DEMOCRACY IN OCCUPIED JAPAN: The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society

DEMOCRACY IN OCCUPIED JAPAN: The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society. Edited by Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. xiv, 245 pp. US$135, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-41589-7.

Many studies of the US Occupation of Japan, 1945-52, focus exclusively on major political and economic reforms in this brief period and their influence on Japan's development as a democratic-pacifist state and a dynamic economy in the postwar period. The implication often is that postwar Japan is a product of American Occupation reforms.

This book offers a different approach, examining the Occupation from a variety of different perspectives. Two things stand out in this study. First, the several authors discuss reforms in areas of Japanese society seldom mentioned by other scholars. They describe and analyze, for example, food policy (Fuchs); managing Japanese fisheries in international waters (Guthrie-Shimizu); labour legislation and gender equality (Toyoda); crime and narcotics, a topic...