Preface

Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 was an unprecedented event in Japanese history. The shift from the life of hunger to the life of saturation that took place between 1945 and 1980 has brought about a great change in life style. The significance of this change will be a subject of reassessment for many years to come. Here I have tried to present an outline of such a change in the domain of mass culture, a sector of Japanese culture most indicative of the change after the defeat and the subsequent economic recovery.

This book, like the earlier one, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945, is based on a series of lectures I gave at McGill University, Quebec, Canada. The lectures were delivered in English from 17 January to 20 March 1980. The footnotes were prepared for the Japanese version published by Iwanami Shoten in 1984.

I am grateful to the East Asia Centre, McGill University, and the Japan Foundation. My thanks are due to Professors Paul Lin, Sam Noumoff, Ward Geddes, and Yuzo Ohta, my colleagues at McGill University. Thanks are also due to Ms Alison Tokita of Monash University for her assistance in the preparation of the English text, to Mr Kji Takamura for the compilation of illustrations which I had not been able to make use of in the lectures, to Professor Norihiro Kat, formerly of the University of Montreal, for generously letting me make use of his record of my lectures in mimeographed form, and to Dr Yoshio Sugimoto of La Trobe University for giving me the opportunity to write this book as well as the earlier one.

This book is dedicated to Mr Charles W.Young, my classmate at Middlesex School, Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.A., in 1938– 1939, in recognition of our friendship, which has survived the war between the two nations.

Shunsuke Tsurumi
October 1986
Kyoto