Japan in War & Peace - Softcover

Dower, John W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006863469 ISBN 13: 9780006863465

Publisher: Fontana, 1996

Synopsis

More than any historian of his generation, John Dower has changed the way we view our relations with Japan. In his prize-winning War Without Mercy, Dower showed the depth of the racial antagonism that gave the war in the Pacific its particularly violent and brutal tone. In Japan in War and Peace, he examines unexplored continuities and connections in Japanese politics, economics, and society at large.
Drawing on decades of experience and research, Dower highlights 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. The brilliant lead essay, "The Useful War," sets the tone for the volume by incisively showing how much of Japan's postwar political and economic structure was prefigured in the wartime organization of that country.
Japan in War and Peace goes beyond the popular images of Japanese culture - whether the idea of the "fanatical nation at war" or the mystified vision of a postwar "economic miracle" - to examine the tensions within Japanese society that have shaped its outlook toward the rest of Asia and the West. These pathbreaking essays also deal with such subjects as Japanese wartime cinema, Japan's own hapless attempts to build an atomic bomb, the social upheaval revealed in the secret wartime records of the Thought Police, and the dynamics of the postwar U.S. Occupation of Japan.
Dower's final essays frankly discuss the stereotypes that Japan and the United States used to demonize each other during the war, which to this day play a role in their relations as allies.
This new book from one of the foremost American observers of contemporary Japan is essential reading for all people attempting to understand a nation that has emerged as one of the superpowers in a fast-changing world.

About this title

About the Author:

John W. Dower is the Henry Luce Professor of International Cooperation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Here, Dower (War Without Mercy, 1986, etc.) offers a collection of essays on Japan and its complex relations with the US over the past half century--a period that roughly corresponds to the reign of Emperor Hirohito. While most of the pieces have been previously published in academic journals, they afford accessible perspectives that go provocatively against the grain of received wisdom on a nation whose economic accomplishments have set the West scrambling for explanations--and scapegoats. Drawing on a host of nontraditional sources (cartoons, movies, rumors, subversive graffiti, and other aspects of popular culture or public opinion), Dower offers a decidedly contrarian appraisal of the Asian powerhouse. He sets the tone in his lead piece, ``The Useful War,'' which makes a persuasive case that the estimable enterprise and productivity of Japan's business establishment dates back to the early stages of WW II, when the military was in charge, and not to the postwar era, during which Allied occupation forces introduced democratic reforms. Nor does the author put much stock in either community or consensus theory: From the 1931 Manchurian Incident through the height of WW II and beyond, he shows that potential revolutionary dissent, tension, and turmoil have been hallmarks of Japan's putatively harmonious society. Covered as well are grassroots perceptions of the atomic bomb; the desultory efforts of Japan's armed services to develop nuclear weapons prior to V-J Day; the policies of ex-P.M. Shigeru Toshida (who made subordinate independence a keystone of his country's foreign policy); and the role that racial antagonisms still play when Tokyo and Washington seek to do business with one another. Challenging views of a land whose industrial and sociopolitical institutions may well defy conventional analysis. (Profusely illustrated throughout with line drawings, stills from propaganda films, political cartoons, and posters, as well as a wealth of tabular material) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fontana
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0006863469
• ISBN 13: 9780006863465
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352