Pop Against Empire

How Pop artists confronted the legacies of modern Empire of Japan and post-1945 American imperialism from the 1960s to the present.Looking at a pivotal period spanning the 1960s to the present, Hiroko Ikegami explores how artists in Japan, Okinawa, and the United States have adopted Pop strategies to critique legacies of imperialism. Ikegami focuses on locales—Tokyo, Okinawa, Minidoka, and New York—that were deeply impacted by the complex relationship between the Japanese and American empires and considers artists across different situations and generations. The book begins with Tokyo Pop artists and graphic designers, including Shinohara Ushio and Tanaami Keiichi, who critically parodied American Pop during the long 1960s. It then turns to Okinawa, where Tom Max probed Okinawans’ convoluted reality regarding the American Occupation and the Vietnam War. Artists in the second half of the volume confronted legacies of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical condition of the present. Roger Shimomura, the third-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated in the Minidoka camp as a child, dealt with the subject by appropriating motifs of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Takashi Murakami, now a global art star, created otaku-inspired art and capitalized on his country’s experience of the atomic bombs in promoting his “Superflat” enterprise. The book concludes with a new generation of artists protesting repercussions of empire in the twenty-first century. This is the first study to treat artists of post-1945 Japan, Okinawa, and the US diaspora in a single volume as mutually independent yet interrelated, using Pop’s criticality as a connecting thread.