Justin Jesty is a precise and articulate writer, a master crafter of rare jargon-free academic English writing that is a pleasure to read.1 His virtuoso study Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan is representative of the kind of granular-level Japanese art/cultural historical scholarship that talented linguists and multidisciplinary social historians like Jesty are able to produce today. Jesty also demonstrates the convincing effectiveness of an authorial voice with apparently unlimited access, actual and intellectual, to primary documents augmented by the active and happy cooperation of curators and living artists, or their heirs.
Jesty's book, which focuses on several loosely connected spheres of socially and politically motivated artistic activity during the first decade and a half after the Pacific War, 1945–60, when Japan was struggling to remake itself as a nation of peace, not war, is written for specialists in the field of modern Japanese studies. The fact that...
