There are several overviews of US-Japanese relations that also examine alliance relations during the early Cold War. Roger Buckley's US-Japan Alliance Diplomacy 1945-1990 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, i992) is one of the earliest monographs that highlights the political, military, and economic aspects of the emerging alliance. In his magisterial book, The Clash: US-Japanese Relations through History (New York: Norton, i997), Walter LaFeber devotes about half of the text to an analysis of the post-World War II period. Michael Schaller's Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, i997) is also a well-balanced survey of the bilateral relationship focusing on the postwar period. John Hunter Boyle's Modern Japan: The American Nexus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, i993) contains useful chapters on postwar US-Japanese relations and covers questions surrounding the atomic bomb.
Biographies of individuals who played a critical part in US-Japanese relations during the early Cold War abound. John Dower's classic Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience 1878-1954 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) is a critical portrayal of the postwar prime minister who laid the groundwork of the US-Japan Cold War alliance. Michael Schaller's Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) is a clear-eyed probe into the career of the ambitious general who shaped the contours of postwar Japan. Richard Finn's Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) highlights these key individuals and their work during the Allied occupation. The Yoshida Memoirs: The Story of Japan in Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1961) provides a rare look into the inner thoughts of a politician who faced a powerful American overlord. Howard Schonberger's Aftermath of War: American and the Remaking of Japan 1945-1952 (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1989) highlights American politicians and strategists who directed the course of the US occupation ofJapan.
The literature on the origins of the Cold War in East Asia with a focus on Japan is also rich. Akira Iriye's The Cold War in Asia: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1974) remains a classic. A collaborative volume of American and Japanese scholars, edited by Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977), examines the coming of the Cold War in a regional framework. Michael Schaller's The American Occupation ofJapan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), along with William S. Borden's The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery 1947-1955 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), shaped the early scholarly debate on the links between American occupation policy and Japan's postwar economic recovery. Marc Gallicchio's The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) provides a concise summary of the US-Asian policies that shaped Cold War policies in the immediate postwar years.
The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has generated a spirited debate among historians. J. Samuel Walker's Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atom Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) offers the most updated and balanced analysis of the momentous decision. Ronald Takaki's concise volume, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1995), places greater emphasis on the racial aspect of the American decision. Based on a special issue of Diplomatic History, Michael Hogan's Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) highlights various historical questions arising from the atomic bombing.
Among the earliest accounts of the Allied occupation ofJapan are Kazuo Kawaii, Japan’s American Interlude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), and Frederick S. Dunn, Peacemaking and the Settlement with Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960). Thomas W. Burkman (ed.), The Occupation ofJapan: The International Contest (Norfolk, VA: MacArthur Memorial, 1982), and Robert E. Ward and Frank Joseph Shulman (eds.), The Allied Occupation ofJapan, 1945-1952: An Annotated Bibliography of Western-Language Materials (Chicago: American Library Association, 1974), are useful references. Eiji Takemae's Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation ofJapan and Its Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2002) explains well the structure and workings of the occupation administration. Robert Wade and
Yoshikazu Sakamoto (eds.), Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), contains many useful chapters on American reform efforts.
For more recent studies on the occupation, see Ray Moore and Donald Robinson, Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State under MacArthur (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999) offers a panoramic view of Japan's social and cultural landscapes during the American occupation. For a general appraisal of occupation policies, see Carol Gluck, "Entangling Illusions: Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in Warren I. Cohen (ed.), New Frontiers in American-East Asian Relations: Essays Presented to Dorothy Borg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 169-236. Yukiko Koshiro's Trans-Pacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) discusses race in the context of US-Japanese relations.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Warren Cohen and Akira Iriye hosted several international conferences that resulted in collections of well-balanced essays based on recently declassified government documents and memoirs of key decisionmakers. See especially Iriye and Cohen, The United States and Japan in the Postwar World (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), and Cohen and Iriye, The Great Powers in East Asia 1953-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
The literature focusing on the 1950s has grown in the last decade. Aaron Forsberg's America and the Japanese Miracle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Sayuri Shimizu's Creating People of Plenty: The United States and Japan’s Economic Alternatives, 1950-1960 (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2001) both focus on the Eisenhower administration's policies for Japanese economic recovery. Burton Kaufman's Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953-1961 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) is rich in information regarding the Eisenhower administration's trade and aid policies during the early Cold War years. John Swenson-Wright's United States Security and Alliance Policy toward Japan, 1945-1960 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) examines the military aspects of US-Japan relations between 1945 and 1960. The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001) by Gavan McCormack analyzes postwar Japan and social and cultural transformation.
For further guidance, see the bibliographical essay in volume III.
World History
