War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

by John W. Dower

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that 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 powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
 
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Japan, World War II, War, American History, Military History

399 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

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 Cultures” project established at MIT in 2002 and dedicated to the presentation of image-driven scholarship on East Asia in the modern world. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 humanity of the enemy who became “The Other”. This led to acts of barbarism by American soldiers towards the Japanese (also on the American mainland thousands of American citizens of Japanese origin were totally disenfranchised – rounded up, moved out of their homes, and sent to camps in the mid-west).

Page 64 (my book) war correspondent Edgar L. Jones

“What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? … We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians…”

What also aided in constructing “The Other” was the Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners of war who were severely treated (by contrast, overall, the Allied prisoners of war of the Germans had a much easier time; I exclude from this the entire Eastern Front).

There was a racist underestimation of the capabilities of the Japanese soldiers and pilots which lead to the disaster in the Philippines and Singapore.

The Japanese also created “The Other”. Their “Other” was sometimes aimed at the opposing leadership – namely Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-Shek. The Japanese viewed the democracies as being weak and decadent and their soldiers lacking sustained motivation. They promoted their own version of Japanese racial purity. Their Co-Prosperity Sphere for Asia sounded good on paper calling for the end of European imperialism and the establishment of Asian self-rule.

Page 285

Certainly, the Koreans could have told the new members of the Co-Prosperity Sphere what to expect. Their out-spoken nationalist leaders had been tortured and executed in 1919. Their government, commerce, industry and agriculture had been totally taken over by the Japanese.

So, in practise the Japanese became even more ruthless then the imperial Western powers that they replaced. Civilians had to bow down to Japanese soldiers on the street or risk being slapped. There is continuing hatred to this day of the Japanese in the countries they brutalized – China, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia…

The Japanese pursued a “Holy War”, a crusade to dominate Asia.

The author barely mentions the use of what the Japanese called “comfort women” who were sex slaves to the Japanese soldiers. There were thousands of these women rounded up from all the countries they occupied.

For my taste the author goes too far back in Japanese historical mythology and traditions to explain their behavior – it made for tedious reading.

He does not explain why the Japanese in each of the battles in the last year of the war such as Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa – were to be the decisive battle – that if they won or held back the Americans, it would lead to the ultimate destruction of their adversary.

The Japanese had a concept of “proper place” which aided them to adapt and accept their new position at war’s end. The author should have given more credit to the United States for its magnanimity to the Japanese country after the war’s conclusion. General MacArthur’s speech on the U.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945 was most eloquent. Here is an excerpt.

“We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers—to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the obligation they are here formally to assume.

It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.”

[Mosca · Rating 4 out of 5]

**********************

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 about apparently-permanent mutually-racist misunderstandings between two nations—both now wallowing in each-their-own self induced, decadent delusions and cultural irrelevances at a time of gigantic, ongoing, unresolved, and terrifyingly-current global threats?

Good question.

But what this book does offer in a disturbingly thorough manner is an investigation into two nations revoltingly self-perpetuating racist myths about one another. And what is truly frightening is how important these national chauvinisms were in creating, justifying, and sustaining one of the more awful bloodbaths of the 20th century...and how essential they were to the propaganda machines of both countries.

For me, the racist images produced for those purposes (and reproduced in some quantity in this book) are truly staggering and revolting. And both nations sustained minor industries whose sole purposes were to create and maintain these racist “cartoons” and propaganda.

What is relevant, however is the essential nature of such propaganda in the maintenance of the public will necessary to sustain the nation’s commitment to the horrors of modern warfare.

It is this thorough investigation into the propaganda machines of two nations, each seriously and pathologically committed to industrial scale slaughter that is so compelling. And it is the intentional and deliberate restructuring of the two nations’ public's perceptions of reality that is most staggering to me--as well as the naked willingness to spin the lies in dramatically new directions as the national, military, and international situations shifted. And how these national machineries of lies and bigotries, of delusions and illusions determined the mass perceptions of “reality”

And these national machineries of deliberate spin maintained their mendacity regardless of their tragic effects. And today we still live with “perceptions” generated by these decades-old, intentional racisms—shifted with time to accommodate new national “enemies”

We should all be concerned about that.

[Hotavio · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 Pacific theater of World War II, but that the Japanese harbored a similar preoccupation with their own racial superiority that motivated them to engage in martial pursuits. This sense of superiority fueled emotions which would bring both sides to act inhumanely to one another.
Dower examines how hatreds influenced the actions of the Americans and Japanese in war by examining cultural influences. He makes use of cartoons, films, propaganda, books, and other cultural sources to identify themes perpetuated on both countries’ citizens and the public perceptions these sources created. Through media like Frank Capra’s Know your Enemy-Japan and An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as the Nucleus, impressionable audiences not only validated war, but ignored ghastly behaviors on the battlefield. Beyond mutual feelings of supremacy contributing to war motivation, the resulting rapprochement after Japan’s surrender September 2, 1945 fascinates Dower. Thus, his book aims to outline the visceral distain these nations had for one another during the war and then how both nations twisted this for their benefits during peace.

