Embracing Defeat

Product Description Discusses the immediate aftermath of WW2. Illuminates how shattering defeat followed by over 6 years of Amer. military occupation affected every level of Japanese society in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. Vividly portrays the countless ways in which Japanese met the challenge of starting over — from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, & activities of ordinary men & women in every walk of life. A fascinating portrait of an extraordinary moment in history, when new values warred with old & early ideals of demilitarization & radical reform were soon challenged by the U.S.’s decision to incorporate Japan into the Cold War Pax Americana. National Book Award Winner. Photos. Amazon.com Review 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 From the Publisher Embracing Defeat has been named a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award in Nonfiction. About the Author 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. From Kirkus Reviews 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 th