Embracing Defeat is an outstanding book, offering the most thorough treatment in any language of Japanese politics, society, and culture in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. John Dower leaves few questions unexplored as he probes deeply into the ways in which the Japanese struggled to come to terms with their nation's defeat. Too often the story has been presented through the lens of the US occupation of Japan, but in this book it is Japanese people, not occupation personnel, who emerge as principal actors and definers of their destiny.... A worthy sequel to Dower's monumental history of the Pacific War, War Without Mercy.
-- Akira Iriye, Harvard University, author of After Imperialism
An extraordinarily illuminating book. . . . Surely the most significant work to date on the postwar era in Japan.
-- Jacob Heilbrunn, Wall Street Journal
Dower has captured the spirit of the postwar Occupation of Japan in a cinematic narrative that brings the period to life.... Never flinching before the ironies of a victorious United States which imposed democracy on a vanquished Japan which embraced defeat, Dower presents the outcome as a 'hybrid Japanese-American model' that combined neocolonial revolution with imperial democracy to produce the Japan we know today. An epic of a book.
-- Carol Gluck, Columbia University
Long in preparation, Embracing Defeat was worth the wait. Dower's research is extraordinarily deep and broad. His tone is at times ironic and amused, and at times is impassioned and angry. The writing is clear and gripping. The result is the finest work in English and perhaps in any language on the political and cultural history of Japan in the wake of the most destructive war in modern history.
-- Andrew Gordon, Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University
[Dower is] America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific. -- Stephen E. Ambrose
Embracing Defeat
Japan in the Wake of World War II
paperback
$15.95
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.
A magisterial and beautifully written book. . . . A pleasure to read.
-- J. A. A. Stockwin, New York Times Book Review
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 the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.
John W. Dower is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for War Without Mercy.
History
Spring 2000
paperback
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 688 pages
978-0-39332-027-5
Spring 2000
paperback
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 688 pages
978-0-39332-027-5
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