Reviews for Japan, the United States and a Changing Southeast Asia

The average rating for Japan, the United States and a Changing Southeast Asia based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-27 00:00:00 Kelly Nash "Such an audacious undertaking by victors in war had no legal or historical precedent. With a minimum of rumination about the legality or propriety of such an undertaking, the Americans set about doing what no other occupation force had done before: remaking the political, social, cultural, and economic fabric of a defeated nation, and in the process changing the very way of thinking of its populace…" - John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II While I have ready plenty of books about the Second World War's Pacific Theater, I will be the first to admit that my studies have - for the most part - ended with the twin atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, a gap appears in my knowledge, a gap that doesn't really end until the Korean War picks up in 1950. Now, I'm not entirely ignorant. It's just that my understanding is made up of bits and pieces, of half-comprehended fragments. Obviously, I know that Japan was occupied by the United States. I also know that the occupation was dominated by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Douglas MacArthur, playing the role for which he was born (to wit: God). This thin grasp has left me with the impression that the occupation was a net positive, bringing Japan back into the family of nations after embarking on a series of murderous endeavors beginning as far back as 1931. When we think of Japan today, the ghosts of Nanking are mostly absent, having been replaced by Japan's status as a place of peace, of technological innovation, and of economic robustness. When I went looking for a book to provide a fuller, more complete story, I did not have to search long or hard. John Dower's Embracing Defeat is the history on postwar Japan. Dower is a noted historian of the Pacific War, and Embracing Defeat is his opus. Published in 1999, it cleaned up on the literary awards circuit, winning both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. At 576 pages of text (and 83 pages of annotated endnotes), it strives for comprehensiveness. The ambition is admirable, but ultimately self-defeating. Embracing Defeat is a very good volume that - to paraphrase Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring - gets stretched, "like butter scraped over too much bread." In structuring this tale, the most obvious thing Dower could have done was sort the material chronologically, resting the narrative on the shoulders of the larger-than-life MacArthur. This would not have made for an uninteresting book. MacArthur, to quote one of his biographers, "was a thundering paradox of a man," as endlessly fascinating as any other historical figure who ever lived. More than that, many of his impulses as SCAP were correct (even if Dower might disagree), and he left Japan as a hero to many. But Dower is not interested in making this MacArthur's story (or rather, another in a long line of MacArthur stories). To his credit, he aims to write from the perspective of the Japanese. His goal - as impossible as it sounds - is to distill a traumatic national experience. Dower tries to imagine what it felt like to go from being the ascendant conqueror to being utterly vanquished. He attempts to describe what it was like to have a foreign culture try to remake your own. We know that Japan managed to survive, and eventually thrive, with many of its cities in ashes, and millions of its people dead. Dower tries to explain this process. The upshot of leaving MacArthur mostly on the sidelines (I do not mean to imply that he is not present, because he is, and has to be; he just isn't the center of attention), is that Dower takes a subject-matter oriented approach. Rather than follow a strict timeline, each individual chapter - which is further broken into numerous subsections - discusses a particular topic or theme. In my experience, thematically-arranged books can sometimes lack consistency, because certain focal areas are more interesting than others. This holds true in this case. For me, the best parts of Embracing Defeat came early, when Dower describes the "ordinary" lives of the Japanese living in the aftermath of nuclear destruction, fire-bombings, and the realization that the world held them responsible for the deaths of untold millions. The scenes of near-famine are startling, while the repatriation of millions of defeated soldiers - and the way they were received - is fascinating. Equally good is Dower's description of the drafting of the 1946 Constitution, written by a committee from SCAP headquarters over the course of a week. Dower has a lot of issues with the document, but it has endured. Dower also makes a rather forceful argument for the war-guilt of Emperor Hirohito, who was protected by SCAP and allowed to remain as a symbolic presence, even as the U.S. attempted to democratize Japan. Dower is a fine writer, leavening his prose with a dry, understated wit. This style is particularly suited for the inevitable clash of cultures as East met West. This material can be pretty heavy, so it's nice when Dower can find the humor in an entrepreneur