Eleanor Hadley was a woman ahead of her time. While working on a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, she was recruited by the U.S. government for her knowledge of Japanese zaibatsu (business combines) and subsequently became one of MacArthur's key advisors during the Occupation. After completing her doctorate, she prepared for a career in Washington until she learned she was being blacklisted. Seventeen years passed before Hadley's name was cleared; she returned to government service in 1967 and began a distinguished career as a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Tariff Commission and the General Accounting Office. Widely known (and feared) by Japanese businessmen and government leaders as "the trust-busting beauty," Hadley published Antitrust in Japan, a seminal work on the impact of postwar deconcentration measures, in 1970. She received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government in 1986. Hadley's personal story provides a colorful backdrop to her substantive discussions of early postwar policies, which were created to provide Japan with a more efficient and competitive economy. As someone closely involved in formulating U.S. economic policy toward Japan for nearly half a century, Eleanor Hadley brings a unique perspective--as well as a down-to-earth sense of humor--to the continuing challenge of communicating across the Pacific.

Concentrating on the rivalry between the formal and informal empires of Great Britain, Japan and the United States of America, this book examines how regional relations were negotiated in Asia and the Pacific during the interwar years. A range of international organizations including the League of Nations and the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as internationally minded intellectuals in various countries, intersected with each other, forming a type of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific. This system transformed itself as post-war decolonization accelerated and the United States entered as a major power in the region. This was further reinforced by big foundations, including Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford. This book sheds light on the circumstances leading to the collapse of formal empires in the Asia-Pacific alongside hitherto unknown aspects of the region’s transnational history. A valuable resource for students and scholars of the twentieth century history of the Asia-Pacific region, and of twentieth century internationalism

Divisions of Labor positions the ideological and organizational evolution of the Japanese labor movement within the larger historical currents that shaped and organized labor globally in the twentieth century. Interspersing detailed narratives of Japanese labor history with analyses of parallel developments in Western European and international labor movements, Lonny Carlile shows how world views and labor movement strategies were shared across national boundaries and shaped in similar ways in the industrialized West and East. Beyond this, he highlights how in both Western Europe and Japan issues that had divided labor since the 1920s were central to the Cold War, which kept labor movements at odds with themselves internally in systematically similar ways. His book suggests that, to the extent that the historical courses of labor movements diverged, this was as much a uh_product of differences in geopolitical location as any inherent cultural or nationally specific ideological tendency. The volume’s approach brings to the fore an important new dimension to our existing understanding of post–World War II Japanese labor and political history by outlining the connection between the politics of Japanese labor and the structure and dynamics of global politics. In addition, by drawing out these parallels and similarities, it provides thought-provoking insights into twentieth-century labor movements in general. Divisions of Labor will be of interest not only to students and specialists of Japan and East Asia, but also to readers with a more general interest in labor history and politics, diplomatic history, Cold War history, comparative politics, and sociology.

"There simply is no other book like this. No other family history presents such a range of insights into the ways in which individuals, women as well as men, have had to cope with changes wrought by the social modernization of Japanese family culture."--James L. McClain, author of Japan: A Modern History "Isami's House is the chronicle of a remarkable family, neither aristocratic nor famous, whose rise and decline seem to parallel Japan's. It makes absorbing reading, affording a panoramic view of a rural family's rise to local prominence at the dawn of the modern Japanese nation state, the expansion of its presence to Tokyo and then the empire, its experience in war and defeat, and finally its postwar reconfiguration as a dispersed urban family."--Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End

This book analyzes the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). It begins by explaining why Japan spent roughly fifty years building its own colonial system and declaring war on China and the Western Allies, only to decide after military defeats, two atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war, to surrender before being invaded. It goes on to describe the controversial issues surrounding the conduct of the Occupation forces, the largely American reform proposals and the shifts in policy as the Cold War developed. Particular emphasis is placed on women’s issues, the Japanese and American reactions to President Truman’s decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur, the tensions surrounding the requirement that the Japanese allow US military bases to stay in Japan and the still ongoing debate over the American decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Despite all this, the book concludes that particularly when compared with later Allied nation building efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the current state of US politics, the Occupation experience was, on the whole, a relatively positive one for both the Japanese and the US-Japan alliance.

