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War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
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Now in paperback, War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War -- race -- while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerf
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Paperback, 399 pages
Published
February 12th 1987
by Pantheon
(first published 1986)
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Start your review of War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

This book looks at both sides of the intense hatred that existed between Japan and the United States in the Second World War. The fighting was extremely vicious on both sides – with neither, at times surrendering or taking prisoners. It was probably much more akin to the fighting on the Eastern Front between Germany and the Soviet Union.
The subliminal race hatred of the Japanese by the United States that existed prior to Pearl Harbor, became manifested after with a total disregard for the human ...more
The subliminal race hatred of the Japanese by the United States that existed prior to Pearl Harbor, became manifested after with a total disregard for the human ...more

As the title suggests, this book is about racial attitudes on both sides during the Pacific War between the United States and Japan. This war was fought much more brutally than the American war in Europe. It was a war of extermination that did not differentiate between Japanese soldiers, civilians or different political trends among their people. It was a war against the "Japs" unlike in Europe where the war was against "Nazis" more than Germans per se. Having read Dower's other book about Japan
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Written in the 1980’s, this book bears the perspective of an American obsession with the then-evident emerging Japanese global economic leadership.
At this time, on a planet witnessing a bloated Chinese economic dominance, a jaundiced Western economic malaise of austerity, a deteriorating global “War on Terror”, and an emerging class-conscious understanding of climate change and plutocracy---a book like this can seem very narrow and dated.
Why should any of us be concerned ab ...more
Written in the 1980’s, this book bears the perspective of an American obsession with the then-evident emerging Japanese global economic leadership.
At this time, on a planet witnessing a bloated Chinese economic dominance, a jaundiced Western economic malaise of austerity, a deteriorating global “War on Terror”, and an emerging class-conscious understanding of climate change and plutocracy---a book like this can seem very narrow and dated.
Why should any of us be concerned ab ...more

It is easy to underestimate the role of emotion in foreign policy. Books such as Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism by Reginald Horsman and Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964 by Andrew J. Rotter, make a strong argument that emotionalism fueled by racial and cultural anxieties influence America’s role in the world. In War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Dower argues that race not only colored America’s actions in the Pa
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A very unique and disturbing look at the uses of racist ideology by both the Western Powers and Japan to fuel their pursuit of military, political and cultural dominance in the early 20th century leading up through the brutal "war without mercy" known as the Pacific War. It's fascinating to see the perceptions that the Americans and British had of "Asiatics" starting in the colonialist period, and how these perceptions of the Japanese changed as their relative economic and political power grew.
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Much of this book I did not like. In fact, it is not really a book. It is two articles expanded and cribbed together (one on American racist perceptions of Japan; one on Japanese racist perceptions of the West) --to meet (I suspect) tenure requirements. Yet the two chapters on "The Pure Self" (ch. 8) and on Japanese War aims ("Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus" = ch. 10) are the clearest and most moving account of Japanese fascism I have found. They are brilliant. My suggestion: get
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Sep 13, 2016
Erik Graff
rated it
really liked it
Recommends it for:
Americans & Japanese
Recommended to Erik by:
no one
Shelves:
history
Father served as an army cryptanalyst attached to the navy for such things as ship-to-shore communications during landings in such places as Sicily and, later, the Philippines. Being in the bowels of the ship, usually in its sole airconditioned room, his only sightings of 'the enemy' were of planes, including kamikazes, or of prisoners. He hated it, but as he grew older his mind (he died some months ago, just short of his 95th year) turned more and more to those distant memories.
Dad's dad was ac ...more
Dad's dad was ac ...more

