Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Despite its obvious borrowings from the West, however, the kasutori counterculture remained fundamentally indigenous. Like the black market, this was a world the conqueror could never really enter—an environment as colorful as the gaudy covers of its pulp magazines and as gritty as the black-and-white photographs that record its bars, dance halls, and hole-in-the-wall eateries, its narrow, crooked streets and cluttered backstage dressing rooms. The conqueror’s ideas had only negligible impact on this world, which seemed so awash in the glitter of American popular culture. Apart perhaps from Hollywood and popular music, “America” often tended to signify little more than an amorphous alien army of occupation, vaguely present, that in and of itself was the ultimate symbol of Japan’s degradation. Similarly, although the barroom intelligentsia often delighted in dropping names and terms from the European intellectual tradition, more often than not these were just set adrift like exotic flotsam and jetsam on a sea of self-indulgence.