The 1960s is a decade of increasing interest to both historians and art historians of Japan as a time when Japanese people were centrally implicated in global processes of resistance and creativity as well as the much more popularly understood emergence of Japan within a globalized postwar capitalist economy. In Money, Trains, and Guillotines, William Marotti brings these two disciplinary traditions of history and art history together in a conversation about the relationship between avant-garde art, commerce, the Japanese state, and revolutionary politics. His book is an important intervention into both how we understand Japan in the middle decades of the twentieth century and the possibilities of art to speak truth to power and to help imagine alternatives to the realities of the present.
Structurally, Marotti sets out his book in three discrete sections, with each section containing several interlinked chapters and a brief framing introduction. This structure allows...