Dower makes his argument by first examining the American perspective on Japan. Dower states that, already endowed with a sense of racial superiority, Americans fixated on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of treachery. Aside from the Caucasian belief that Asians were inferior, this treachery demonstrated that Japanese were particularly inhuman. War Without Mercy illustrates a variety of subhuman creatures that began to symbolize the “Jap” but no creature was utilized more than the monkey or ape. Dower provides many examples of how Americans utilized this connection as he includes several cartoons within the book. Dehumanizing the enemy justified the murder of prisoners on the battlefield and a public assertion that the Japanese should be “annihilated as a people.” Beyond this diminutive image, Americans also refashioned the simian according to the stage of war. Contributors to the cultural image also portrayed the Japanese as a hulking ape-man after Japanese victories and as harmless pets during the Japanese’s Allied occupation.
The second component of War Without Mercy explains the Japanese racialist role in the war. Japan insisted in its superiority as well. Japan focused less on skin color and more on their 2,600 year old history under the Emperor. While Japan detested Western colonialism for its arrogance and subjugation of Asians, Japan also had its own colonial scheme called the Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was very similar. The Co-Prosperity Sphere emphasized what Dower notes as Japan’s “proper place,” the center of the world. Japan also provided a host of cultural references contributing to Dower’s argument. Among these, Dower gets the most leverage out of the children’s tale of Momotarō. The tale of a youth battling an ogre surfaced as an analogy for the Japanese fighting off America and its capitalist trappings. What makes this cultural piece outstanding is the image of Japan as a youth battling off the Western “ogre” can later be reinterpreted in the era of Japanese occupation. During the occupation, Japanese anxieties ebbed as they recognized that this ogre had “a human face.” While the Americans exhibited differences from the Japanese, the Japanese felt that the Americans were not evil as originally thought. This made loss of the war more bearable.
Dower’s epilogue examines the how both parties diverted racial tension and, in some cases, assisted the post war relationship between the United States and Japan. Dower’s inclusion of this twist in the use of racism, pushes his examination further than many historians. Unfortunately, Dower does not examine this fascinating observation with the intensity he devotes to racisms contribution to war violence. Still, War without Mercy ties the many horrific instances of known racial violence during World War II together in a way which makes race seem like the single most determining factor for the war.

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. Initially looking at all non-whites as physically and mentally inferior, barbaric, infantile, inscrutable, and inhuman, the West was forced to take Japan more seriously as it grew in power in Asia. And the Japanese, for their part, started to recreate a myth of their superiority among the Asian nations in their drive to create their own imperial empire, the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", closely modeled after the colonial empires of the Western powers, particularly the British. In their view, they were a pure race descended directly from the divine Emperor Jinmu 2600 years previously, and had a duty to rule and dominate the other Asian races in a patriarchal hierarchy.

Driven by their desire to be recognized on equal footing with the other Western Powers, the Japan military and political apparatus also utilized the image of the Emperor as a father figure to unite the Japanese people into the "100 million" and realize their destiny to rule over all of Asia and eventually the world. Ostensibly their rule would be benign and uplifting, but the reality as their armies occupied more and more of Asia was one of unrestrained brutality and contempt for other Asian peoples. And as the tides of war turned against them, this cruelty was further exacerbated as it became clear that Japan was losing the war.

Meanwhile, the US was at first shocked by the Japanese military prowess in its defeat of Russia at the turn of the century and then its invasions of Manchukuo, Korea, its easy ousting of the British from Hong Kong and Singapore, the Dutch from Indonesia, the French from Indochina, the occupation of the Philippines, and then the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese went from "little yellow people" into unstoppable super-soldiers. But the resources needed to maintain the Japanese war machine could not be sustained, and the greater military strength of the US forces slowly but surely defeated the Japanese forces in battle after battle throughout the Pacific. However, even when the outcome was clear, the Japanese refused to surrender, and the American military decided to extent their bombing raids to targeting civilians in urban centers, killing hundreds of thousands in an effort to crush the Japanese spirit. Finally, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to devastating effect, and the Japanese military and the Emperor capitulated.

This book focuses very closely on the perceptions of race on both sides of the war, and it is quite shocking in its unearthing of the depths of racism that ran throughout both the US (and other Western powers) and the Japanese in their myth of racial purity and superiority. The research is in-depth and takes a unique perspective not seen in most books about the Pacific War. In fact, the book was written while author John Dower was in the process of researching his book about the post-war occupation and reconstruction of Japan by US authorities, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II . That book is even more impressive in its scope, depth of research, and insight into the forces that transformed Japan from a blood-thirsty imperialistic aggressor into a peaceful, hard-working, anti-Communist ally of the US in the emerging Cold War struggle against Communist China and Russia. It is well worth reading for any serious student of Japan's role in the modern world.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 and the United States I found some of this to be a retread. Having said that it was still stunning to read frank admissions of horrible war crimes by U.S. officials, including expressing pleasure over the deaths of 80K-100K civilians in the firebombing of Tokyo. The Japanese were of course just as brutal in Asia and their atrocities left a legacy of hatred in places like China that continues to this day. Having said that this was not a war with obvious good and bad sides. Only victors and defeated.