When I was a boy our mail was delivered by a pleasant mailman named John (as far as I know his last name was "the Mailman") who was always smiling and whistling, and he was a Marine Corps Pacific War Vet. He gave me a huge plastic wall sheild with the Marine Corps Emblem on it, which I placed among all the car parts adverts on my wall. So the only person I knew who fought in that war was sunny as the day is long, and the idea that he had been part of the force which fought inch for inch on other
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This book seemed to be hell-bent and determined to paint the United States, white America specifically, as racist warmongerers who were out to wipe non-whites in the Pacific off the face of the Earth. I had trouble staying focused on the material because it was so saturated with a racial setting. I'm not too surprised by Dower's sentiment, considering his wife is Japanese. But, this is the typical style of book that is being pushed in academia. Sigh.
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In my eyes this is undeniably a very good book. But I must say right away that while it is a good introduction (and nothing more, I have to be honest there) into the topic of racism in the Pazific War during World War II, I would not recommend it for casual readers. The book is good in debunking the, apparently not so rare, notion that racism is equal to white supremacism, but the quotes it often has (which you can't blame the author for) were done by people who for all their efforts still seeme
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A beautifully well-researched piece of cultural and social history that provides a great source of grisly anecdotes you can use to horrify friends, family, and colleagues. Whether it's a redneck who can't wait to get his mitts on a pair of Jap ears, or a Japanese propaganda piece suggesting that US Marines have to kill their parents to get into the Corps, or the hilariously mortifying 19th Century racist skull science employed by both sides, this is a one-stop shop for the worst of humanity (som
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I cannot imagine the amount of time it must have taken for John Dower to piece together this intensely detailed account of the Pacific War, with such minutiae of information as the words and images used in American and Japanese magazines published in the days and months leading up the major confrontations. Dower outlines the use of propaganda in both Japan and America and how each was made to view the other so as to serve the purpose of all-out war.
This is by no means an attempt at a summary, bu ...more
This is by no means an attempt at a summary, bu ...more

Very interesting ways to look at the Pacific War. Goes to show how deeply extremely racist views have been part of America from the beginning. Racial misunderstandings influenced the behavior of both sides and led to millions of deaths. A different and significant way to look at how WW2 came about. It did get a little tiring to feel that Americans were more to blame.

With this astonishing, original history, Dower has given us two of the most illuminating and important books ever written on the subject of Japan and the Pacific War (the other being his postwar tome "Embracing Defeat"). Both are absolutely essential to anyone interested in the topic.
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During the 1941-1945 war between the United States and Japan, the Americans were unabashedly racist. American cartoons, newspaper and magazine stories depicted the Japanese (and the Japanese Americans) as apes, rats or lice. Admiral William Halsey was especially fond of comparing the Japanese with monkeys; when the Japanese were told about this, a zookeeper in Tokyo declared that he had reserved a cage for the admiral in the monkey house. Ordinary Americans, both soldiers and civilians, were ful
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Historian John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986), is largely concerned with how race fueled the Pacific War machine. This comparative study argues that Japanese and American racisms fomented violence and atrocity in the Pacific. What remains difficult for Dower (and for all who attempt to make connections between ideas and actions), is his ability to draw distinct causal relationships between racism and war-related violence. This quibble, however, should not
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John Dower’s 1986 work War Without Mercy delves into the devastating racial hatred which the Pacific War had devolved toward in its last and bloodiest year. “Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese” recalled historian Allan Nevins of his wartime service. Dower catalogues the fury with which both American and Japanese soldiers fought, exploring the racial ideologies that underlay their attitudes toward each other. While the Japanese belief in the purity of th
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This book should have won John Dower the Pulitzer Prize, instead of the other one ("Embracing Defeat"). "War without Mercy" touches upon one of the most important aspects of the Second World War, but one often forgotten in retrospect: the Second World War was also a Race war, the ultimate triumph of the Social Darwinism doctrine. The cultural history prevails in this book. Taking the comparative approach, John Dower discusses wartime images and ideologies about the Other on both side , describin
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Early in the War, a US Congressman could baldly state that if God had intended the Japanese to rule Asia, he would have made them white. By the end of the War, many saw their racism as not just ridicules, but evil. It had been called “pride of race,” but it was really just the attempt to claim arbitrary privilege—enforced by whatever collective violence groups of people could manage.
Hobbes tells us that we all consider ourselves better than most of those around us: because we see our own accompl ...more
Hobbes tells us that we all consider ourselves better than most of those around us: because we see our own accompl ...more

