Postwar Rehabilitation

In his chapter “Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens” from his book Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, David Serlin argues that the 1950s event that brought Japanese women to the United States for reconstructive plastic surgery should be seen as a product of the influence of the Western powers on how the Japanese people reconstructed their society and, more importantly, their bodies. In their article “Imperialism of influence and the state–profession relationship: The formation of the Greek auditing profession in the post-WWII era,” Emmanouil Dedoulis and Constantinos Caramanis argue that the Greek accounting profession emerged in a reconstructed society with a different structure than the United States or Britain despite American influence in the country in the late 1940s. In other words, the story of the emergence of the Greek accounting profession is one of resistance to Western influence and pressure. Dedoulis and Caramanis tell a story that is opposed to Serlin’s view of the West’s influence in postwar Japan: the Greeks resisted Western influence while a significant number of Japanese embraced Western practices and products as symbols of modernity and moving away from the shameful nationalism of before the war. Serlin shows how the bodies of the Japanese war victims were reconstructed by the same nation that damaged them in the first place, and argues that the way the bodies were rebuilt, through Western medicine, is particularly important. To Serlin, plastic surgery represented the triumph of Western influence in Japan. The plastic surgery of the Hiroshima Maidens reflected how Western science, technology, and medicine was viewed as superior to their Japanese counterparts as well as the influence of Western beauty standards on Japanese perceptions. In contrast to the very personal, individual reconstruction presented by Serlin, Dedoulis and Caramanis describe a much more societal, economic reconstruction. They argue that the Greek accounting industry was able to grow so differently from its American and British counterparts because the Greek model worked better for the Greek economy, and Greek accountants (as well as members of the Greek government with influence over the creation of the new industry) did not believe  the Western model to be superior in the Greek context. While Dedoulis and Caramanis and Serlin cover very different subjects, they are united in their examination of reconstruction as a product of Western influence. Rather than simply viewing reconstruction as numbers of homes rebuilt and steel produced, these scholars focus on the reconstruction of the society, and how the wars’ victors shaped these societies that they wielded so much influence over.