Given my recent output, the title is a bit misleading. Buy there could be some synchronicity here; who knows?
Embracing Defeat is National Book Award winning, Pulitzer Prize winning 1999 book by John W. Dower. It seems to be the first book you come across when you go looking for a modern history (post-World War II) of Japan in English.
When I take a deep dive on a book, I’m going to include it in my TILF (Things I Learned From) series. Bigger books like this one will get broken up into multiple parts. Most of these posts will be for paying subscribers. But when I break a book into multiple parts, I’ll offer the first one for free.1 So without further adieu:
Introduction
The Introduction gives us a basic historical overview and outlines some core themes:
The tremendous rise and fall and rise of modern Japan. This is one of the qualities that makes modern Japan such a compelling case study. Japan becomes a major world power in less than a century, fails catastrophically in WWII, only to rise again, in a very improbable and unique way in the second half of the 20th century.
It a wild and compelling story on its own terms.
It also happens on a timeline that makes it a useful comp for the US. The Meiji Restoration happens three years after the end of the Civil War, and WWII looms large for both countries. They also emerge as two of the major economic powers in the world today. So, we have important shared experiences with tons of interesting differences.
The morally and practically complex relationship between the two countries during the occupation. This book represents my first time seriously considering these issues. So, I’m not in a great position to evaluate Dower’s claims. But I’m guessing this is a theme I’ll return to again and again.
The uniqueness of the moment and relationship. I’m generally skeptical of claims that any given experience is truly unique across the sweep of world history. But Dower thinks that the US occupation of Japan is such a moment.
Seeing the occupation as lived Japanese experience. It’s hard to argue with this as a goal, and it’s meant to undermine the focus on the US as victor imposing its will. Of course, that’s a big part of the story, but how this all plays out has a ton to do with how the Japanese people responded to their situation.
Part I: Victor and Vanquished
Chapter one: Shattered Lives
With US support, Emperor Hirohito is allowed to rehabilitate his reputation and distance himself from the disastrous war effort. In his famous radio address to the nation announcing the surrender, he says “my vital organs are torn asunder,” making himself one of the victims of a war he’d supported. Dower seems to agree with the conventional wisdom that allowing Hirohito to avoid responsibility was essential for maintaining continuity and giving the Japanese an opportunity to move past the horrors of WWII. These sorts of justice vs practicality conflicts will keep recurring, and seem inevitable in these sorts of contexts (ie how far will you take denazification, etc) (36).
A la Tony Judt’s Postwar (the European equivalent of this book), Dower catalogues the extent of the devastation. And as with Judt, it’s a powerful illustration of the unique horrors of WWII (at least in the modern world) and a sound corrective to contemporary catastrophizing (45).
For whatever reason, or maybe none at all, the rich even benefitted (relatively at least) from the US bombing campaign: “Wittingly or not, U.S. bombing policy, at least in the capital city, had tended to reaffirm existing hierarchies of fortune” (47).
The Soviets held on to Japanese POWs in part for communist indoctrination, which seems, in some cases, to have worked. Just an amazing footnote:
In November 1948, for example, and uproar occurred when Japanese repatriated from the Soviet Union on the ship Eiho Maru burst into Communist songs, delivered Communist speeches, and initially refused to cooperate with occupation authorities. Similar incidents occurred in June and July 1949.
I don’t know anything about these efforts but certainly an interesting and weird avenue for future research (52n27).
We have wide public support for lynching an officer. We have former soldiers, even from suicide squadrons, engaged in widespread looting. We have all the makings of a Tarantino film (59).
Chapter two: Gifts From Heaven
Famous cartoonist Katoo Etsuroo depicts democratic reforms as gifts from heaven. Dower describes his cartoons as “at once ironic and yet hopeful.” This sort of cautions optimism in the face of massive US intervention seems crazy in 2022, but seems to have been prevalent in 1945 Japan (67). This gives rise to the questions that will dominate throughout:
How did people actually feel?
Who was ultimately right?
Can a democratic revolution really be imposed from above?
How do we evaluate the US occupation, both in terms of intent and outcomes?
I’m no fan of US foreign policy, and Dower doesn’t seem pollyannish. But he does take a more nuanced and I’m inclined to join him, if only to test the propositions offered.
Even ardent communists supported US occupation (69). Apparently this would become a “point of embarrassment” for the communists during the Cold War. Still, how many people in Japan would have preferred casting their lot with the USSR?
The extent of US reforms really is shocking especially in retrospect. They included “promot[ing] labor unions and carry[ing] out a sweeping land-reform program” (76). Would that we had felt the people in Korea, Vietnam, and Latin America deserved the same treatment.
Dower argues that Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur played a unique and specific role in Japan (78-9). I’m always interested in where, if ever, specific individuals matter. MacArthur certainly seems like a wild character. Definitely someone worth delving into in both the Japanese and US context.
The reforms went even further, including widespread democratization and liberalization, although whatever idealism these efforts initially involved would be “devoured by the Cold War” (80-1).
Which gives way to my main concerns at the end of Part I. Was any liberal hope at the end of WWII a complete illusion? Or could things have come out differently? Some days I imagine a better outcome. This may be hopelessly romantic. Who knows?
This is what we call Marketing Mindset.
Even as someone with barely more than a passing interest in Japan, I'm excited for this. I'd be curious to see what lines of thought Dower picks up that might have foreshadowed Japan's current demographic and social challenges. Are anti-immigrant post-industrial states doomed?
Also, it's a movie that I know is too much for me, but there was a revisionist Japanese war movie called Caterpillar that may be of interest to you.