Customer Reviews

Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

John Dower is the outstanding figure in the field of cold war, especially in Japan. His Pulitzer awarded book, 'Embracing Defeat', could be regarded as the cream of his career. If you read it already, you don't need to pick up this, I think. This book is no more than a collection of essays. So you chould not expect any integrity among papers. You'd better select essay to your needs. Sure, the quality of essays is not bad.

John Dower's Embracing Defeat is one of the best history books I've ever read. This earlier essay collection, which covers some of the same territory, is a disappointment by contrast. Dower is always an insightful guide to modern Japanese culture and politics. Among other things, he makes an interesting comparison here between U.S. and Japanese wartime cinema; offers a moving assessment of Japan's Atomic Bomb art; and inveighs repeatedly and passionately against what he fears is a resurgence of racism in America and ultra-nationalism in Japan. The book feels dated, though. Dower wrote most of these essays at a time when Japan appeared to be overtaking the United States economically, fueling resentment in America and arrogance in Japan. Now that Japan has endured a decade of economic stagnation and the U.S. has reemerged as the engine of global growth, Dower's concerns seem overblown (though, to be fair, they were widely shared at the time - and may return one day). More troubling, he is hypersensitive and defensive about anything he sees as a slight against Japan. Dower labors to disprove the notion that the Japanese are robotic drones who can't think for themselves. He certainly shows that the conformist label is exaggerated and simplistic. But he sometimes strains to make his point. For example, Dower attempts to unearth signs of grassroots resistance to the militaristic rule that led Japan (and much of the world) to bloody disaster in the 1930s and `40s. He notes, for example, that police investigated more than 2,000 rumors in Tokyo between 1941 and 1945. I think my own workplace produces rumors at a faster pace than that. Given the magnitude of the militarists' folly and the agony they caused in Japan, it strikes me as staggering that no one seriously tried to stop them. A low-level whispering campaign, a few furtive communists scribbling anti-Emperor graffiti and some unhappy factory workers calling in sick just don't cut it.

While the topics included within this book are facinating, I found the author's writing style very hard to follow. Each essay seemed a disjointed stream of facts just as if this was an early draft waiting to be pieced together.If I were to grade this academic's work, he'd get a C-.

What's most surprising is that the author's other book on a similar topic is "Embracing Defeat" which is a good read and I definitely recommend.