Drawing on decades of experience and research, John W. Dower, author of the award-winning "War Without Mercy," highlights for the first time the resemblances between wartime, postwar, and contemporary Japan. He argues persuasively that the origins of many of the institutions responsible for Japan's dominant position in today s global economy derive from the rapid military industrialization of the 1930s, and not from the post-occupation period, as many have assumed. A brilliant lead essay, The Useful War, sets the tone for the volume by incisively showing how much of Japan s postwar political...

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning...

These questions form the basis of a wide-ranging inquiry held recently at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and recorded inPeace with China? Government officials candidly discuss emerging foreign policies. Former members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations analyze the political and military realities as they saw them. Finally, critics of America's actions in Asia--including spokemen for New Left and revisionist positions--contribute their viewpoints and alternatives. The result is a unique scrutiny of the complex processes by which the White House, State...

Historian John W. Dower s celebrated investigations into modern Japanese history, World War II, and U.S. Japanese relations have earned him critical accolades and numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize. Now Dower returns to the major themes of his groundbreaking work, examining American and Japanese perceptions of key moments in their shared history.
Both provocative and probing, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering delves into a range of subjects, including the complex role of racism on both sides of the Pacific War, the...

In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution. The Only Woman in the Room chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitution; how she almost single-handedly ensured that it would establish the rights of Japanese women; and how, as a fluent speaker of Japanese and the only woman in the room, she assisted the American negotiators as they worked to persuade the Japanese to accept the new charter.

Sirota was born in Vienna, but in 1929 her family moved to...

This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka's case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He traces the fate of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers who were shot...

This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka's case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He traces the fate of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers who were shot...