Japanese painters, printmakers, and sculptors who produced artwork in support of Tokyo’s war efforts in the period between 1931 and 1945, had to pivot as they continued their careers in the shadow of empire during the seven-year US occupation occupation, which began with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended in 1952 under a Cold War peace treaty.

Alicia Volk, professor of Japanese art at the University of Maryland, recounts the history of artists who, having collaborated with the authorities in Imperial Japan’s 15-Year War, worked within the confines of Occupied Japan at the onset of the Cold War to create art reflecting Japan’s wartime losses and their aspirations for the postwar era.

Japanese leaders had enlisted the nation’s artists to produce wartime propaganda, coercing the more reluctant ones to do their part. With different degrees of enthusiasm, the artists cast heroic statues and painted thrilling scenes of military victory. As the tides of war turned towards defeat, the artists created darker works that called on the public for an increasingly desperate struggle against the oncoming enemy.

With Japan’s defeat and occupation, artists shifted direction to produce works that expressed sorrow over Japanese wartime suffering and hopes for a democratic and peaceful “new Japan”. Some artists exchanged the restrictive guidelines of the war years for the ideological straitjacket of the Japan Communist Party to produce proletarian art for the toiling masses. Others reverted to the notion of art for art’s sake. Some artwork of the latter group sold well both to American soldiers shopping for Christmas gifts in Japan at the Army Post Exchange (PX) and to American collectors of contemporary art.

One tale of two peace statues gives us a glimpse of the political currents running against some art in Occupied Japan.

The sculptor Kikuchi Kazuo created Peace Group, a trio of female nudes evocative of the Three Graces from classical Western art, on commission from the influential Dentsu public relations firm. The statues, noted above all for the beauty of their female forms, attracted little attention and no controversy when placed on their pedestal in a Tokyo park under US control in February 1951, when Japan was serving as an indispensable logistics base and staging area for the United States in the Korean War. In Volk’s assessment, “The naked triad of female goddesses was a fitting monument to the elusive and compromised peace of a defeated and occupied country.”

Hongo Shin, in casting a male nude in memory of the conscripted students of Tokyo Imperial University and other schools of higher education who lost their lives in the war, created what the book’s author describes as “the most notorious of peace monuments.” Along with published collections of student writings and even a movie telling their story, Hongo’s Voices of the Sea lamented the loss of Japan’s elite students in the flower of their youth on account of the aggressive acts of a handful of militarists. The statue’s message was that atoning for their loss required surviving Japanese to safeguard the peace.

Hongo’s statue, however, created at the time of the Korean War, fell victim to the times. With its stark message of peace, at odds with Japan’s supporting role in Korea, the statue never found a permanent home during the Occupation. Only in December 1953, a year after Tokyo regained its sovereignty under the San Francisco Peace Treaty and several months after the signing of an armistice in Korea, did Voices of the Sea find its permanent place, on the campus of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, in a ceremony held on the twelfth anniversary of Imperial Japan’s going to war against the Western powers.

Volk has written her story from a large number of Japanese and Western sources. She extensively mined resources from the University of Maryland’s Gordon W Prange Collection of censored Japanese materials and publications from the Occupation years and from Record Group 331, Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II, at the US National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.

The book is well illustrated with photographs of artwork from the Second World War, the years of the Occupation and the early Cold War. Paintings include such wartime works as Nakamura Kenichi’s paintings Sergeant Nobe’s Suicide Attack on Two B-29s over Kitakyushu and his Naval Battle off Malaya. Postwar prints include both creative prints, such as Onchi Koshiro’s Lyrique No. 4: Après-guerre (part of popular American novelist, and Japanese art aficionado, James A Michener’s collection) and such examples of leftist people’s prints as Kitaoka Fumio’s Under the Railroad Bridge. The book also includes many pictures of wartime and postwar Japanese statues. Photographs of magazine covers give one a feel for the popular culture of those years.

For those whose exposure to Japanese art is primarily to works of premodern Japan—temple bells, ukiyoe prints and such—the book should be a revelation. Volk’s history proves wrong the assertion to her of a former official of the Arts and Monuments Division in General MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters that, “All Japanese art after 1868 is rubbish!” Volk shows us that Japanese artists in the turbulent period from the 1930s to the 1950s produced works of art worthy of our consideration.

Stephen Mercado, formerly an officer of the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, now a freelance translator and writer, is the author of The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School and of Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War.