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Marc Gallicchio, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. By John W. Dower. (New York: Norton, 1999. 676 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-393-04686-9. Paper, $15.95, isbn 0-393- 32027-8.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1042–1044, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700406
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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.
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).
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.”
