The Unmasterable Past: The Limits of Japan's Postwar Transformation

At the center of both modern Japanese history and the United States' evolving relationship with Japan is the tension created by breaks in Japanese history. Small wonder, then, that the Japanese themselves, as well as many of their friends and critics abroad, stress the nation's overwhelming need for continuity. Japan has been portrayed in the West as a nation whose omnipotent bureaucracy has ruled for centuries, whose emperor traces his legitimacy back an uninterrupted 2,600 years, and whose everyday social (and too often political) practices have deep historical roots. But no industrialized nation has matched Japan's roller coaster experiences over the past 150 years.

Behind the Japanese emphasis on continuity is a history of jarring fractures that is foreign, in every sense of the word, to the American experience. Until 1853 Japan enjoyed several centuries of isolation from nearly all Western nations; a decade later the West blew up Japanese coastal installations and imposed unequal economic and political treaties. In the 1920s the nation moved toward the more liberal political system known as "Taisho democracy" and backed Woodrow Wilson's new emphasis on anticolonialism and self-determination; a decade later a military regime ruled and began building a colonial empire. By the mid-1940s Japan had sacrificed three million of its citizens to realize that empire and maintain its tradition of never having been occupied; in the late 1940s thousands of GIS arrived to ensure that General Douglas MacArthur could carry out his "white man's burden" policies. In the late 1980s Japan's economy was envied as the real winner of the Cold War; a decade later that economy was dismissed as awesomely corrupt, shortsighted, and bankrupt.

In Embracing Defeat, his third major work dissecting Japan's mid-twentieth-century history, John W. Dower explains these last two seismic shifts -- the war years of the 1940s and the roots of today's economic upheaval -- as well as anyone ever has. He cuts through Japanese society and politics between 1945 and 1950 as if they were a thickly layered and not always palatable cake. On one level Dower, a history professor at MIT, analyzes U.S.-Japanese relations; on another, he explores domestic Japanese political and economic policies. The thickest layer reveals how Japanese of every social stratum confronted "in exceptionally naked ways" the confusion, destruction, and starvation thrown up by their defeat. At one point, the authorities in Osaka had to suggest that starvation could be avoided by eating mice, rats, moles, rose leaves, silkworm cocoons, and sawdust broken down into powder for use in dumplings and bread.

Dower argues that this experience of defeat, which Japan had never endured before, helps explain why the "preoccupation with their own misery . . . led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others." Throughout the war, soldiers had been taught not to surrender. Civilians were to be prepared to die "like shattered jewels," as the phrase had it. But when surrender came, Tokyo's skies remained dark -- not only from the smoke billowing from lingering fires set by U.S. planes but also from massive bonfires set by pragmatic bureaucrats destroying wartime records. History was to turn so sharply that the past was to be incinerated.

But the past, as always, refused to die. In finely drawn case studies, Dower shows how the Japanese -- and above all, the returning veterans -- published letters in newspapers detailing the war's horrors. Many veterans focused on the cruelty and stupidity of officers who ordered them into hopeless battles. When one paper ran the story of how soldiers had lynched an abusive officer, 16 of the 18 readers who responded supported the soldiers.

Such public responses did not mean that Japan's elite leadership was anxious to fundamentally reform the society that took the country into war. MacArthur actually asked Prince Konoe Fumimaro, the former prime minister whose government started the 1937 war against China and signed the 1940 pact with the Axis, to advise him about constitutional reform. That the general made such a request revealed his concern about maintaining some continuity. That Konoe's conservative proposals were abruptly rejected revealed the elite's misconception that reform could be minimal. Rejected and then listed as a Class-A war criminal, Konoe committed suicide the night he was to go to prison.

The veterans' letters, Konoe's suicide, and MacArthur's imposition of a new legal system that promised human rights, free political expression, new educational systems, and decentralized police authority -- all symbolized the stunning openness and opportunity that suddenly seemed to blanket Japanese society. "People behaved differently, thought differently, encountered circumstances that differed from any they had previously experienced -- or would ever experience again," Dower writes. "People were acutely conscious of the need to reinvent their own lives." Such reinvention could be seen, unfortunately, in a lucrative prostitution business set up expressly to service the occupiers, flourishing strip-club shows to entertain Americans and Japanese alike, and a vibrant literature and photography that deeply explored decadence and degeneracy. The backlash was not slow in coming. If these were parts of Western democracy, many Japanese wanted no more of it. Nevertheless, Dower emphasizes, Japan experienced a moment of openness, experimentation, and questioning of fundamentals. But the moment too quickly passed.

THEY, THE PEOPLE