During World War II, Japan allied with the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. While many people in the country wholeheartedly supported the war effort, tens of thousands of Japanese people protested and resisted, especially as the effects of war became more and more devastating. These acts of protest were generally frowned upon, if not illegal. The Axis countries lost the war in 1945, and Japan in particular suffered huge amounts of damage. Beyond the typical effects of war, the small country suffered the effects of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This caused both extreme damage to physical infrastructure and, as Ishiguro writes extensively about, emotional trauma.
The Allied powers, specifically American forces, then occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952 under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur. In the wake of the war, many members of the Japanese military were tried for war crimes, and hundreds committed suicide. The Americans created a new Japanese constitution, which dictated major political changes: the emperor’s position was diminished to a ceremonial one, universal suffrage was introduced, and the Shinto religion was officially separated from the state. Furthermore, at least in the earlier years of American occupation, Japanese media was rigidly censored to avoid anti-American sentiments, and the Japanese military was completely disbanded.
The Allied powers also introduced economic reforms to turn Japan’s economic system into a Western-style free-market capitalist one. While during the late 1940’s the economy suffered, American leadership quickly realized that a program of economic revitalization would be necessary to prevent the growth of a communist movement. The Americans found a solution to this problem with the start of the Korean War, which the United Nations entered. This development allowed MacArthur’s leadership to turn Japan into a supply depot for the United Nations, and Japan then underwent rapid economic growth. In 1950, American troops withdrew from Japan, since the American military now saw communism as the larger security threat. Therefore, Ishiguro’s novel focuses on the latter years of the American occupation.
During these middle years of the twentieth century, America was not only in control of Japan but one of the most influential powers on the world stage. Post-war wealth in the United States allowed for a booming culture industry, including movies and television shows like “Popeye the Sailor" and genres like the Western. Therefore, people living in Japan both lived under American authorities on an official level and lived in a world pervaded by American popular culture. While many Japanese people in this period felt negatively about the American occupation and wanted to resist it, the same people often enjoyed American cultural products. Though this interest in American mass culture was genuine and voluntary, unlike the more concrete aspects of occupation (such as Japan's new constitution), the power relations between the occupying state and the occupied one led to policies of censorship and a general sense of all-encompassing American power, which in turn created feelings that Americanization was necessary and materially beneficial to Japanese people.
