Embodied Defeat: Occupation, Power, and Cultural Reordering in Postwar Japan

This article reinterprets the social and cultural transformation of occupied Japan by shifting attention from occupation policy as an agent of change to the ways Japanese society negotiated and reworked the conditions created by defeat and foreign occupation. Drawing on Japanese-language sources alongside SCAP documentation, it examines how material dislocation and the erosion of established norms opened spaces in which social practices, cultural meanings, and forms of subjectivity were contested and reconfigured. Particular attention is devoted to the body as a terrain of historical change. Debates over sexuality, morality, intimacy, and public expressions of desire reveal transformations that cannot be understood simply as effects of American social engineering or cultural Westernization. Practices associated with kyodatsu, kasutori culture, and nikutai instead show how Japanese society appropriated, adapted to, and at times resisted normative frameworks accompanying the occupation. By connecting these social and cultural transformations to the asymmetries of foreign occupation, the article contributes to international history by showing how relations of power were translated into, negotiated through, and reshaped by everyday social and embodied practices. Postwar cultural reordering thus emerged through the interaction between external constraints and Japanese agency.