Shohei Ooka (1909-1988) makes critical interventions into the cultural and political U.S. hegemony in Cold War Japan by creating his fictions (Furyoki 1948; Hamlet’s Dairy 1955) as allegories of Japan under U.S. domination.

He fought two wars: WWII and cultural cold war. Based on his experience as a POW of American forces in the Philippines during WWII, he wrote Furyoki (Taken Captive). In the novel, by quoting from Robinson Crusoe (“tis as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another”), Ooka insinuates that‘imprisonment’ of Japanese POWs during the warin the novel is intended as an allegory of Japan under the Allied occupation (“imprisonment by another”). When the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored him to visit the U.S. and Europe (1953-54), some criticized him that he, who had been a POW in the war, was now a prisoner of cultural cold war. In the U.S. - Europe travelogue, Ooka records strong sympathy he felt to Caliban (Shakespeare, the Tempest) - produced as a native American struggling against Prospero, European colonizer. Creatively adapting Shakespeare’s canon, he creates Hamlet’s Diary, in which Denmark under Norwegian military occupation is intended to be an analogue to Japan under Security Treaty. As a cultural cold war warrior, Ooka continued guerilla wars against American domination.

In this presentation I will argue that literature in cold war cannot be free from socio-political situations, but at the same time, literature can also be a means resistance against social, cultural and political hegemony of the U.S. in the global cold war.