Even though the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CIA supported) affiliated periodicals in the West such as Encounter have been fairly well documented, CCF periodicals in Asia such as Jiyu (Japan), Sasanggye (South Korea), Free China (Taiwan), Solidarity (Philippines) and Horison (Indonesia) are waiting for further scholarly examinations. People working for these periodicals worked in close collaboration with each other. Hoki Ishihara (1924-2017) was the chief editor of Jiyu in Japan, and his Chronicle of the Intellectuals in postwar Japan (1984) is a rich record of the Cultural Cold War in Asia, as it records the activities of such renowned CCF-affiliated people as Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Sionil Jose, Chang Chun Ha. This presentation , after briefly summarizing Ishihara's (controversial) life and works, argues for the necessity of an Asian network of documenting and analyzing CCF affiliated periodicals in Asia, for the purpose of achieving a deeper understanding in literature and publication culture in Cultural Cold War in Asia.

Momoko Ishii (1907–2008) is widely recognized as a distinguished writer and translator of children's literature, including the Winnie-the-Pooh series. Following World War II, she played a crucial role in modernizing children's literature in Japan. She pioneered the establishment of Children’s Bunko (home libraries) to promote access to modern children's literature and cultivate reading habits among young readers. However, her work has not been sufficiently examined within the broader context of Cold War cultural dynamics.

This paper explores Ishii’s engagement with Cold War cultural networks by analyzing her efforts to institutionalize children's literature in postwar Japan. In 1952, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she traveled across the United States to study library management, a trip facilitated by Japanese intellectual Shiho Sakanishi and numerous American librarians. Upon her return, Ishii co-founded the Home Library Research Group, which held regular meetings at the International House of Japan—an institution closely linked to the Rockefeller Foundation. Additionally, the group secured funding from the Asia Foundation to distribute basic book sets to newly established home libraries.

Through these initiatives, Ishii introduced innovative linguistic expressions for children’s literature, moving it away from its prewar function as a tool for moral instruction. Instead, she positioned children's books as a source of enjoyment in their own right. This shift aligned with the objectives of the Report of the United States Education Mission to Japan(1946, 1950), which sought to replace prewar moral education rooted in imperial ideology with postwar democratization efforts aimed at Japanese children. By situating Ishii’s contributions within these broader transnational frameworks, this study illuminates her role in shaping postwar Japanese children’s literature as part of Cold War cultural policy.

Tamizdat, or the practice of publishing banned works by Russian émigré or Soviet writers beyond the borders of the USSR, whether in the original form or translated into Western languages, has been identified as a significant phenomenon of the cultural Cold War. The dissemination of these literary works, particularly those that address contentious political or social issues, has been noted as a pivotal manifestation of the ideological and cultural tensions that characterized the geopolitical battle between the two superpowers and their allies in the late twentieth century. The most notable instance is Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, whose Italian translation was published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Milan a year before the CIA-funded Russian original version was clandestinely provided to Soviet tourists at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The aim of this paper is to recontextualize the process of establishing Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova (the Chekhov Publishing House, CPH), a subsidiary of the East European Fund (formerly known as the Free Russia Fund) directed by George F. Kennan with the aid of the Ford Foundation, and its publishing venture in New York as an earlier example of tamizdat than the Zhivago affair. The CPH publications encompassed a broad spectrum of literary genres, ranging from fiction (novels, short stories, drama, and poetry) to non-fiction, from the classics of the 19th century like Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Tyutchev, or Nikolai Leskov, to the translations of the contemporary literary and political works by British and American authors, such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918; Moya Antoniya, 1952) or Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (1948-53; Vtoraya Mirovaya Voyna, 1954). During the brief period spanning from 1952 to 1956, CPH released approximately 200 titles, including My (We, 1952), a novel by Evgeny Zamyatin first published in English by an American publisher in 1924, along with other unpublished texts by émigré writers whose works were no longer permissible for publication in the Soviet bloc due to their critical stance on the Kremlin. The CPH imprint and logo, which depict the Statue of Liberty emerging from a book, can be found in the bibliography of Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita (1955). A close examination of the publication history of three of Nabokov's Russian books — a novel, Dar (The Gift, 1952); an autobiography, Drugie berega (Other Shores, 1954); and a collection of short stories, Vesna v Fialte (Spring in Fialta, 1956) — illuminates his idiosyncratic position within the CPH's enterprise. This case study of Cold War publishing culture will demonstrate how geopolitical challenges played out in the search for a market for Russian émigré literature in the postwar American society.