Americans stationed in occupied Japan at the close of World War II claimed to be bringing religious freedom to a country where it did not exist. They described Japan’s existing constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as false, and they claimed to be implanting “real religious freedom” in its stead. In Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Jolyon Thomas ’01 counters this victors’ narrative, showing that Japanese people were involved in a robust debate about religious liberty for decades before the occupation began. He also demonstrates that the occupiers were far less certain about how to define and protect religious freedom than their triumphalist rhetoric suggested.
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