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

Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. By Takeshi Matsuda. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. xxii, 372 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8047-0040-5.)

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945-1952) was touted in Washington as a successful example of American altruism that produced the model outcome of a vibrant and prosperous democracy in a previously authoritarian state. Takeshi Matsuda's compelling if somewhat disjointed monograph on U.S. cultural policy in Japan, focusing on the 1950s, demonstrates that national self-interest, not altruism, was the driving force in U.S. policy toward Japan and that the outcome was and remains a form of permanent psychological dependency on the part of Japanese intellectuals-American studies specialists in the first instance-that has crippled their capacity to function in...