The use of atomic bombs against Japan was emblematic of the technological and material supremacy of the United States in mid-century as its productive capacities and human resources were mobilized for total war. From one perspective, the atomic attacks could be seen as heralding a period of American ascendancy in Asia and the Pacific, as the United States, its global power and reach obvious to all, took the lead role in occupying Japan and then overseeing the restoration of the Japanese economy following the reverse course of 1947–8. Victory over Japan had coincided with high hopes that with US leadership it would prove possible to forge ‘One World’, where American values would be universally acclaimed and the international system refashioned in its own image. Instead, during the decade that followed, the Cold War preoccupations of policy-makers in Washington had often carried little resonance for indigenous Asian peoples and governments coping with a very different agenda, and where perceptions of the United States were not always positive. Moreover, one of the most significant and far-reaching consequences of the Second World War was to raise the saliency of the issue of race, which was now increasingly operating in a transnational fashion, breaking down the traditional distinctions maintained between domestic and international contexts. In its immediate setting, the dropping of the bomb in 1945 had done much to drown out Japan's wartime rallying call of ‘Asia for the Asians’ and its challenge to Western influence.