While the Americans had a rich store of negative racial stereotypes to draw upon when fighting an inferior Other, the Japanese were in the strange position of going to war against the Westerners who taught them modern civilization. As a result, their racial attitudes were more about their own purity and exaltedness rather than depictions of Westerners as simian for example. They called the Americans demons and the Americans called them monkey-men. Contrary to appearances the latter was a more developed and powerful insult, even buttressed by the racial pseudo-science of the time. Japan liked to discuss itself as a liberator of the darker peoples of the world but clearly also saw themselves in a hierarchy standing above them. This led to its contemptuous and brutal behavior in its Asian empire.

The prejudices about the Japanese expressed at the time sound very familiar. They were irrational, fanatic, the products of a sexually repressed and superstitious culture and damaged psychological specimens. There were a widely expressed fears that they represented a "Rising Tide of Color" that would displace global white supremacy. After Pearl Harbor the level of sheer hatred in the United States towards the Japanese was at such a fever pitch that it seemed entirely possible that victory would end with a genocide. As much was said and proposed openly. Japanese skulls and stationery made out of their bones became common household accessories for a time. But after the fighting stopped, temperatures cooled quite quickly. It shows how the public can be worked up into a fervor and how suggestible they are. Dower's other book was a good history of the ultimately benevolent, if paternalistic, role the U.S. took towards japan after the war.

This book was good though a little but disjointed. Dower's other one is the real masterpiece of the two in my opinion, although I might be biased since I found a lot in this familiar.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 the book, scan chapters 1-7 and 9, and read 8, 10, 11 with great care.

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good history book. Reads somewhat dry to me. Interesting area of pretty much neglected historical research. Recommended

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 active in the Socialist Party of America, Dad himself having voted for Norman Thomas in '48. The family was Norwegian, both sides of it, and most of our relatives endured German occupation during the war. There was some residual dislike of Germans on their part, but when I was growing up our closest family friends included a number of Germans and Japanese. American Socialists, whatever their visceral feelings, are internationalists.

Still, I grew up indoctrinated by family, family friends (almost everyone's dad was a veteran) and the public schools to believe WWII to have been, unlike WWI, a 'just' and necessary war, a war against the evils of Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism. My perspective, given the Norwegian connection, was perhaps a little broader and emotionally deeper than the suburban norm, but it was still pretty one-sided. I was an American patriot, proud of our defense of democracy and individual liberties. Indeed, one of the first adult books I ever read was William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, an account hardly sympathetic to the Axis.

Years have passed, decades of study, and, while my concern for defending democracy and liberty has continued, I no longer see the U.S.A. as essentially allied with such values--indeed, I see it as all too often as an hypocritical opponent of them. Some of this I simply noticed by following the mainstream media as a child (The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.), then explored by reading histories by Anglo-American historians from their Anglo-American perspectives. Most recently I've favored books written by non-English speaking historians or books by historians attempting to represent the views of other peoples.

This study of Japanese and American attitudes does a fair job in giving the racists on both sides a voice. Beginning with their respective histories, author Dower focuses on WWII and its immediate aftermath, with an epilogue about the recurrence of earlier prejudices during the Japanese economic boom (an American decline) in the late seventies and early eighties. In addition to being a meditation on nationalism in general this book also serves as reminder of the ubiquity of propagandistic misinformation and manipulation.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 otherwise useless volcanic islands just seemed part of the american heroic dream. I was more interested in ww1 western front, so I was surprise when as a young teen in capecod summer vacation i found popular science from another long ago summer,1945, barely prehiroshima, with the prominent question splashed on the cover: Should we Gas the Japs?" WW1 I thought was the war to end all chemical weapons, but a study of this article showed the nature of what the pacific war was like. This book was a similar eye opener that dealt with our propaganda and what those nice young heroic men, or at least some of them, did as their duty, which thanks to the interwebs is much easier to find: http://www.duffelblog.com/2012/06/man... or more objectively http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American.... Illusions of youth are there to be shattered.

[Harrison Helms · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism, Dower analyzes the "Western gaze" toward the Japanese during WW2. Yet Dower goes further, also considering the mirror phenomenon of the Japanese gaze upon the West. Not much military history in here. Primarily a study of culture, both learned and popular, and how racial prejudices form and are then unearthed later on.

[Andrew]

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 (something I first saw in my tweens, watching Bugs Bunny proceed to fuck with a gang of bucktoothed and dimwitted Asiatics representing General Tojo et al). As a historian, Dower's ironic distance works wonders. If you a want a more serious account of the horrors of World War II in the Pacific, read Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking." If you want stories about weirdos, their weirdo delusions, and a few lulz, read this.

[Joseph R. Howard · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much for the "greatest generation" - east and west.

