Previous waves of scholarship have focused on Japan's political and economic transformation in this period, especially Japan's U.S.-written constitution and its limits on Japan's security and the place of the emperor. Other historians have stressed the role of the Occupation in shaping Japan's economic structure, transforming it from munitions production to export-based industries. The emphasis in such work is on disruption and disjuncture. Some emphasize that this was a period when the Occupation imposed a critical break with Japan’s wartime past; others, that the natural arc of postwar Japan towards liberalism and socialism were arrested by the same American authorities.

By centering our analyses not on the actions of the occupiers, but on the Japanese themselves, our panel challenges this framework by showing how deeply the Occupation era connected with Japan’s imperial past and the post-Occupation age. The execution of General Headquarters’ stipulations always interacted with and were influenced by the legacies of the former empire and the ongoing process of de-imperialization. The continuities of experience are evident in the stories we cover: small factories, labor platforms in Okinawa, munition scientists, and black markets. Our papers show how these actors, with different agendas apart from the GHQ’s policies, collaborated, negotiated, and interacted with and within the Occupation regime.

Dong’s research navigates how the American consulting group, the Overseas Consulting Inc., participated in building a technocratic order in Japan. Wijeyaratne traces the transformation experienced by military scientists, particularly in terms of utilizing the postwar system in order to pursue research interests harbored since before the war. Beyond focusing on the technologists themselves, our panelists Nishizaki and Solis zoom into business and everyday lives. Nishizaki challenges the current conceptualization of Okinawa as a military colony and instead shows how Okinawan women and men negotiated with the Americans to form an active labor market. Solis reveals how cigarette trading in black markets was a common ground for Japanese and Americans to secure everyday goods. His paper reveals how informal economic practices formed during the Occupation had a longer presence.

Together, our nuanced research reconfigures current interpretations of the Allied Occupation, showing how careful attention to everyday life, the history of business, and local history forces a new chronology of Japan's twentieth century. Our panel addresses Japan’s transformations and the form of a new global order at the nexus of decolonization, de-imperialization, and the rise of the US’s power in East Asia.