Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay shows how Japan and the United States, the two competing imperial powers during the Asia Pacific War, preserved, modified, and reinforced both empires’ exceptionalist ideologies, building a new interimperial hegemony across the Asia Pacific. The “demilitarize and democratize” policy of the American occupation forces soon morphed into an effort to sanction Japan to refashion and redefine its militarism, racism, and neocolonialism to enable these imperialist apparatuses to persist in the decolonizing Cold War world. American exceptionalism and Japanese exceptionalism, I argue, have mutually constituted and dialectically reproduced one another throughout the long Cold War era. I term this interimperial complicity “transpacific exceptionalism,” which enables us to address how such nationalistic myths can converge and operate complicitly in the international political arena.