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Sharalyn Orbaugh's detailed exploration of discursive and visual first responses to the experience of military occupation is an impressive scholarly achievement. Her objective is to chart how the Allied occupation was interpreted and represented contemporaneously, a task made all the more important by the distorted and predictably comforting ways in which the occupation is often remembered today. She is highly successful in demonstrating how the occupation shaped postwar Japanese "racial, national, and linguistic identity" (p. 3), a project that is timely for terrible reasons. While there are qualitative differences between the occupations of Japan and Iraq, the arrogance and aggressions of the U.S. empire, which Orbaugh rightly notes have been "expunged almost completely from North American discussions of World War II" (p. 6), loom more menacingly now than ever. Thus, her book should be of interest not only to those invested in the study of mid-twentieth-century Japanese literature and history, but also to anyone concerned about U.S. empire or interested in the development of insurgent or other forms of first-response cultural production in contemporary Iraq. Likewise, her discussions of how images of Japanese military atrocities were kept from the Japanese public, which instead saw "footage of the Chinese expressing gratitude to Japanese soldiers and colonists" (p. 180), will be of great interest to anyone studying the politics of information in contemporary U.S. society (pp. 242-43).
Orbaugh's archival work and analyses will be invaluable in the classroom, not only for graduate-level seminars but for undergraduate courses as well. Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation is also a perfect choice for National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) workshops for K-12 educators in that many chapters include accessible and cogent ways of engaging primary source material that could be adapted for advanced high school courses and warrant inclusion in the NCTA's listings of curriculum materials. One example is "The Atomic Body" in chapter 5,...