Alicia Volk’s In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan is a focused and accessible account of early postwar Japanese art history (1945–52), skillfully weaving a narrative that explores the masked and buried discourses of transwar continuities in art and the art world. To this end, Volk examines a range of works, both canonical and lesser known, and draws on prewar exhibition histories to contextualize the development of postwar art and its institutions. 

Building on Bert Winther-Tamaki’s seminal writings about paintings from the fifteen-year war and postwar abstract art, Volk frames America’s occupation of Japan as having an afterlife in inherited narratives of empires, from Japan’s defeated empire to US imperialism (7). Volk uses the notion of “voids” for the occupation period as an inherited reference to critic Segi Shin’ichi’s writing about the lack of art-historical documentation concerning the immediate postwar years. However, instead of filling the void, Volk consciously chooses to pursue a “terra incognita” uncovering of the obstructions that exist in our collective memory of this period (11). Building on the work of various scholars to problematize universal narratives about Japan’s postwar occupation and the Cold War period, Volk’s argument is at its strongest when the author asks us to sit with the discomfort of artistic and cultural interrelation operating outside the hegemony of universalism. To borrow Volk’s words, this interrelation may be read as “incommensurable”: tangled and, at times, opaque in this specific moment characterized by the geopolitics of the Cold War and occupation censorship (35). 

After a substantial introduction that lays out the book’s larger stakes, chapter one delves into the turbulent times of American occupation, focusing on the art world’s response to the issues of wartime responsibility and artistic autonomy seen in the various art associations and exhibitions that emerged or were rebranded. For example, Volk explores the symbolism and iconographies popular during the war and their afterlives in the exhibitions of the Nitten (formerly the Bunten during the war). At the same time, Volk examines the birth of the Japan Art Association (Nichibi) in response to the Nitten, its role in shaping the work of artists from a wide range of schools and political leanings, and its eventual implosion. Drawing on ideas from Jacques Rancière, Volk frames the attempt by wartime authorities from the Imperial Art Academy and Ministry of Education to maintain their positions of power as a form of “dissensus masqueraded—temporarily—as consensus” (55). This chapter sets the foundation for understanding the key issues that artists and the art world faced in the mobilization to democratize art, and how such issues were shaped by the surveillance of occupational authorities and their shifting policies.

Chapter two narrows its focus to the artist Fukuzawa Ichirō and antiestablishment artists who underwent tenkō (ideological conversion). Volk delves into the increasing pressures that Fukuzawa faced during the war as he was targeted by military authorities for advocating artistic independence. In particular, she characterizes Fukuzawa’s Monument to Defeat in War (1948) as a reflection on his role in monumental wartime propaganda painting. Volk neatly frames Fukuzawa’s rejection of idealism and artistic utilitarianism as another side of the avant-garde just after the Second World War that embraced “universality,” offering the reader an instructive glimpse into how the postwar Japanese art world would evolve.

Volk continues her discussion of the Cold War rhetoric of “universality” and its dialectical engagement with Japanese prints in chapter three. This chapter sets out to expose a canonical and archival void evident in the limited discussion of twentieth-century Japanese prints represented within the US-centered canon and Japanese discourse. Volk follows major figures within the proletarian-minded shin hanga movement, with its Chinese influences, as well as the experimental sōsaku hanga movement, expanding our knowledge of art associations and exhibitions that were essential for promoting Japanese culture and art for diplomatic purposes. Contrasting the political organizations of the Japanese Communist Party and union protests against General Headquarters (GHQ) efforts for democratization, Volk describes the fluctuating popularity and developing audiences (both domestic and international) that the shin hanga and sōsaku hanga prints attracted, as each offered different approaches for the medium’s “democratization.” Volk addresses the issue of plurality in print ownership and its categorization within art by analyzing the diverse Osunita collective (comprised of artists, Hitachi workers, and farmers from Jōtō) and its scarcely discussed picture books, The Tale of Hitachi (1950) and The Tale of Hanaoka (1951). Much like Volk’s discussion of the Tōhō labor disputes in chapter one, the gendered politics of unions fade into the background as the author focuses on the development of the people’s print and the creative print movements.

