Embracing Defeat

 Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower is a nonfiction history of the end of WWII with the Japanese, and the reconstruction of Japan under far different circumstances than existed in Europe. Dower is a well-recognized scholar of the war and its impact on Japan. The book, published in 1999, is a very detailed analysis of the incredible chaos that Japanese society faced with the collapse of the Japanese empire in August 1945. (This book is a follow-up to my review of Dower’s 1986 book entitled War Without Mercy.) The U.S. had been firebombing 66 Japanese cities to the point of near total destruction, and then there were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war’s toll on the general population of Japan was horrible. In addition to the death of Japan’s soldiers, there were also perhaps two million Japanese soldiers that were stranded throughout the Asian theater of war which consisted of China, Formosa, the Philippines, southeast Asia, and many remote Pacific islands. It took years for those people to be repatriated to Japan and many never made it back to their home island.

 

It should be remembered that until 1862 when Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay that the Japanese society had been nearly closed to all Western influence, except for the Portuguese and Jesuit influence. Essentially, it had been a feudal society for centuries, first under the Shoguns and then under the Emperors (there were just four in the post Shogunate era). It was after the Japanese defeat of the Chinese in the last decade of the 19^th century and then their defeat of the Russians in the first decade of the 20^th century which led to a rise of militarism and a mistaken belief in their invincibility. It was Japan’s miscalculation of its own power that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That attack was the beginning of a grandiose plan to extend their own resourceless island’s reach throughout Asia, if not even further. Neither Japanese leaders nor the citizenry were prepared to accept their unconditional defeat.

 

Unlike the post WWII situation in Europe where the Allied powers split up the conquered territories, the U.S. was the only such victorious power in Japan, and it was the U.S. that occupied Japan formally until 1952. General MacArthur was given the primary control of the occupation, and just as the Japanese had essentially hero worshipped their Shoguns and Emperors, the generally wise leadership of MacArthur led to such status for him. It was also his task to impose democracy on the populace, although there was clearly a hypocritical position to essentially have a dictator impose such. There were many such contradictions and double standards which the Japanese seemed to endure from the Americans as recovery from the war continued.

 

It was the Korean War that had a favorable impact on the Japanese economy as the U.S. turned to them to provide supplies for the war, but of course the Korean War also led to MacArthur’s dismissal by President Truman for insubordination. Despite the termination of MacArthur’s military career, he left Japan as a hero, and he was seen as such by much of the Republican party upon his arrival back in the U.S.

 

Along with economic uncertainty through the years after the war, the society as a whole was in turmoil. After having lived with minimal freedom under the Shoguns and Emperors, open freedom was something most Japanese had never experienced and there were many bumps in the road. Embracing Defeat was a remarkably well-researched book, and although I’ve had an interest in Japan for many decades, there were themes in this book that I had not previously considered. Many of those themes have not been mentioned in this brief review. If this topic of interest to you, then I invite you to read this masterpiece of scholarship about the war’s aftermath.