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Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency

New Book Published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press Explores the Mixed Long-term Legacy of the U.S. Occupation of Japan

Woodrow Wilson Center Press has published a new book, Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency, by Takeshi Matsuda. It is copublished with Stanford University Press.

This book examines the cultural aspects of U.S.-Japan relations during the postwar Occupation and the early years of the Cold War and analyzes their effect on the adoption of democratic values by the Japanese. Matsuda finds that the results were mixed: Japan is an electoral democracy but intellectually remains elitist and submissive—in part because of U.S. efforts to reinforce the domestic importance of intellectual elites. The author is especially concerned with the development of American Studies in Japan, and U.S. efforts to foster it. Soft Power and Its Perils brings forward a great deal of new information about the creation and funding of new institutions of educational and cultural exchange.

"Matsuda observes that American policymakers and cultural emissaries have never abandoned their early postwar assumption of moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority; and the Japanese elites whom the United States has so carefully cultivated, in turn, have rarely failed to acquiesce to such cultural hegemony. He is not the only observer to argue that ‘an abiding psychology of dependence on the United States' has gripped Japan for over six decades now. Few such critics, however, have developed their argument through such a detailed case study. —John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Takeshi Matsuda is a professor of American history at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2001–2.

Soft Power and Its Perils is distributed by Stanford University Press, http://www.sup.org or telephone 1-800-621-2736. The price is $ 60.00 for hardcover.