Review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower

*Embracing Defeat* by John W. Dower (1999). Published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Despite being someone who has started increasingly specializing in Asian history, I am quite to ashamed I had not heard of John Dower. I was wandering the minuscule history section of my library when I spotted this book among the Japanese history books, and, after reading the back cover and seeing that it had some won awards, I decided to check it out.

I then posted it on my Instagram story one day and all the fellow kids I knew who were big on Asian policy in East Asia and history were all messaging me saying that they loved John Dower.

Then I headed into my independent study professor’s office for our bi-weekly meeting and realized that right there, in the center, he had a copy of Embracing Defeat. I swear this book has pretty much just been following me at this point.

It took me a hot minute to get through this one because of the content, but I think it was a very good read for people who are dabbling in this era of history. Granted, I specialize in Korean colonial period, but it fascinating to see how Japan recouped their losses after the war.

Onwards with the review!

A searing glimpse into Japan immediately after World War II.

Before I get too deep into this, Embracing Defeat is one monster of a big. It clocks in at almost seven hundred pages by the end, and while a good chunk of it tends to be the bibliography, but because of how depressing the content can be, you’re going to get somewhat depressed while you’re reading this.

As Dower shows in the book, post-war Japan was not the most pleasant place to be in if you were not a higher level official or buddies with the American occupiers. There was a ton of starvation in this period, and the government and newspapers were literally putting out adverts on how to make dishes with things you really shouldn’t be eating.

One of the more prominent examples to me was how a respected individual in the Japanese academic community was revealed to have starved to death despite having the prestige of being a well-known figure.

Then there are many of the people who are not so fortunate depicted throughout the book, whether they’re mothers trying to scrape by or the various street orphans who lost their parents in one of a myriad of ways. This isn’t a book told from the perspective of the Americans—it’s all about the Japanese who were living and struggling during this time.

Soldiers become a bigger focus in the book as well, as there was immense stigma when the Japanese troops came back home. They were seen as people who failed in their mission, and Dower describes how many veterans were reduced to begging and barely scraping by in order to survive after the war.

Forget about if you were disabled—there were many veterans who were struggling and disabled that just couldn’t hang on because they came into a society that didn’t want to acknowledge their existence. And even if they did, there were probably not enough resources to hand around.

Dower organizes the sections of the book by theme, and then dwells on different aspects of that theme and their manifestations.

I had to take a week-long break from the book when I landed on the censorship section when it came to the arts and literature, and there were mentions about how pornographic and erotica became more mainstream conventions, especially as Japanese brothels began to open catering towards the American men (despite the rampant STDs going around because of the soldiers).

I’d been reading for several days straight up until that point, and it began to hit me about how messed up a lot of what was happening was. It wasn’t the refugee camps when reality began to set in for me, or the drugs and gangs. It was the literature and cinema of the era that smashed reality into my skull.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a fascinating read, and I will be purchasing a personal copy for my collection so I can allow the info to sink in. You won’t want this one as a library book if you’re genuinely fascinated about the period because of the sheer amount of information that Dower is packing into the book.

I was wishing I could highlight, but it was unfortunately a library copy I had. Definitely take your time with this one and revisit as needed because of how dense it can be, especially if you’re not used to academic texts.

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