Japan's experience of defeat and occupation at the end of the Second World War has most commonly been examined from the point of view of the conquerors. It has rarely been tackled as a Japanese experience. But, in this massively researched and beautifully illustrated book, John Dower attempts to understand the hopes, visions and dreams ( as well as the hopelessness and exhaustion) of the defeated Japanese as they sought to remake their identity and values in the aftermath of war. He probes a kaleidoscopic array of Japanese responses and their contradictions: guilt and giddy liberation, selective forgetting, iconoclasm, new hopes and old disillusions. And he places them against the background of an American Occupation which was at once high-minded and visionary, arrogant and imperialist.So this is a must read.
