The presence of US military personnel as a part of the Allied Occupation, for instance, had an outsized impact on reconstruction across multiple scales, from the dwelling to the city. Sabrina Teng-io Cheng’s paper examines the interventions of Japanese urban planner Ishikawa Hideaki in shaping postwar urban landscapes amidst geopolitical transformations, revealing both the divergences and convergences of his work with that of US Occupation policies on war-damage reconstruction in the cities of Tokyo and Naha. Michelle Hauk, on the other hand considers the cultural impact of the US presence on Japanese soil through the construction of dependents’ housing, particularly the well-equipped and plumbed-in spaces of the kitchen and bath. Hauk argues that although the occupation housing’s impact on postwar Japanese housing was limited in certain ways, “Little America,” as these neighborhoods were called, provided a vector of cultural and technological influence in the domestic sphere. Will Sack’s study of women’s education in Japan’s 4-H clubs reveals another route of influence, through an anticommunist program turned home economics class. Arguing that 4-H powered rural-urban migration through their spread of “Life Reform” education, Sack further shows how 4-H’s kitchen, nutrition, and bookkeeping education urbanized domestic life. Yuki Hoshino’s work calls attention to ethnic inequalities reinforced by postwar urbanization through contestations over food and housing in early postwar Osaka. Hoshino’s work demonstrates how black markets, food rations, and housing provisions operated as both sites of exclusion and deprivation—particularly of ethnic Koreans—as well as sites of resistance.

The rebuilding and growth of Japanese cities reshaped relationships between those living inside Japan, often in new but still unequal ways, while also shaping the relationship between the U.S. and Japan for decades to come. Together, these papers tease out the complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways that American influence, and the Cold War politics that surrounded it, came to bear on reconstruction and urbanization.