Barak Kushner

Quick Links

Give to a scholarship for students and children in Tohoku Japan

While everyone is graciously giving to Japan's Red Cross and other large organizations, let us not forget that many children are orphaned. To support their educational future, this special fund was set up in Yamada machi (where I first lived in Japan.)

See the East Asian Seminar Series I coordinate at Cambridge

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"Treacherous Allies: The Cold War in East Asia and American Postwar Anxiety"

This is an article in the Journal of Contemporary History, October 2010, p. 812-843.

Get the article here.

The postwar US federal government spent a decade, initiated two federal treason trials, and dispensed over one million dollars in legal pursuit of John Provoo for his crimes in the Philippines as a POW and as a propaganda agent for the Japanese. In a strange perversion of justice the US attorney even invited to the federal court Provoo’s former captors – Japanese propagandists, military officials and POW guards – to establish his guilt. Why was the US government so keen to pursue and charge a lone second world war POW with treason? What dread did Provoo strike in the hearts of US officials? This article examines how Provoo embodied wartime and postwar American panic concerning East Asia, just as the situation in the region dramatically spiraled out of American control.

Selected Works

Book Chapter

“Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan”

This research considers some of the ways in which sweets increasingly came to be incorporated into the everyday lives of Japanese people, as an indicator of rising levels of ‘modernity’.

“Going for the Gold - Health and Sports in Japan's Quest for Modernity”

Overview of Japan's efforts to market and promote the 1940 Olympic games in Tokyo that never took place

"Imperial Cuisines in Taisho Foodways," in Eric Rath and Stephanie Assman, eds., Japanese Foodways, Past and Present.

Chapter in edited volume on Taisho era Japanese cuisine

"Planes, Trains and Games: Selling Japan’s War in Asia"

An analysis of Japanese wartime kamishibai and the market for children's propaganda

"Gojira as Japan's First Postwar Media Event," in the book, In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage

My chapter on Godzilla as Japan's first international popular culture icon.

Catalogue

Dreams of Empire

See my essay on Alan Marcuson's fantastic collection of imperial Japanese textiles.

Online Article