AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
A new look at democratization, women’s rights, and the Cold War in post-World War II U.S.-occupied Japan
Pedagogy of Democracy
Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan
Mire Koikari
"The postwar history of Japan is just beginning to be written, and Pedagogy of Democracy examines a formative period---the U.S. Occupation, 1945-52. Koikari examines the Occupation as a raced, gendered, and classed endeavor in the larger context of the Cold War. Her fresh perspective makes this a significant book for those interested in Japanese women's history and Japanese history in general."
—Kathleen Uno, Associate Professor of History at Temple University, and author of Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood, and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan
Pedagogy of Democracy re-interprets the U.S. occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 as a problematic instance of Cold War feminist mobilization rather than a successful democratization of Japanese women as previously argued. By combining three fields of research—occupation, Cold War, and postcolonial feminist studies—and examining occupation records and other archival sources, Koikari argues that postwar gender reform was part of the Cold War containment strategies that undermined rather than promoted women’s political and economic rights.
Koikari suggests that American and Japanese women leaders both participated in as well as resisted the ruling dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. Thus, Pedagogy of Democracy sheds new light on the complex and contradictory implications of Western feminist interventions in Asia.
By applying a postcolonial feminist framework to American gender reform in the Cold War Asia-Pacific context—a subject hitherto understudied among feminist scholars—Pedagogy of Democracy reveals both the similarities and the differences between imperial feminisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
About the Author(s)
Mire Koikari is an Associate Professor in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.