Faubion Bowers (29 January 1917-17 November 1999) was an American academic and writer who served as an aide to General Douglas MacArthur during the Allied occupation of Japan.
Biography[]
Faubion Bowers was born in Miami, Oklahoma on 29 January 1917, and he taught at Hosei University in Tokyo from 1940 to 1941. After the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II in August 1945, Bowers served as the interpreter for an advance party of 150 US Army personnel who flew into the Atsugi airfield on 28 August 1945 to initiate the Allied occupation of Japan, and he became General Douglas MacArthur's own interpreter. While serving as an official censor for Japanese theater, he became its champion, opposing SCAP's belief that kabuki should be banned for promoting feudal values and arguing that kabuki was not just Japanese culture, but world culture, and should be preserved for the future. Later, he returned to the United States and became an academic at the New School for Social Research and at Kansas University, and he published a book called Japanese Theatre in 1952. He died in New York City in 1999.