Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945-52: Alien Prescriptions? is a long-awaited volume borne out of the collaboration between Christopher Aldous and Akihito Suzuki. The authors adopt a straightforward, commonsense approach to the topic, which is public health reform under the occupation of Japan (1945-52). It is based on rich information and statistical data gleaned from printed sources and various archives, the most important of which was the archives of the General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ), available at the National Diet Library in Tokyo. As the book's subtitle hints, Aldous and Suzuki engage with the question long at stake for scholars of Japanese history: whether or not the year 1945 signifies a moment of historical disjuncture. Thus, Aldous and Suzuki ask, was the health reform in occupied Japan a revolutionary, novel, and foreign prescription imposed by American occupiers on' "backward" Japanese public health practices, or could one see in the reform any element alluding to the historical continuity? To tackle this question, Aldous and Suzuki embark on thorough and careful examinations of cases and come up with two main arguments. First, synergies between the Americans and the Japanese—though varying in degree and kind, depending on cases—often shaped the reform. While Crawford F. Sams, chief of the Public Health and Welfare Section of the GHQ (PH& W), might have initiated public health reforms with a grander mission to democratize and pacify Japan, "many Japanese officials, doctors and public health nurses embraced the prescriptions of the PH& W as a return to effective strategies of disease control" (183). Second, as opposed to the claim of Sams that he and his colleagues in PH& W single-handedly improved Japanese public health practices, the "Japanese scientific community was sufficiently advanced" and "opportunities presented by the Occupation enabled the more progressive approaches associated with the early interwar period" (183). In a nutshell, the public health reform in occupied Japan was neither alien nor prescriptive.