[AskHistorians]

Pretty much the best comparative look at race and ideology in the Pacific War. It's long and a bit academic, but there's none better.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 seemed to be trapped into the "White vs. Coloured" dichotomy, which in my mind often leads to many people to e.g. ignore the leopard in this picture:

Or the "samurai" in this one (I know it's supposed to be Emperor Meiji but he doesn't seem to look like him at all):

And act as though pictures like this had nothing to work with:

(I am looking at you Off the Great Wall and China Uncensored).

But either way, this is a completely recommendable book. It doesn't shy away from showing the racist propaganda images and attitudes of both sides at the time. And to be honest considered this, it is astounding how far we have actually come, after all today even in war you cannot any longer just make stuff like this:

Or even this:

And just in case you think this is specific to the Pazific War. Consider this picture about the Japanese in WW II:

And this how Germans were perceived in WW I:

(In WWII the Germans were not usually shown like this but rather propaganda was targeted towards "the Nazis" respectively Hitler).

I like the information on the, somewhat ambiguous, role of the Japanese as they inspired countless millions of Asians with their audacity, even as they inspired hatred by their own overweening arrogance. For the Japanese were as racist as their Anglo-American adversaries. And that although the Japanese government frequently admonished its officials and citizens to avoid all manifestations of racial discrimination, the operative language of the new sphere was in fact premised on the belief that the Japanese were destined to preside over a fixed hierarchy of peoples and races.
As you can probably guess by now, you get insights into Japan's own colorism and racism of the time and its "savior" mentality which I think is not exactly gone today: Like pallid copies of the old Sino-Japanese War prints, Japanese cartoons during World War Two frequently depicted the people of southern and southeastern Asia as dark-skinned, while the Japanese standing among them were light.
Note: This is has nothing to do with them wanting to be "white," as many still believe today, but rather their own cultural colorism that links whiteness with purity, as the book makes perfectly clear.
Also you clearly see how similar both sides of the war actually were despite old and new claims to the contrary, e.g. both sides elevated dying on the battle field to nearly divine actions when it concerned their own soldiers but the very same actions by the enemies was seen as signs of their inherent inferiority. And when you read how the Kyoto school dealt with such broad and amorphic concepts as "perpetual war" and "total war"; "living space" and "historical space" you tend to be reminded of other people who also used and still use such concepts.
As examples the book shows how the Anglo-Americans were described as demons (oni), devils (kichiku), fiends (akki and akuma), and monsters (kaibutsu). More elaborate variations were offered on occasion, such as "hobgoblins" and "hairy, twisted-nosed savages," but the basic image remained intact - as did the natural response to being confronted by such forces of evil. And how the Anglo-Americans consistently emphasized the "subhuman" nature of the Japanese, routinely turning to images of apes and vermin to convey this. With more tempered disdain, they portrayed the Japanese as inherently inferior men and women who had to be understood in terms of primitivism, childishness, and collective mental and emotional deficiency. Cartoonists, songwriters, filmmakers, war correspondents, and the mass media in general all seized on these images-and so did the social scientists and Asia experts who ventured to analyze the Japanese "national character" during the war.
Another example of similarities is "proper place" and the author shows how "proper place" had a long pedigree in the history of Asian thought going back to early Confucianism in China. While the concept flourished for centuries as a pure product of the Confucian tradition, however, and later came to assume the coloration of Japanese family-system ideologies as well, it is misleading to see it as peculiarly Asian. For practical purposes, "proper place" was the functional equivalent of the Great Chain of Being in Western thought, and like that potent concept served in the mundane world to rationalize and reinforce disparate status and power relationships among people, races and countries.
And let's face it such information is not actually known to the general public. So I agree with the author when he says at the end:
To return to that terrible conflict of four decades ago is thus inevitable and essential - and fraught with peril. It can teach us many things, but can also fan the fires of contemporary anger and self-righteousness. In whatever way, World War Two in Asia has become central to our understanding not only of the past, but of the present as well.

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview which ties well its sort of spiritual continuation, Browning’s Ordinary Men. The continued revitalization of racial hatreds or general bigotry for the drumming up of martial sentiment is shown well here on both sides of the pacific front. Other books, including perlstein’s series on conservatism, but most especially Reaganland, have discussed this well for less discussed and not as outright violent situations, notably the Iranian hostage crisis. However one can see the echoes of Dower’s War without Mercy, as he himself notes in the Cold War, with descriptions of Russian Soviets as ‘asiatic.’ One sees it still today, as ‘enemies-‘ of the American state, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Palestine etc. are turned into monolithic stereotypes pedaled from the highest peaks of ivory towers at universities to the lowest sewers of outwardly racist or otherwise bigoted B-movies.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

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, but John Dower's book is in its own way a witness to the maddening instrumental rationality of warfare and how it sacrifices human (and non-human life) for misplaced ideals.

[Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[MKMyrdal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago for class and it was certainly worth revisiting! The information and analysis are still a good insight, both for the time and for relevance to the modern day and the dehumanization that we still see at work.

[Peter Tillman]

See especially Stuart's 5-star review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... He thought it better even than Dower's classic "Embracing Defeat".

