| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Amerika eiga to senryo seisaku (The formulation and implementation of U.S. film policy toward occupied Japan). By Takeshi Tanigawa. (Kyoto: Kyoto Daigaku Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2002. x, 499 pp. ¥5,000,ISBN 4-87698-443-3.) In Japanese.

Even the most astute historians of the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952) often fail to go beyond portraying American policies as a composite of punitive impulses, New Deal–style reforms, and strategic concerns contoured by the looming Cold War. Takeshi Tanigawa's laboriously crafted study of movie censorship, screening, and distribution by the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP) cogently shows that the U.S.-Japan contestation over film extended far beyond American efforts to ban militaristic visual representations, democratize the defeated enemy through mass entertainment, and ward off Communism's cinematic propaganda. Plumbing a staggering sea of documentary sources and materials drawn from film archives, the author meticulously follows the government paper trail to elucidate how the U.S. program of cultural diplomacy, resting on public and private sector collaboration, developed alongside the postwar planning of various Washington agencies and ultimately converged with that planning in U.S. movie censorship and screening in occupied Japan. The depth of detail makes this volume a useful reference source on the various institutions formed during wartime and the cast of characters who inscribed their visions into the policies produced at those interlocking venues. That said, Tanigawa's often overly detailed narrative and lengthy verbatim quotations will tax the endurance of even the most dedicated of academic readers.

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