A Conversation between Yoshikuni Igarashi, PhD, and Jason Dawsey, PhD
One of the country's leading authorities on post-1945 Japan joins an Institute historian to discuss this crucial time in Japanese history. How did the deep enmity between Imperial Japan and the United States during World War II transform into a lasting postwar alliance? How did the authoritarian Japanese state transition into a democracy? How did the Japanese respond to the experience of defeat, occupation, and then restoration of independence in the decade after World War II? This engaging conversation will throw light on these momentous shifts in Japanese politics and society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK
Yoshikuni Igarashi’s research focuses on Japanese cultural history during the interwar and post-World War II periods. His first book, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, examines the tension between the repression and the expression of the trauma of the war and contemplates the impact of the war and defeat on postwar Japanese society.
Igarashi’s second book, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, discusses the former soldiers who belatedly returned to postwar Japan after the end of the Asia Pacific War.
Igarashi’s third and most recent book, Japan circa 1972: Visions of Masculinity in an Age of Mass Consumerism (Columbia UP, 2021) focuses on the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, stemming from the development of mass consumer society, and analyzes Japanese society’s anxiety-ridden and often violent responses to that transformation.
