Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
John W. Dower
Language: English
Pages: 688
ISBN: 0393320278
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.
Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order. John W. Dower is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for War Without Mercy. 75 illustrations and map
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Witnessed GHQ’s increasingly frenzied campaign against the left at first hand as an editor of Kaizō, it was not until the occupation authorities actually left in early 1952 that a “renaissance of democratic journalism” was possible—an open, springlike atmosphere comparable, indeed, with the early stages of the occupation.73 Among other things, only then was it possible to discuss the occupation itself frankly. The deeper legacies of this censored democracy transcended ideology. Can anyone really.
“Japan crowd” and “China crowd” in Washington as World War II came to an end. 7. Kades (1986), p. 288; TOT/RP 1:366–370; PRJ 1:106. GHQ’s deadline was subsequently extended to February 22. 8. The key Japanese source on these cabinet meetings is the diary of Ashida Hitoshi, which was not published until 1986; see Ashida Hitoshi Nikki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 1:77 (February 19, 1946). In 1954, Matsumoto publicly presented a harsher version of Whitney’s position, claiming that the general had said.
Reflect the rebirth and transformation of the best of old traditions. Kōsaka’s essay is reprinted in Hidaka, pp. 60–63. 31. PM, p. lvii, lxi-lxii, 281. The flower metaphor is noted in Japan Christian Quarterly, op. cit., pp. 137, 142. 32. PM, pp. 261, 278–79. 33. See, for example, PM, pp. Ixii, 263–65, 291. Tanabe developed the argument for “social democracy” in an important article entitled “The Urgent Task of Political Philosophy,” published in March 1946, the month before Zangedō to shite.
In such goods referred to them among themselves as oshaka—a ghoulishly pious reference, for shaka refers to the Buddha or buddhas.35 By October 1945, an estimated seventeen thousand open-air markets had blossomed nationwide, mostly in the larger cities. Only months later, there were many as seventy-six thousand stalls, each averaging over forty customers a day, in Tokyo’s numerous markets alone. With this came organizational rationalization, a sometimes brutal process commonly led by yakuza.
Exceptional times. He served a popular need for icons of Japanese suffering on the one hand and symbols of hope on the other. From the liberal or leftist perspective, Ozaki, like 2 million fighting men and hundreds of thousands of civilians, had been sacrificed by a murderous, militarist state. Less important than the precise identity of the victimizer, however, was the sense of being victimized. In the years to come, Ozaki’s wife and daughter would both be active and effective in keeping his.