No Regrets: Growing Up American in an Era of Globalization follows the author’s life from his earliest days as the child of Czechoslovakian immigrants to his twilight years. Along the way he introduces us to improbable meetings, amazing coincidences, and fascinating individuals and events, all presented in a clear and, at times, humorous first-person narrative. Against the backdrop of major demographic changes in America since his ancestors’ immigration in the early 20th century, we follow the author’s journey from homogenous neighborhoods populated by first and second generation Central and Eastern Europeans to a life which embraces the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of America. Part economic, political, and personal history and part social commentary, the author makes a persuasive case for maintaining an open and tolerant country and society made more important given the recent growth of nativist, anti-immigrant, and racial bias in the United States. During his life, the author introduces us to important historical figures personally connected with his relatives including the last emperor of China; the Granddaughter of the founder of the Mitsubishi Corporation; and Josephine Baker, the black American performer and World War II spy for the French resistance. Personal and funny anecdotes abound such as a chance meeting and almost tennis challenge to one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Interspersed with these, the author provides valuable advice on such practical matters as buying a house and how to lead a rich and full life.

This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.

The Occupation era (1945-1952) witnessed major change in Japan and the beginnings of its growth from of the ashes of defeat towards its status as a developmental model for much of the world. The period arguably saw the sowing of the seeds of the post-war flowering of what some term the ‘postwar Japanese economic miracle’. However, some scholars dispute this position and argue that the Occupation's policies and impacts actually hindered Japan's recovery. This volume addresses this question and others surrounding the business and economic history of this crucial period. The chapters presented in The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan are authored by major scholars of the Occupation from the U.S., Japan, and Europe. The chapters are divided into three sections: 'Planning, reform and recovery', 'Industries under the Occupation', and 'Legacies of the Occupation era'. Following an introduction focusing on the historiographical background, the first section examines zaibatsu dissolution and its significance, the role of Japanese businessmen within the Occupation's reforms, the crucial impact of Japan's postwar Materials Crisis, and the impact of reform at the local level in Hokkaidō. Part two looks at a number of individual industries and their development during the era, including the fishing, automotive, and cotton spinning industries. The final section looks at the human impact of the changes of the initial postwar years, including the reintegration of repatriates into the Japanese labour force and the impact of changing working patterns on society and family life. This book covers a key period of the economic and business history of Japan and presents numerous new approaches and original contributions to the scholarship of the Occupation era. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Japan, economic history, business history, development studies and postwar U.S.-Japan relations.

In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama took us from the dawn of mankind to the French and American Revolutions. Here, he picks up the thread again in the second instalment of his definitive account of mankind's emergence as a political animal. This is the story of how state, law and democracy developed after these cataclysmic events, how the modern landscape - with its uneasy tension between dictatorships and liberal democracies - evolved and how in the United States and in other developed democracies, unmistakable signs of decay have emerged. If we want to understand the political systems that dominate and order our lives, we must first address their origins - in our own recent past as well as in the earliest systems of human government. Fukuyama argues that the key to successful government can be reduced to three key elements: a strong state, the rule of law and institutions of democratic accountability. This magisterial account is required reading for anyone wishing to know more about mankind's greatest achievements.

Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As Mark Metzler shows in Capital as Will and Imagination, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter’s ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but mostly unrecognized aspect of the successful stabilization of Japanese capitalism after World War II and was integral to Japan’s postwar success. It also helps to explain Japan’s bubble, and the global bubbles that have followed it. The heterodox analysis presented in Capital as Will and Imagination goes beyond the economic history of postwar Japan; it opens up a new view of the core circuits of modern capital in general.