© Columbia University Press
Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law
February, 2009
Cloth, 304 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14662-3
$55.00
/ £38.00
"This study will prove a worthy and ultimately rewarding challenge for motivated readers of cultural history . . . Recommended." — Choice
"Ann Sherif introduces what may well become a new dominant paradigm. What has been studied for the last forty years under the rubric 'postwar Japanese culture' must now be rethought as 'Cold War culture.' The framework she proposes is utterly persuasive and forces us to see Japanese culture of the 1940s and 1950s as something transcending national boundaries, as something arising out of a historical situation that was global in scope. Timely and innovative, Japan's Cold War deserves to reach a wide audience." — Michael Bourdaghs, professor in modern Japanese literature, University of Chicago
"Going on sixty-three years and counting, there is still no convincing end to Japan's 'postwar.' This state of historical and political shapelessness is sharply illuminated in Ann Sherif's book, where she uses the rubric of the Cold War to examine Japanese cultural production between 1945 and 1960. What a difference this decision makes—loosening the exclusiveness of the U.S.-Japan embrace, showing it to be an ideologically desired end rather than an ordained reality; exposing the multifaceted uses of a pacifist exceptionalism; and, most refreshingly, considering the role of the left in making the 'high Cold War' era a time for intense, creative contestation over the character of Japanese society." — Norma Field, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in Japanese Studies, University of Chicago
"Japan's war with the United States and its ensuing peace permitted the nation to slide into the temporal tense of a permanent postwar, with a social order that peddled visions of prosperity, well-being, consensus, and the surety and stability of a timeless cultural identity. If this narrative sanctioned Japan's withdrawal from its world, as Ann Sherif's superbly executed book proposes, it also, as she correctly recounts, failed to prevent the historical reality of the contemporary Cold War from seeping into the concerns, texts, artifacts, and movies of artists and writers, whose witness was both a reminder of and a reproach to the country's complicity in its struggle to scratch the event from popular consciousness." — Harry Harootunian, professor of history and East Asian studies, New York University