamed in the largest numbers to ikebana, but traditional dance (Nihon buyō), musical instruments such as the shamisen and the koto (a thirteen-stringed zither), and tea ceremony were also very popular. During ikebana’s peak in the mid-1960s, there were over three thousand schools in Japan; the three largest had over a million students each. Men undertook different arts, such as bonsai—the art of tree miniaturization—and martial arts. Judo became especially popular after it was declared an official Olympic sport in 1964. With the invention of the karaoke machine in 1971, men also turned to singing lessons to better impress their bosses and colleagues in after-work outings. Both sexes studied calligraphy and poetry, particularly the composition of haiku.
The re-elevation of traditional culture in the postwar era was part of a conservative national “rebranding” strategy, presenting Japan as a peaceful country of culture (bunka kokka) and no longer an aggressive military power. Official policies and projects were launched on many fronts to support this image, including the 1948 declaration of November 3 as National Culture Day (Bunka no hi), the inauguration of prefectural Culture Festivals (Bunkasai), and the 1950 law for protection of “Living National Treasures”—that is, artists, performers, and craftspeople who preserved traditional techniques. Promotion and support of premodern culture, however, while deemed exotic and desirable by Western audiences, contrasted sharply with the contemporary daily reality of a rapidly expanding urban middle class living increasingly Americanized lifestyles.
Many modern artists attempted to merge traditional arts with modernist forms associated with artists such as Picasso, Klee, and Duchamps in attempts to make their work more relevant in the international art world. Experimental calligraphy by Hasegawa Saburō and Morita Shiryū fused script with abstract painting, giving their works recognizable Japanese qualities through the use of space and traditional materials. Yagi Kazuo and Tsuji Shindō injected the boldness and conceptuality of abstract art into ceramic pieces made using traditional techniques. Teshigahara Sōfu promoted an avant-garde approach to ikebana, incorporating non-plant materials and using unconventional objects as containers.
Other contemporary artists of the era, however, preferred to create works that expressed more originality or political and social critique. Artists such as Okamoto Tarō, Kusama Yayoi, and Yokō Tadanori; filmmakers Terayama Shūji and Ōshima Nagisa; photographers Hosoe Eikō and Tōmatsu Shōmei; music improvisation troupe Group Ongaku; and dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Ōno Kazuo created works that engaged with global trends while offering criticism of the Japanese condition, seen as subject to rampant capitalism and to national trauma due to overwhelming American influence in culture and politics.
In the early 1950s, painters such as Yamashita Kikuji (1890–1973) drew upon Russian Social Realism in “Reportage” murals that depicted the effects of social injustice and American imperialism, from rural poverty and urban blight to the scars of atomic victims and the tawdriness of towns near U.S. military bases. Okamato Tarō provided an influential voice calling on young artists to engage in works that communicated Japanese realities beyond the horrors and helplessness of Social Realists and beyond traditional conceptions of beauty that supported Orientalist conceptions of Japan. His surrealistic sculptures and paintings—such as The Law of the Jungle (1950), depicting fantastic creatures fleeing from a zipper-mouthed monster—were intentionally confrontational and grotesque.
In the 1950s and ’60s, radical art collectives such as Gutai, Hi-Red Center, and Neo-Dada engaged in collaborative experiments that aimed to express original vision through original means, as exemplified in Gutai founder Yoshihara Jirō’s (1905–72) famous call, “Do what no one has done before!”8 These groups mounted “Happenings,” ephemeral installations that blurred the lines between art and everyday life by incorporating junk and utilitarian objects, seeking to expand the definitions of art in postwar Japan. For instance, Hi-Red Center’s 1000 Meter String (1963) consisted of an unremarkable piece of twine that led from the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum through Ueno Park, ending at the Ueno train station. Other works conveyed that art was created in the interplay between an artist’s bodily actions and mundane materials. Gutai members used photography to capture works created while writhing in piles of mud and jumping through large screens of paper. The “boxing paintings” of Neo-Dada’s Shinohara Ushio (b. 1932) were made by randomly punching long canvases with boxing gloves dipped in ink or paint.