who published a runaway bestseller by rushing a Japanese-English phrasebook into print. There is a vast array of topics here, and not every chapter is equally absorbing. For example, I found my mind starting to wander a bit during Dower's esoteric discussion of obscure Japanese writers and poets. More troubling, at least to me, is that Dower has an idiosyncratic notion of the relative weight to be given to the various issues that are covered. This was especially striking with regard to the economy. When I cracked these covers, I was interested in how Japan's bureaucratic capitalism came into being. Economic issues, though, are mostly skimmed at the end of the book, in a fifteen page chapter. Meanwhile, Dower devotes twenty-seven pages to America's censorship of Japanese books, cartoons, and films. To me, that's a bit lopsided. More troubling is Dower's tone. By channeling the Japanese viewpoint, Dower has created a sympathetic portrait. That, in and of itself, is certainly not a bad thing. The problem, though, is that this postwar panorama tends to forget the precipitating events that led to America's occupation in the first place. Obviously, Dower had no room - in an already cramped book - to even begin to summarize the massive cataclysm of World War II. Yet this reality, combined with Dower's predisposition, tends to be unfair to the Allies in general, and the United States in particular. The trajectory of Japanese historiography has been ineluctably altered by the triple convulsions of Fat Man and Little Boy, the fall of China to the Communists, and the outbreak of the Korean War. Without these three events, we would remember Japanese war crimes and outrages with far more clarity and emotion. Instead, WWII-era Japan is as much victim as victimizer. Japan is now a valued friend, while former Allies such as China and Russia (formerly the USSR) have become outright antagonists. Dower's bias in this regard is revealed in his discussion of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). Since the day of its conception, the IMTFE has been a target of elite opinion. Dower mimics the tired accusation that the so-called Tokyo Trials amounted to "victor's justice." In doing so, he - like other IMTFE critics - fails to answer the question that is begged: With what would you have replaced the IMTFE? Does he support "loser's justice," wherein there is a high-level conference serving milkshakes and cookies, after which all is forgiven and everyone goes home? Is Dower saying that Tojo should have been allowed to retire to his estate, or even run for the Diet? It's interesting to me that seventy-five years after World War II, we are still hunting down elderly and decrepit Nazis, as though they can somehow pay for their sins. We all remember the evils of Nazism. But what about the search for Japanese war criminals? Suffice to say, the last Class A war criminal was released after approximately eleven years in jail, a sentence to which a petty thief in Florida might respond: Hold my beer. (Dower himself has cited statistics showing that as many as fifteen million Chinese were killed by the Japanese. China itself insists on eighteen million civilian deaths, along with four million military deaths. I get that China's fall to Communism has skewed the record, and that America officially stopped caring after Chiang fled to Taiwan. But if those figures are anywhere near correct, it's more than double the Holocaust). Back in 1986, in War Without Mercy, Dower mentioned working on the project that would turn into Embracing Defeat. At that time, he was sanguine about the cooperation between victor and vanquished, between West and East, between the U.S. and Japan. Now, all Dower can see are the imperfections. Embracing Defeat spends a lot of time criticizing the U.S. occupations, often regarding things that are strikingly minor, considering the circumstances. Dower's belaboring of censorship, to take one example, is sort of laughable compared to Japan's own wartime censorship, backed by the Kempeitai (when they came for you, it wasn't with a black pen). The occupation of a "great power" is sort of a massive undertaking, making it difficult to judge. It just so happens, though, that there are a number of other occupations by which the U.S. occupation can be compared. It also happens that they occurred almost contemporaneously. First, there is Germany, which incorporated vast swaths of Europe into its dominion, an event that - you might have heard - included death camps, slave labor camps, murder squads, and sick medical experiments. Second, there is Japan itself, which killed millions of people, enslaved hundreds of thousands more, raped on an industrial scale, and also performed sick medical experiments. A less extreme example comes from the USSR, whose dominion over Eastern Europe was not exactly benign. Dower does not recognize how bad it could have been. He is so busy tabulating all the things that went wrong, that he never acknowledges anything that went right. Sure, there were mistakes, there was ineptitude, there was the imposition of beliefs, and there was - especially on MacArthur's part - no shortage of condescension. On the other hand, there was also idealism, munificence, and mercy.