[DJ Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

John W. Dower’s book War Without Mercy explores the major role that race played in the Pacific theater of WW2. He analyzes this vicious cycle by dissecting the racism displayed by both sides. Dower explains how stereotypes were created and promoted through popular culture in various forms of media. He compares and contrasts the racist stereotypes between the U.S. and Japan to show their impact on the brutal fighting in the Pacific. Dower clearly argues that these factors make the Pacific theater an example of not only a large-scale violent conflict but also a race war. In the end, he shows how racist stereotypes on both sides remained present but were changed in a way of allowing peace between the U.S. and Japan. Dower’s use of unique evidence is extremely beneficial in supporting his arguments of racism being a critical factor in the brutality seen in the Pacific theater.
Dower states that the Pacific theater of WW2 was seemingly much more brutal than other parts of WWII such as the European theater and he uses unique evidence to show how racial hatred contributed greatly to violence and atrocities, which further contributed to the racial hate on both sides. Dower splits the book into three sections; the U.S. perspective, the Japanese perspective, and the transition from war to peace after WW2 ended. Dower shows how mainstream and widespread racialized propaganda was used in the U.S. and came in various forms of media such as films, posters, and magazines to push the “yellow-peril” narrative. For example, Dower uses the 1944 film Purple Heart, which portrays the trial and execution of the Doo-Little Flyers and contains instances of anti-Japanese rhetoric. This is just one example of unique evidence that is not typically utilized in other historical texts that Dower uses to show racialized propaganda from the Western perspective of the Pacific War, but Dower uses other forms of evidence to show how the West used propaganda to push racial stereotypes associated with the “yellow-peril”.
Dower includes a whole chapter on how the U.S. used propaganda to dehumanize the Japanese, such as portraying them as apes and animals. Dower provides several examples including references to several propaganda illustrations and even official speeches. He spends time showing how propaganda was used to portray the Japanese as “lesser men” to portray them as racially inferior, whilst also showing them as “supermen” as an excuse for their victories and tactical abilities, both stereotypes dehumanizing the Japanese in the eyes of Americans. In addition to the Japanese being portrayed by Americans as primates, “lesser men”, and “supermen”, Dower also mentions how the Japanese were portrayed as children and madmen to further dehumanize them and make them seem racially inferior. Dower even refers to unique psychiatric studies in Themes in Japanese Culture by Geoffery Goer, which intentionally and unintentionally pushed harmful stereotypes and led to questionable conclusions about the Japanese people. Dower ends the ‘Western Perspective’ section with a chapter called ‘Yellow, red, black men’. In this chapter, Dower goes over the history of white imperialism and its relationship with Japan and other races. He shows how the ‘yellow-peril’ idea and other racist and white supremacist ideas developed over several centuries, and how the U.S. had a history of weaponizing race in other armed conflicts throughout history. Importantly, Dower also talks about the African American perspective of the war: how the Japanese tried to weaponize the U.S.’s racist treatment towards African Americans, how racism against African Americans influenced their will to fight, and how racism resulted in successful future civil rights movements.
In the second part of the book, Dower provides the reader with the Japanese perspective. Dower starts off by explaining how Japanese racism was very similar to Western racism in several ways, yet there were several key differences. One difference included the Japanese idea of the “Pure Self” and how they believed they were racially pure and superior to other races. Dower argues the Japanese did not particularly focus on the color of one's skin during the Pacific War, instead they had a more abstract look on race compared to the West. They focused on symbolic colors and religious or cultural beliefs. The Japanese believed that if one’s spirit was white they were pure, and if it was black they were impure and even demonic. They believed that their souls and blood were pure and descended from the divine, unlike other Asian races and Westerners. This led them to believe that being the main world power was their proper place and that other nations should be set in their own proper place to benefit the Japanese Empire. Dower argues that propaganda was utilized in Japan to spread themes of unity, conformity, racial superiority, and support of the divine Emperor in order to validate and raise support for Japan's war.
Dower further explains that the Japanese often portrayed the Americans as “Demons” or “Barbarians” in their culture for centuries, most notably during WWII. He explains how these stereotypes were different from Western Japanese stereotypes. The stereotype of “Demon” was deeply embedded in ancient culture rather than being based on skin, and the “Barbarian” was different, as it was a borrowed term from the Chinese rather than relating it to the Western idea of the word associated with primitivism. Similar to America, the Japanese also portrayed Americans as not only demons and monsters but also beasts, brutes, and animals, with there even being parts of the Japanese language to denote Westerners as “beasts.” Dower explains that the Japanese utilized atrocities and racism that their enemies committed to further fuel the stereotypes associated with their enemies. He argues that overall, the Japanese attempted to create an image comparing their pure Yamato race to the “Demonic other" which further validated their part in WWII.
Dower does a great job of making clear arguments backed up by an abundance of evidence. His evidently comprehensive research on topics included in War Without Mercy effectively utilizes historical, political, and cultural evidence in a coherent way. Not only does Dower utilize unique historical evidence from WW2 such as propaganda posters, movies, and speeches, he includes much more unique and older evidence. One example is found in the chapter ‘Yellow, Red, Black Men,’ where he uses a multitude of secondary and primary sources to explain how white supremacy and racism developed in the West. For instance, when explaining the negative perception of Asians in the United States, he references the writer Robert Louis Stevenson's observation in 1890 of how the Chinese and Native Americans were despised by Americans. Furthermore, Dower succeeds in utilizing various forms of evidence coming from or relating to political figures at the time. He is able to show how widespread racism was in the U.S. even at an official level, by referencing figures such as Douglas MacArthur, William Halsey Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Trueman, and many more. Additionally, cultural evidence is often utilized by Dower in the form of films like Momotaro-Divine Sea Warriors, numerous magazines and illustrations, songs, poems, and even slogans like, “One hundred million advancing like a ball of flame,” which Dower uses to support his argument that slogans made by the Japanese often reflected themes of collectivism, purity, and solidarity.
Dower uses this evidence to form coherent arguments that show how racism was reciprocal between both sides, which affected war strategy and public opinion. For example, he shows how both sides used similar racist tactics in propaganda meant to dehumanize and villainize the enemy, which resulted in hatred on the battlefield and the homefront. Dower also makes it clear that the hate and brutality seen in the Pacific theatre were not shared in the European theatre. He claims that when referring to Germans, Americans often categorized them as “Nazi” or “German” as a way to differentiate “good” Germans from “bad” ones, whereas the Japanese were just referred to as “Japanese” regardless of the context. Dower emphasizes that racism and stereotypes contributed to atrocities on both sides, which caused reciprocal violence and brutality. He provides several examples of this, such as the image of the Japanese being equal to animals ingrained in the minds of many U.S. soldiers, resulting in atrocities such as torture, looting, and corpse desecration; this then contributed to the savage demonic stereotype of Americans in the minds of many Japenese soldiers. Another example is the Japanese committing suicide attacks when surrendering and booby-trapping their dead, which resulted in U.S. troops often refusing to accept surrender and/or take prisoners. Both sides used examples of atrocities and frequently exacerbated or portrayed them in a racist fashion through propaganda in the mass media. This further fueled the racial hatred on both sides, resulting in the bloodiness seen on the battlefields of the Pacific.
