This study analyzes the complex interplay of various cultural forces in Japan during the American occupation after World War II, using the theatrical arts as a microcosm. Three important elements are examined that dominated the cultural scene in post-World War II Japan in order to analyze how the Japanese identity was reshape d. First, it was the recently inimical Americans who helped guide Japan toward achieving a Ne w Japan by encouraging the Americanization of Japanese administrative systems, social values, and popular culture. Second, by way of responding to total defeat and once again instilling national pride, the Japanese government strongly encouraged the arts. Third and finally, some unintended effects arose from state-sponsored programs because the wartime experience provided postwar models for Japanese leftist intellectuals and laborers, who presented their own vision of a new Japan as an ideal to help liberate the working class and encouraged the development of political and labor group activities. In the end, neither Communism nor Americanization won out, and a distinctively Japanese culture was reborn. Thus, contrary to what some have asserted, although American culture was popular, the Japanese did not suddenly embrace it after the war. Rather, depending on American support and building on their own arts organizations maintained during the war, they successfully fended off Communism and restored a strong and distinctively Japanese culture. Japanese cultural policy makers, the occupation forces, profit-seeking commercial groups, and leftist-led theaters sometimes collaborated and sometimes clashed during the process of nationwide cultural renovation.