Radicals and Realists is the first book in any language to discuss Japan's avant-garde artists, their work, and the historical environment in which they produced it during the two most creative decades of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 1960s. After surveying censorship and arts policy during the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952), the narrative divides into two chronological sections dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, bisected by the rise of an artistic underground in Shinjuku and the security treaty crisis of May 1960.