Chapter four shifts its focus to the public sculptural monuments and memorials that were reinterpreted through the lens of wartime ideologies. It also examines references by the newly created monumental sculptures both to intermedia productions of the tumultuous history of student conscripts and to the afterlife of universities neglecting their wartime responsibility. Using the example of Norimatsu Iwao’s nude Goddess of Liberty installation in Hibiya Park in 1950, Volk homes in on the themes of construction and culture that appeared in wartime propaganda but ironically spoke to postwar slogans. By recounting the anguished history of Hongo Shin’s Voices of the Sea (1950), Volk examines how nudes became increasingly tied to the iconography of the peace monument in postwar Japan, though often in uneasy association with its theme and the memories of its locations. In Volk’s words, Voices exposed “the incongruities and irrationalities of Japanese peace, democracy, and freedom in the final years of the occupation” as well as the continuing legacy of the intermedia Wadatsumi phenomenon (216). Referencing Lisa Yoneyama’s research on Hiroshima peace monuments and the authority given to the concept of peace and the complex meaning that this term came to develop, Volk considers the ways in which the notion of the democratic subject promoted under occupation was superimposed on a nation struggling with its rapid reconstruction and its continual involvement in war through its Cold War alignment with the US. 

A timely discussion of antiestablishment female artists unfolds in chapter five, concentrating on the postwar rhetoric of autonomous subjectivity. In this chapter, Volk expands on her earlier journal publication (2020) and compares Migishi Setsuko and Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi), who played significant roles in the art world by giving voice to women artists. Volk traces the biographical similarities and ideological differences between Migishi and Akamatsu as they navigated the male-dominated art world and confronted their shared disillusionment with postwar “liberation.” The chapter heavily relies on writings from Migishi and Akamatsu in journal publications and newspaper articles about the state of women artists’ standing in the art world and society more broadly. Volk resists dividing these artists’ attitudes into prewar and postwar moments, approaching the “postwar paradigm” as a major issue within Japanese studies. For instance, the author reveals a throughline between the autonomy that women exercised in producing art during the war and the autonomy they demonstrated in the horizontally organized Association of Women Artists and the Women’s Democratic Association, both formed as the constitution was being rewritten in the interest of postwar democratic reform. Volk concludes the chapter by highlighting the surfacing of an international-minded peace movement that characterized the approaching Cold War years. 

In the epilogue, Volk references Namiko Kunimoto’s and Justin Jesty’s studies of the emerging activist art movement and Winther-Tamaki’s extensive observations about the exchanges between the Japanese and American art worlds. Akamatsu’s journal drawing, Goddess of Liberty, This Is Peace (1951), and Inokuma Gen’ichirō’s large-scale mural Freedom (1951) are compared for their alternate visions of peace in the wake of the signing of the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco. Volk ends her book powerfully by clarifying her core methodological intervention to “expose the invisible structures, dynamics, and stakes of this formative historical moment” in Japanese art history (315–16). As one example, Volk ties Kunimoto’s intervention on postwar art narratives shaped by a Cold War mindset to Partha Mitter’s writing on Euro-American narratives of art, along with Monica Juneja’s and Katy Siegel’s methodological lens for a global art history, which offer possibilities for understanding overlooked “sites in the shadow of empire” (315–16). Volk draws from a global art-historical approach to Japanese art that places Japan at the center of the entangled dynamics of the occupation and Cold War period.

Volk’s book offers a meaningful contribution to existing scholarship about the still underexplored terrain defined by postwar occupation art and its discourses. Its treatment of the fallible memory of empire and its afterlife is particularly prescient today, as younger generations increasingly become distanced from this memory and as nationalist ideology surges globally. Just as importantly, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan offers a unique methodological alternative to the comparative model of art history, centering our gaze on Japan and inviting future scholarship to embrace the incommensurability of tangled narratives or discourses in this particular moment in Japanese art history.