Book Review

John W. Dower's acclaimed study of the Japanese experience during the American occupation is a richly detailed and fascinating study of Japanese society in the wake of World War II. It is also the best and most original synthesis of Japanese and American scholarship on the American occupation of Japan.	1
Dower is best known to American historians for his War without Mercy (1986), an analysis of racial prejudice in the Pacific war. Embracing Defeat carries some of the themes of that work into the postwar period, but it also revisits questions about the relationship between war and modernization in Japan that Dower has explored in his earlier work on Japanese history. Of special note are his Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (1979) and Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1993).	2
Embracing Defeat differs from those works, however, by shifting the focus away from elite politics and directing it toward the everyday experience of the millions of Japanese who coped with defeat and American rule during the occupation. Here he seeks "to capture what it meant to start over in a ruined world by recovering the voices of people at all levels of society."	3
Depending on one's point of view at the time, Japan's military collapse resulted in either an alarming breakdown of social cohesion or an exhilarating liberation from government restraints. As Dower shows, Japanese behavior in defeat defied Western stereotypes of the Japanese as undifferentiated members of an "obedient herd." Japanese from all walks of life engaged in black marketeering and price gouging. Official corruption was especially severe. But grass-roots organizations, formerly outlawed political parties, and labor unions also flourished.	4
Eschewing monolithic descriptions of Japanese society, Dower identifies many different "cultures of defeat." Intellectuals often embraced Marxism as a way of explaining Japan's descent into fascism. Writers and artists embraced a more dissolute culture of hedonism and iconoclasm. Thousands of desperate women and girls encountered the conquerors in what the anthropologist Sheila Johnson has called the "sexual nexus" of bars and brothels. The impact of total defeat and the shattering of wartime regimentation also encouraged a lively public discussion of such profound subjects as love, culture, and the definition of a good society. Eventually these debates produced a consensus centered on the twin ideals of peace and democracy.	5
The second half of the book covers the more familiar story of occupation policies and their reception by the Japanese. Throughout, Dower is especially concerned with showing how Japanese influenced the creation of those policies and shaped their implementation.	6
Dower views the American occupation as an incomplete revolution hampered by a contradictory impulse to impose democracy from above. From the start, the Americans made choices that hindered their more liberal reforms and contributed to the entrenchment of bureaucratic power in postwar Japan. The most important of those choices was to preserve the emperor and, as one American put it, use him as a "force for good" once Japan was completely defeated.	. . .