Dower clearly proposes some ethical questions to consider in his conclusion such as, “How did the transition from hatred to peace happen so fast and drastically?”. Dower claims that there were several reasons for such a drastic shift from hate to peace. He argues one reason is because many of the stereotypes were false, and both sides realized this. The Japanese people accepted peace with open arms in the end, despite the stereotypes about their enemy being so ingrained. Another reason Dower argues is that the racist stereotypes did not disappear, rather they were changed by the victor to portray the loser in a less threatening or even more beneficial light. Dower provides examples such as comparing a depiction of the Japanese as a small pet monkey after the war to the brutal King Kong-like beast during the war, or showing how Americans molded the stereotype of Japanese being “children” into more of a “good-child” stereotype, with the Allies being portrayed as “parent states” after the war. Another reason Dower presents is that the negative stereotypes were often transferred to other enemies such as the Soviets, who were now the ones being portrayed as “world conquest seeking beasts” and “the real eastern threat”. Some Asian stereotypes were also used against the Chinese once they became communists, and against the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. Dower argues how racist sentiment against both sides still lingers today. For example, some Japanese people’s negative perception of foreigners or the U.S. in an economic context, or some Americans' negative perceptions of the Japanese in economics and during patriotic days such as Pearl Harbor, which stirs up dormant patriotic anger.
It is clear that there are many aspects of War Without Mercy that should be applauded; however, Dower’s book does seem to have a few issues. War Without Mercy tackles a broad scope, which causes it to lack depth in some areas. Dower could have possibly benefitted from looking at more personal narratives from both sides, as he did by utilizing E.B. Sledges' memoir With The Old Breed. Although Dowers' variety and abundance of evidence should be commended, more utilization of personal accounts could allow his arguments to strike the reader on a more personal level, and show how race played a role in the individual's perspective. Another small critique of Dowers's work was the abundance of information which may have caused the reader to lose track of his central arguments. Dower often provides a multitude of evidence for a single argument, which presents further questions and arguments that can be slightly confusing. Regardless of these nitpicks, Dowers's work remarkably shows how race played a role in one of the bloodiest theatres of conflict the world has seen, and his unique variety and amount of evidence he provides make his arguments strong and impactful.
Dower provides a unique insight into the Pacific Theatre of WWII that is not often talked about. It can be argued that most Americans have a basic understanding of the Pacific Theatre of WWII, and the ones who have a further understanding likely overlook race as a factor. Dower is able to show how race was not only and undoubtedly an important factor in the bloodiness of the theatre, but also how it played a major role in overall strategy and public opinion/perception. Despite WWII being over 80 years ago, War Without Mercy has remained relevant through the twentieth century and even in the modern day. When looking at conflicts such as Vietnam or Operation Desert Storm and Shield, Dowers's arguments can be applied to both sides, notably the U.S., such as utilizing racism in propaganda and media to promote hatred towards the enemy or how racial hatred on both sides played a role in atrocities. Atrocities seen during the Vietnam War like the My Lai massacre and the “Highway of Death” bombing of retreating Iraqi troops show how the dehumanization of the enemy was still commonplace after WWII. Examples of Dower's arguments are even seen today such as in the recent conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq, where hatred and patriotism are often intertwined resulting in abhorrent atrocities such as the bombings and murders of Afghan/Iraqui civilians, the September 11th attacks, the U.S. torture of assumed enemies, or the maimings caused by IED’s to name a few. Unfortunately, it is likely that Dower's arguments and warnings will go unheard in the foreseeable future of warfare. Overall, War Without Mercy provides important themes that can be applied to modern conflicts leaving the reader with relevant ethical and moral questions to consider.
War Without Mercy effectively argues that race played a major role in the Pacific theatre, especially regarding the violence and the atrocities committed in the conflict. Dower makes his argument clear that the Pacific theater was an example of not only a large-scale violent conflict but also a race war. Dower utilizes a great deal of quality evidence, much of it coming from unique forms, to show how racial hatred on both sides resulted in savage combat and atrocities, which caused even more hate creating a vicious cycle. Despite some minor flaws, Dower is able to effectively make a case that provides an often undermentioned aspect of the fighting in the Pacific with strong evidence to support it, which also allows his work to remain relevant. In the end, Dower leaves the reader with some thoughts to consider such as how the U.S. and Japan were able to reconcile and how racism still plays a major role in warfare today. It is important to not repeat the mistakes of the past and it is clear that race hate is present in many current conflicts with it contributing to violence, atrocities, public opinion, and more. After the war, Dower mentions that the U.S. and Japan were able to transition from hatred to peace so drastically partially due to them realizing that the vast majority of stereotypes that were prominent in both cultures were false. It is critical to know your enemy, not the blatant racist stereotypes of them, but who they actually are, their culture, their personal goals, and their beliefs. Racism may not be as blatant, but it still lingers centuries later; conflict allows it to dawn a seductive nature that creeps into the minds of the population, resulting in hatred. If one looks past this veil of hatred, one may realize it’s the same humans fighting each other, not animals, savages, or demons. Having an understanding of each other is critical for not only reducing the brutality witnessed in warfare but also for preventing conflict entirely in some cases. Learning about the enemy may reveal commonalities and motives behind disagreements, which allows for the possibility of options for resolution besides conflict fueled by hate.
Bibliography
Dower, John W. War without mercy: Race and power in the Pacific War. New York, New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 full of hatred towards the Japs aka the Nips; no such hatred existed towards the Germans as a people (as opposed to the Nazis as a political movement): war with Germany did not have a racial angle to it because the Gemans were of the same race as the (white) Americans, and German Americans were an important part of the American society and the American military, from General Eisenhower down to Private Vonnegut. This of course influenced the conduct of the war; Americans collected Japanese skulls as souvenirs, boiling the flesh off, which would have been unthinkable in Germany or Italy; an American soldier sent President Roosevelt a present of a letter opener carved from a bone of a dead Japanese, which the President rejected. A typical American wartime cartoon showed Hitler stomping on Czech villages and an apelike Jap imitating him, stomping on an island in the Philippines. Of course, the Chinese, America's wartime allies, were just as yellow-skinned as the Japanese; if the latter were the Yellow Peril, why not the former? American academics opined on the causes of aggressiveness and cruelty in the Japanese national character; an anthropologist suggested that this was caused by the overly harsh toilet training of Japanese children. Obviously, this took place before the Shimajiro videos.