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-21 00:00:00 Roy Shak Before defeat, and after defeat In the top photo Hirohito is in military uniform. After the surrender, in the photo with Douglas MacArthur, the uniform was discarded This is a masterful account of Japan after their surrender in August, 1945. It is very nuanced, pointing out both positive and negative aspects of the U.S. occupation and how the Japanese coped and adapted. And the primary problem for most Japanese was food. Many were already mal-nourished before the surrender - and their struggle continued. Millions of returning soldiers and civilians from China and Korea added to the problem. Hovering over all this, chameleon-like, is the Emperor Hirohito. Due to his reverence by the Japanese people he was spared of any involvement in causing and making war. War against China in Manchuria that started in 1931, a vicious racist war in China proper that started in 1937, and the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia...) that commenced in December of 1941. Hirohito managed to transfer himself from the head of the Imperial Japanese Army to become the Emperor of peace and a new Japan that was to have non-militarism as a basis of government. There were many outside Japan that put him in the same category as Hitler and Tojo (and there were some who thought that way in Japan too). Douglas MacArthur was now the new supreme leader of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. His main concern was to protect the Emperor from any type of tarnishment as a war leader. He went so far as to tell all the Japanese being prosecuted as war criminals to deny (lie) of Hirohito's culpability in the war. MacArthur feared that if Hirohito were removed from the throne, Japan would descend into chaos. There is truth in this; many Japanese revered the Emperor as a deity. On a few occasions Hirohito considered abdicating, MacArthur told him not to. Hirohito tried to humanize himself by emulating the British monarchy and going out amongst his people now and then. He never did deny that he was a deity, keeping some of his God-like aura. Page 278 (my book) Hirohito was also, as it turned out, resilient and malleable, blessed by the heavens - and by General MacArthur more particularly - to survive and prosper, while all around him, his loyal subjects were denounced, purged, charged with war crimes, even executed. The emperor's role in Japan's aggression was never seriously investigated. He was dissuaded by the Americans from acknowledging even moral responsibility for the repression and violence that had been carried out in his name and with his endorsement... the occupation authorities chose not merely to detach the emperor from his holy war, but to resuscitate him to the center of their new democracy...if the nations supreme secular and spiritual authority bore no responsibility, why should his ordinary subjects be expected to engage in self-reflection? Page 179 Renovation and iconoclasm [in Japan] were strains as deeply embedded in consciousness as were the reverence for the past or acquiescence to the powers that be. For almost a century the Japanese had been socialized to anticipate and accommodate themselves to drastic change. When World War II ended, they were well prepared - not merely by the horrors and manifest failure of the war, but also by socialization of the past and even the psychic thrust of wartime indoctrination - to carry on the quest for a "new" Japan. In other words, it was entirely "traditional" to find pundits gathering soon after the surrender to engage in a "roundtable discussion" on "changing the world". What changed, and drastically so, was how men and women now chose to define what that new world should be like. The occupation caused a tremendous overhaul of Japanese society. When the Japanese government modified their constitution the Americans said "not good enough". So a small U.S. staff worked to make a new, much more liberal constitution. It granted equal rights to women (something the U.S. constitution does not do), it allowed trade unions, educational reform, removed patriarchy, allowed more freedom... During the occupation there was an astounding growth of new periodicals, newspapers, movies, and new radio shows. Political prisoners, mostly communist or left-wing, were released from prison. But there were restrictions, no criticism of the occupation forces or the Emperor was permitted. The author discusses how this lack of freedom to "question" the role of the Emperor and the emasculation of a "free press" led the Japanese readily to see themselves as victims, but not as victimizers. The top military cadre was blamed for the defeat - and the Emperor was removed from that clique. Also when China became communist in 1949 the Japanese atrocities in China became more and more overlooked. Communism was now the new enemy and Japan was needed as a buffer to stop the advancement of Soviet and Chinese forces. This also made the U.S. side with the right-wing in Japan. This is a comprehensive examination of many aspects of Japan after the war. And it was then that the great Japanese companies like Toyota, Sony, and Nikon started to build up their vision of a future far different than what had recently occurred. Japan is obviously a country that is able to re-invent itself.