Embracing Defeat
by John W. Dower
Summary
Embracing Defeat is the history of Japan in the seven years after its surrender, 1945 to 1952, and it is that rarest of prize sweepers, a scholarly masterpiece that reads like life. John Dower's subject is not the American occupation as Washington saw it but defeat as the Japanese lived it, and he builds the book from the bottom up, out of letters, diaries, photographs, cartoons, pulp magazines, and songs: the starving cities and the black markets that fed them, the panpan girls who serviced the conquerors and became defeat's most visible symbol, the demobilized soldiers returning to contempt, the kasutori culture of cheap intoxication and pulp eroticism that bloomed in the ruins, and the extraordinary energy with which ordinary people, out of exhaustion and hope at once, embraced the defeat of the title and remade themselves. Over this teeming ground Dower sets the high politics with equal command: MacArthur's viceroyalty, the decision to save Hirohito from the Tokyo trials and the moral fog that choice institutionalized, the new constitution drafted in a week by young Americans and made genuinely Japanese by the people who took its promises seriously, the censorship that forbade mention of itself, and the reverse course as the Cold War turned the occupation conservative. The book won the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and the Bancroft Prize, virtually every major honor available, and it stands as the definitive account of how a militarized empire became a democracy, with every cost and irony counted.
Historical Context & Significance
Dower wrote as the fiftieth anniversaries of the war's end forced both countries back over the record, and after his War Without Mercy had documented the racial hatreds of the Pacific war; Embracing Defeat answered it with what came after. The prize sweep across 1999 and 2000 made it that rare academic history with a mass readership, in Japan as well as America, where its unsparing account of the emperor's exemption stirred real debate. It became the inevitable reference when Americans next occupied a defeated country, cited constantly, and mostly in vain, during the Iraq occupation debates a few years later, when planners reached for the Japanese precedent and historians reached for Dower to explain why it would not transfer.