Justin Jesty's Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reframes the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945. This fascinating cultural history addresses our broad understanding of the immediate postwar era moving toward the Cold War and subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. At the same time, Jesty delves into an examination of the relationship between art and politics that approaches art as a mode of intervention, but he moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value.

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan centers on a group of social realists on the radical left who hoped to wed their art with anti-capitalist and anti-war activism, a liberal art education movement whose focus on the child inspired innovation in documentary film, and a regional avant-garde group split between ambition and local loyalty. In each case, Jesty examines writings and artworks, together with the social movements they were a part of, to demonstrate how art—or more broadly, creative expression—became a medium for collectivity and social engagement. He reveals a shared if varied aspiration to create a culture founded in amateur-professional interaction, expanded access to the tools of public authorship, and dispersed and participatory cultural forms that intersected easily with progressive movements. Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.

Justin Jesty is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author in Japanese of several catalog exhibits for the Meguro Museum of Art and of articles in the Nishi Nihon Shinbun and Gendai Shiso (Contemporary thought), and author in English of articles in Japan Forum and Art in America.

Jesty's argument for a "metamorphic" as opposed to a "volcanic" view of the avant-garde—the one calling attention to commitment and organization, the other privileging disruption and momentary liberation—should demand the attention of those studying modernist and avant-garde practice in any medium.

Art and Engagement provides a timely example of the way in which minority voices and independent groups intervene in seemingly insurmountable political scenarios... it offers comprehensiveness of topic that simultaneously shoots in many directions, pointing readers toward divergent roads and avenues of further scholarship.

A brilliant puzzle box of a book — at times vexing, but mostly delightful... Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan will undoubtedly be essential reading for years to come for students and scholars of Japanese modern art, global modern art, and the culture and society of Japan's crucial 1950s transitional moment.

Offers timely and urgent insights into the complexities of the early postwar era.... Jesty consistently focuses on uncovering the connections between avant-garde artists' engagement with a range of communities and social practices and their artistic and aesthetic choices. Jesty's project points the way to new methodologies that help us broaden, deepen, and rethink the framework of postwar art in Japan.