Obsession with sex, madness, and monstrousness among many avant-garde artists recalled prewar tastes for “erotic-grotesque nonsense” and aimed to express primal urges suppressed in conservative mainstream society. Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–86) was one originator of the butoh dance form, known for its torturous movements, exaggerated facial expressions, and open sexuality, which he distilled from the misery and fertility associated with his agrarian, poverty-stricken boyhood. Hijikata intended butoh to transcend both Western contemporary and stagnant traditional dance. His dark, subversive works sought to assert a Japanese artistic modernity rooted in indigenous conditions and aesthetics. Graphic artist Yokō Tadanori (b. 1936) created posters for Hijikata and many other avant-garde performances and exhibitions in the 1960s. Yokō’s iconic collages combined disparate images, such as Edo-period erotic shunga, nostalgic advertisements, nationalist symbols, and American icons, in decadent, psychedelic works that suggested the instability and banality of Japanese society. Nude and orgiastic happenings by Kusama Yayoi (b. 1929), along with her assemblages of polka-dotted phalli, expressed feminist outrage against the oppressive Japanese patriarchy. Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kusama made works characterized by minimalistic repetitions, patterns, and accumulations to express her psychological states.
FIGURE 71. Yokō Tadanori, Having Reached a Climax at the Age of 29, I Was Dead, silkscreen, 1965, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: Art Resource.
Today’s contemporary art world highly esteems the groundbreaking work of such Japanese artists. Gutai and Kusama Yayoi have been the solo subjects of recent, blockbuster exhibitions in New York and Washington, D.C. Foreign spectators flock to these shows for their playful qualities and visual shock appeal; few deeply consider the social and emotional turmoil of the 1950s and ’60s that inspired the works.
In summary, Japan’s painful interlude of occupation by a foreign power was followed by an era of consumerist plenty, with middle-class lifestyles influenced by American norms. From the 1950s to the ’70s, civil liberties granted under the postwar constitution and a sense of optimism inspired the development and growth of a variety of new religions and social movements. The variety and quantity of forms of entertainment and culture proliferated and became more accessible. At the same time, conservative forces continued to dictate ideal gender norms and continued to control politics and the economy. Their all-out prioritization of economic growth resulted in environmental damage and unrestrained industrial development that spurred popular opposition. Public resentment and violent protests also arose over Japan’s continued subordination to the United States, represented by the ANPO treaties. The majority of the middle-class masses, however, contented themselves with their improved standards of living, supported through dedication to work and family.
FURTHER READING
Avenell, Simon A. Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Barshay, Andrew E. The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Bardsley, Jan. Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Francks, Penelope. The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative History of Modern Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Gordon, Andrew. The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Kushner, Barak. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.
Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Watt, Lori. When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
ANPO: Art X War. 2010. Documentary film directed by Linda Hoaglund. Chronicles public protest and artists’ reactions related to ANPO.
Gate of Flesh. 1964. Feature film directed by Seijun Suzuki. Drama about a band of panpan girl prostitutes living in postwar ruins.
Giants and Toys. 1958. Feature film directed by Masumura Yasuzō. Satire about ruthless corporate competition between three manufacturers of caramels.
Minamata: The Victims and Their World. 1971. Documentary film directed by Tsuchimoto Noriaki. Award-winning work on Minamata mercury poisoning.
Tokyo Olympiad. 1965. Documentary film directed by Ichikawa Kon. Highly regarded work on the 1964 Olympics.
Tokyo Story. 1955. Feature film directed by Ozu Yasujirō. Family drama about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children. Often cited as one of the best films ever made.
Yakuza Papers: Battles without Honor or Humanity. 1973. Feature films directed by Fukasaku Kinji. Series of gritty films based on the memoirs of a member of the yakuza.