When I purchased this book I was expecting to read a rather light tale of how the US and its deadly enemy Japan had come to know and like each other over the long US occupation. I thought that I would read how the US had generously provided food to the decimated country while working with the Japanese to rebuild it. Soldiers handing out candy to children, the Japanese falling in love with the baseball that we introduced there.

Well, I was 100% wrong. This is a long, dry, scholarly work that doesn't show that the US was so generous to Japan. Chapters devoted to the formation of brothels by the Japanese to serve the Americans when they arrived, wide starvation in the country through the first three or so years of occupation, the flourishing of the black market where all the necessities of living could be found at five to ten times what they were worth, the writing of the new constituion....

Only get this book if you are a scholar interested in this slice of history. Entertaining it is not.

Way too much like a Japanese language lesson rather than a story