Japan After WWII Dower, John.

Japan after WWII

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton

Company, 1999.

Japan is now such a trusted ally of the United States, it is easy to forget that it was once America's bitter enemy during the first half of the 20th century. In John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), Dower portrays the Japanese reaction to the American occupation and demilitarization of Japan after V - J Day, a period of time that spanned a considerable length of time, from 1945 to 1952. Although Dower includes evidence from both Japanese and American historical records, and addresses both nations' perspectives, his focus is on the occupation as seen through Japanese eyes, to remedy existing deficits in literature in English on this period.

All too often, writes Dower, Japan and the Japanese experience has been seen as a monolith, especially in regards to its acceptance of American democratization efforts. Dower attempts to show the multiplicity of ideological and intellectual responses to the Japanese defeat and American democratization -- or American colonialization, in the eyes of some Japanese intellectuals. It should be noted, however that the Japanese government in part had fed this world image of Japanese total unity, as its propaganda espoused that the Japanese nation was made up of "one hundred million hearts beating as one" (Dower 59). In Japan, after the surrender, information about cruelty within the armed forces and other deflationary accounts quickly revealed the lie of this assertion of unity. But Americans seemed to take this concept more seriously than even many of the Japanese citizens after V-J Day. The concept of the Japanese as a homogeneous collective, in the thrall of obedience to the Emperor was appealing because it confirmed American concepts of Asia as alien, inscrutable, and passive to authority. "Much that lies at the heart of contemporary Japanese society -- the nature of its democracy, the intensity of popular feelings about pacifism and remilitarization, the manner in which the war is remembered (and forgotten) derives," Dower observes from this period of history, 'from the complexity of the interplay between the victors and the vanquished" that still characterizes the American relationship with Japan today (Dower 28). To understand modern Japan, it is essential to understand how Americans saw the Japanese, how the Japanese saw the Americans, and most importantly how the Japanese saw themselves.

At the beginning of the time of the occupation, perhaps the one common assertion a historian can make about the Japanese people is that they were dispirited and depressed from fighting for fourteen years. Cartoons from immediately after the surrender are caustic regarding the nation's leaders, depicting Japanese peasants resisting the atom bomb with home-made weapons. General MacArthur saw it as his duty to democratize Japan, to bring what he saw as the correct form of democracy to a supposed single-minded autocracy, a nation made up of subservient individuals. MacArthur, along with most Americans had focused on an essentialized view of Japanese culture that has its roots in an apparent cult of fanatical loyalty -- the examples of "patriotic suicides" during the war were particularly horrifying to the Americans (Dower 39). America's mission was thus to bring democracy to this new nation, for the sake of the Japanese and for the sake of American safety in the region, as a bulwark against further militarism and communism.

However, no matter how fervently the Americans might espouse democracy, they was also intent upon preserving the supposedly integral aspects of what was seen as the essential building-blocks of Japanese culture, like the Emperor, again taking the rhetoric of the Japanese seriously, as when it proclaimed "Our divine Japan, with a national polity that is unsurpassed in the world and a proud history of three thousand years" (Dower 189). The predominant line of thought amongst the Americans was that it would be best to condemn Tojo and preserve the figurehead of the Emperor to hold the nation together, for fear that doing away with the imperial system would be too great a shock to the Japanese. Yet the relationship of the Emperor Hirohito to the militaristic leaders of Japan was far more complex than might be initially suspected. Dower suggests that the Emperor was far more complicit in wartime actions than has been portrayed in the past, and that Japan's democratic tradition before the dominance of the military took hold of the government was and has been overlooked. The Japanese intellectuals who were embittered by the eventual system enforced by the Americans raged that rather than a true democracy, what came into being was "a charade" and instead of revolutionizing the Japanese consciousness the Americans merely set about reinforcing a colonial mentality (Dower 72).

Some real strides were made in undoing the damage that had been done over the years of military rule. Freedom of the press was now enshrined in law. Furthermore, women were given the right to vote. But democratization was not absolute -- all anti-American, including many leftist dissident voices were purged from the institutions of government. However, Americans tended to ignore the impositonal aspects of their rule and the Japanese, on the surface, complied with this notion rather than resisted. They seemed to accept this 'gift' of democracy, along with gifts of American cigarettes and chocolate. However, the genuine feelings of the Japanese people bubbling beneath the surface were far more pluralistic. In Dower's phrase, many different 'cultures of defeat' existed, including leftist, Marxist resistance.