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Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (平装)
by John W. Dower
| Category:
Japanese history, World War II, Asian history |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
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¥ 208.00
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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Amazon.com (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
Embracing Defeat tells the story of the transformation of Japan under American occupation after World War II. When Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces in August 1945, it was exhausted; where America's Pacific combat lasted less than four years, Japan had been fighting for 15. Sixty percent of its urban area lay in ruins. The collapse of the authoritarian state enabled America's six-year occupation to set Japan in entirely new directions.
Because the victors had no linguistic or cultural access to the losers' society, they were obliged to govern indirectly. Gen. Douglas MacArthur decided at the outset to maintain the civil bureaucracy and the institution of the emperor: democracy would be imposed from above in what the author terms "Neocolonial Revolution." His description of the manipulation of public opinion, as a wedge was driven between the discredited militarists and Emperor Hirohito, is especially fascinating. Tojo, on trial for his life, was requested to take responsibility for the war and deflect it from the emperor; he did, and was hanged. Dower's analysis of popular Japanese culture of the period--songs, magazines, advertising, even jokes - is brilliant, and reflected in the book's 80 well-chosen photographs. With the same masterful control of voluminous material and clear writing that he gave us in War Without Mercy, the author paints a vivid picture of a society in extremis and reconstructs the extraordinary period during which America molded a traumatized country into a free-market democracy and bulwark against resurgent world communism. -John Stevenson -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
The writing of history doesn't get much better than this. MIT professor Dower (author of the NBCC Award-winning War Without Mercy) offers a dazzling political and social history of how postwar Japan evolved with stunning speed into a unique hybrid of Western innovation and Japanese tradition. The American occupation of Japan (1945-1952) saw the once fiercely militarist island nation transformed into a democracy constitutionally prohibited from deploying military forces abroad. The occupation was fraught with irony as Americans, motivated by what they saw as their Christian duty to uplift a barbarian race, attempted to impose democracy through autocratic military rule. Dower manages to convey the full extent of both American self-righteousness and visionary idealism. The first years of occupation saw the extension of rights to women, organized labor and other previously excluded groups. Later, the exigencies of the emergent Cold War led to American-backed "anti-Red" purges, pro-business policies and the partial reconstruction of the Japanese military. Dower demonstrates an impressive mastery of voluminous sources, both American and Japanese, and he deftly situates the political story within a rich cultural context. His digressions into Japanese cultureAhigh and low, elite and popularAare revealing and extremely well written. The book is most remarkable, however, for the way Dower judiciously explores the complex moral and political issues raised by America's effort to rebuild and refashion a defeated adversaryAand Japan's ambivalent response to that embrace. Illustrations.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Library Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
Dower's magisterial narrative eloquently tells the story of the postwar occupation of Japan by departing from the usual practice of making the story part of General MacArthur's biography and instead focusing on the citizens. With historical sweep and cultural nuance, and using numerous personal stories of survival, loss, and rededication, he follows the astonishing social transformation of a people. (LJ 4/1/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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J. A. A. Stockwin, New York Times Book Review, USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
A magisterial and beautifully written book. . . A pleasure to read.
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Jacob Heilbrunn, Wall Street Journal, USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
An extraordinarily illuminating book. . . Surely the most significant work to date on the postwar era in Japan.
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T. R. Reid, Washington Post, USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
A marvelous piece of reporting and analysis.
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Kirkus Reviews (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
An NBCC award winner and expert in the modern history of Japan, Dower (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology; Japan in War and Peace, 1994; War Without Mercy, 1986) absorbingly explains how American forces imposed a revolution from above in six years of occupation that transformed imperial Japan into a democracy. As WWII ended, Japan had lost three million dead, with many more wounded, starving, homeless, and demoralized. Dower has drawn effectively on Japanese academic, archival, and popular sources to capture the atmosphere of flux and uncertainty that followed surrender, including suicidal despair, gratitude toward generous GIs, black-market entrepreneurship, prostitution, and the unleashing of creative energy. The most important change, of course, occurred in politics. In a root-and-branch attempt to destroy Japans militaristic culture, the Americans created a constitution that limited the emperor to a symbolic head of state, renounced war as an instrument of settling international disputes, and established such reforms as sexual equality, greater freedom of speech and press, an end to the Shinto state religion, and a free labor movement. Written in six days, the constitution set the stage for unprecedented Japanese freedom, equality, and prosperity. For all their idealism, however, the American forces also acted with little knowledge of Japanese history, censored criticism of the occupation, and treated the losers with condescension. In the Far East counterpart to the Nuremberg trials, American prosecutors excluded testimony about Emperor Hirohitos responsibility for war crimes and fed the nations sense of its victimization without forcing a realization of its culpability for atrocities committed against other Asians. In the greatest irony, by promoting such bureaucratic structures as the Ministry of Trade and Industry, MacArthur merely replaced his own mandarinate with a Japanese version. A turning point in Japanese history, illuminated through diligent research and piercing insight. (80 b&w photos) - Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Stephen E. Ambrose (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
[Dower is] America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific. |
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Andrew Gordon, Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
Long in preparation, Embracing Defeat was worth the wait. Dower's research is extraordinarily deep and broad. His tone is at times ironic and amused, and at times is impassioned and angry. The writing is clear and gripping. The result is the finest work in English and perhaps in any language on the political and cultural history of Japan in the wake of the most destructive war in modern history.
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Carol Gluck, Columbia University, USA
<2008-02-19 00:00>
Dower has captured the spirit of the postwar Occupation of Japan in a cinematic narrative that brings the period to life... Never flinching before the ironies of a victorious United States which imposed democracy on a vanquished Japan which embraced defeat, Dower presents the outcome as a 'hybrid Japanese-American model' that combined neocolonial revolution with imperial democracy to produce the Japan we know today. An epic of a book.
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