| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

James J. Orr. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2001. Pp. viii, 271. $22.95.

Any discussion of Japan's responsibility for World War II must confront the heartfelt belief of many Japanese that they too, like their Asian neighbors, were victims of the conflict. As James J. Orr's solid monograph demonstrates, this "victim consciousness" arose even before surrender in August 1945, and it was earnestly abetted by Occupation authorities during 1945–1952. The Americans held the emperor and his people blameless while finding Japan's military leadership culpable of armed aggression against China, Southeast Asia, and the Western Allies. Orr concludes that the American decision to release the Japanese public at large "from guilt consciousness was an important component of the more self-indulgent forms of victim consciousness" (p. 32) and hence diminished people's subjective agency. 1

Specific awareness of their status as the only people to be victimized by operational atomic bombings spread among the general public more fully in the mid-1950s, when more than thirty million Japanese signed petitions calling on all nations to ban atomic and hydrogen weapons. Amid the fiercely partisan political battles of the late 1950s, ban-the-bomb pacifism won support from left, right, and center, perhaps softening "the rigidly oppositional stances in Japanese political life" and "making antinuclear pacifism—indeed, pacifism itself—into a viable conservative, even patriotic position" (p. 70). . . .

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