Japan in War and Peace; Selected Essays

New York: New Press, 1993. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x, 368, [4] pages. Tables. Figures (illustrations). Notes. Sources. Index. John W. Dower (born June 21, 1938) is an American author and historian. His 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association. Dower earned a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1959, and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1972. He expanded his dissertation, a biography of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida, into Empire and Aftermath. His other books include a selection of writings by E. Herbert Norman and a study of mutual images during World War II entitled War Without Mercy. Dower was the executive producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima. Derived from a Kirkus review: Dower offers a collection of essays on Japan and its complex relations with the US over the past half century. They afford accessible perspectives that go provocatively against the grain of received wisdom on a nation whose economic accomplishments have set the West scrambling for explanations--and scapegoats. Dower offers a contrarian appraisal of the Asian powerhouse. He makes a persuasive case that the enterprise and productivity of Japan's business establishment dates back to the early stages of WW II, and not to the postwar era, during which Allied occupation introduced democratic reforms. He shows that potential revolutionary dissent, tension, and turmoil have been hallmarks of Japan's society. Covered are grassroots perceptions of the atomic bomb; the efforts of Japan's armed services to develop nuclear weapons; the policies of ex-P.M. Shigeru Yoshida; and the role that racial antagonisms still play between Tokyo and Washington.