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The Twenty-Year Occupation: Cultural Reimagination And The American Occupation Of Japan, Phillip Jones

Masters Theses

In the wake of the violence and racial animosity of World War II, the United States carried out an ideologically ambitious occupation of Japan, with the stated purposes of demilitarizing their former enemy and facilitating Japan's reintroduction to the world as an appropriately reformed nation. Between 1945-1952, Japan and the United States engaged in complex and often contradictory processes of cultural reimagination, through which they reimagined the recent past, each other, and their roles in the world. I contend that the Occupation of Japan can only be appropriately understood through these processes, placed within the appropriate historical context. These processes …