I haven't read a lot of books on World War II. Like most Americans, my education on the war comes largely from History Channel documentaries and the occasional magazine or Wikipedia article. This book makes one thing really clear: all of those sources are embarrassingly incomplete. Just reading the back cover copy, you'd think this was just a book on racism, and in a sense it is, but it's really more broadly about prejudice, tunnel vision, and the inability to see beyond one's cultural upbringin
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May 23, 2014
Justin Michael James Dell
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
warfare
I’m not sure how I feel about War without Mercy. It comes across as somewhat banal, if only in the sense that it merely expatiates on a subject I already knew about. In other words, it does not present anything shocking or that I wasn’t expecting. Everyone knows the basic sketch that the Pacific War was racially charged; Dower just adds the colouring. Moreover, the paradigm of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ throughout the book has, from a 2014 perspective, become humdrum. It is simply too overused now. I th
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Great book that I need to read for a World War II History class this fall, but even though it was very thick, I was fascinated by the information and skated through the 300+ pages easily. Dower's thesis is that the Pacific War was so brutal because of inherent racism on both sides (United States & Japan) and explores how this racism came about and how it manifested itself in cruelty and inhumane treatment of civilians and POWs. Cartoons and illustrations produced during the war are referenced an
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So much for the "greatest generation" - east and west.
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Nov 14, 2017
Ekul
rated it
really liked it
Shelves:
geo-asia-east,
empire,
history,
geo-global,
geo-japan,
temp-modern-late,
geo-america-north,
geo-pacific
Crucial for understanding the way race was constructed in both the United States and Japan during the Pacific War.

This is a remarkable book filled with information about the impact of race in World War II as far as it related to Japan. There is a wealth of information in this book, among which are the following items.
While the US condemned what the Nazi's were doing as far as their Aryan supremacy concept goes, at the same time the US was highly segregated, with blacks still subject to the Jim Crow laws. They were kept in separate military groups; white and black blood was kept separate, and the US put arou ...more
While the US condemned what the Nazi's were doing as far as their Aryan supremacy concept goes, at the same time the US was highly segregated, with blacks still subject to the Jim Crow laws. They were kept in separate military groups; white and black blood was kept separate, and the US put arou ...more

The Second World War is uniquely characterized by the sheer magnitude of conflict and casualties, making it the most widespread war in world history. It was a war of national rivalries, radical political upheavals, and brutal militaristic aggression. The war was also defined by racial and ethnic animosities, most prominently in the Western theater of warfare. Everyone knows Adolf Hitler’s maniacal quest to exterminate what he considered the inferior populations of Eastern Europe. Lesser known is
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World War II was a conflict that included many wide and divergent motivations among those who participated. However, one aspect of the war has not received the scholarly attention it deserves according to John Dower. “Apart from the genocide of the Jews, racism remains one of the great neglected subjects of World War Two." In War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, Dower presents his thesis stating that, “To scores of millions of participants, the war was also a race war." To substan
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When thinking of "The Greatest Generation," as the veterans of WWII have been cast of late in the popular media (largely due to Tom Brocaw's prize-winning book by this title), I too wax a bit nostalgic. I think of the watercolor portrait of my Uncle Art in his Naval uniform and remember the pictures my mother showed me as a child of him going off to war. Like the war babies described by Tuttle in his Daddy's Gone to War, she watched him leave and worried about him while he was in combat. When he
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Although I had come across Dower in regards to his highly regarded book on the Occupation of Japan called Embracing Defeat, I have not yet read it. I was not familiar with this one at all. It was required reading for a course that I am auditing on the history of the military in Japan. IMHO War Without Mercy deserves all the praise it has gotten via most of the Goodreads reviews.
First, it offers a very comprehensive survey of a large variety of sources ranging from popular media to scholarly arti ...more
First, it offers a very comprehensive survey of a large variety of sources ranging from popular media to scholarly arti ...more
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John W. Dower is the author of Embracing Defeat, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; War without Mercy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Cultures of War. He is professor emeritus of history at MIT. In addition to authoring many books and articles about Japan and the United States in war and peace, he is a founder and codirector of the online “Visualizing
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