The Japanese were no less racist, but in a different way: they considered themselves to be a unique people in the whole world, the pure Yamato Race, destined to rule the other races, dirty and mixed. Some Japanese academics provided support for this theory, too. The two major Axis powers regarded each other as being racially inferior to themselves. Although Japanese propaganda proclaimed the liberation of South-East Asia from European colonialism, and Burma, the Philippines and Indonesia declared (puppet) independence under Japanese auspices, this was atypical. Typically, the Japanese behaved like the worst colonial masters, killing and torturing natives to take control over their labor and their countries' natural resources, and justifying it by their right as a superior race. In a typical magazine illustration, a dark-skinned half-naked Indonesian farmer shakes a much bigger fair-skinned hand with the Rising Sun flag on the sleeve; in the background, a Dutchwoman in national dress is running away. Japanese often compared themselves fighting the Allied Powers with folktale character Momotarō fighting demons. Katakana seems to have been written right-to-left in those years; cartoons showed トルベズール (Roosevelt) and ルチーャチ (Churchill) as demons with claws, horns, fangs, a horse's behind or a badger's tail.

After the war, relations between the two nations have been more or less amicable, but their racist prejudice towards each other did not disappear altogether. In 1950 John Foster Dulles suggested that the Japanese could export shirts, pajamas and perhaps cocktail napkins to the United States, not anticipating superior-quality Japanese cars, motorcycles and consumer electronics, which conquered the American market in the next half-century. There is a Honda factory in Ohio that produces Goldwing and VTX motorcycles; Honda is closing it in 2009; I was reading some motorcycle-related blog, and a commenter said that this decision was made because of poor quality of American workers. Can someone please remind me, who won the last war between the United States and Japan?

[Alessandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 detract from the work’s contributions.

Historiographically, War Without Mercy decenters a field that focuses largely on race in the European theatre. While much work has been done on racism and the Holocaust, less is known about the role of race in the Pacific—let alone from both the American and Japanese encampments. Methodologically, the comparative framework highlights not only the malleability of popular metaphors and idioms, but also the fluidity of racism. By focusing on Japan and the U.S., Dower reminds us that racism can adopt many guises.

II wonder, however, if Dower could’ve spent more time charting the transnational comparisons in racist thought between Japan and the U.S. In particular, when reading about Japan’s emphasis on purification, I kept thinking of Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence—which posits that violence has long been associated with renewing qualities throughout American history. Is there not an interesting connection to be made here? And perhaps at other moments? I suspect that part of his inability to thoroughly engage connections/disparities is due to the book’s structure. By handling each nation separately in the last two sections, some moments for comparison were likely lost.

According to Dower, racism accounts for the unique degree of violence and brutality that characterized the Pacific War. Exploring how racism operated in the U.S. and Japan, however, also answers another question Dower rightly posed: how was peace attained so quickly in the wake of such a brutal contest? The answer, Dower explains, lies in the malleability of the symbols and idioms that embodied the “other” during the war. “The abrupt transition from a merciless racist war to an amicable postwar relationship was” Dower claims, “facilitated by the fact that the same stereotypes that fed superpatriotism and outright race hatred were adaptable to cooperation" (302). For example, the apian image employed by the U.S. to dehumanize the Japanese people morphs, in the postwar period, into a docile pet. In another instance, the image of the Japanese as child-like others made room for the “maturation” of Japan in the postwar years.

The symbols and idioms Dower discusses, however, were by no means products of the war alone. Instead War Without Mercy elaborates on how, in both America and Japan, many common propagandistic tools were unearthed from previous contexts. For example, the Japanese notion of the stranger—or the demonic other—emerged from folk traditions in the countryside and was reinvented to underscore the polluting, demonic nature of the Allied powers. Likewise, American imagery had portrayed Filipinos as apes decades before the resurgence of apian imagery in Pacific War cartoons.

Dower does the important work of demonstrating how certain symbols and idioms were loaded with racist ideologies and representations, which in turn fueled the escalation of violence in the Pacific. His emphasis on symbols, phrases, idioms, and ideas points to the structural nature of racism. By using mass-produced material and political documents, Dower highlights that racism and racist acts are not simply products of individual action, but are also embedded into the operating apparatuses of many—perhaps all—nation-states.

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 the Yamato bloodline underwrote colonialist domination, American caricatures of the Japanese as inherently deceptive, brutishly apish and unthinkingly fanatical drew on the nation’s own racial symbols. Indeed, many of the American attitudes toward the Japanese echoed earlier views regarding Native Americans, and Dower traces the American military presence in Asia to the occupation of the Philippines by men who had earlier fought against western tribes, such as the father of General MacArthur. The main thrust of War Without Mercy is not, however, the depths or details of the hatred unleashed during the war, but in the manner it evaporated into a harmonious occupation and alliance after the war. What had happened?

“In a world that continues to experience so much violence and racial hatred, such a dramatic transformation from bitter enmity to genuine cooperation is heartening . . . it is fortunate that people on all sides can put such a terrible conflict behind them, but dangerous to forget how easily war came about between Japan and the Western Allies, and how extraordinarily fierce and Manichaean it was.” The key, Dower suggests, to the shift to an “inequitable but harmonious relationship between victors and vanquished lies in appreciating the malleability of political language and imagery in general.” Once defeated, images of the Japanese in the American press shifted, portraying a nation of friendly mimics – inferior but welcoming of guidance. The more threatening traits attributed to them quickly resurfaced in depictions of treacherous and ruthless communists, suggesting a flexible but coherent American tradition of symbols around “otherness.” This approach to racism, based in Geertzian ideology, has some merit, but Dower’s study would have been more rounded had it taken Asian-Americans more fully into the picture. While he does note the many discriminatory anti-Asian laws still on the books at the start of the war (to the chagrin of Americans and the delight of Japanese propagandists), a consideration of the connection between international standing and domestic prejudice, and the structural aspects of discrimination, would have been profitable. While Dower’s expertise is in foreign affairs, observations on American racism abroad will inevitably find domestic significance.

[Chi Pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 , describing how one side often demonized the other without realizing its own atrocity, and without realizing the reverberating similarity. John Dower also stresses the way those images were mallable to the purposes of wartime as well as peacetime leadership. The concept of racism made the war all the more brutal, because the US just could not ignore the myth (or fact?) that the black race and other yellow races were secretly hoping for the demise of the White supremacy, at the same time when the Japanese could not ignore the idea that the White was there to exterminate them all - the way the Holocaust visited upon the Jews. First World War - it was "the war to end all wars", but Second Word War - it was only "the war without mercy".

Of course, as this book was published more than 20 years ago, some new issues have emerged out of the study of Race War, notably T.Fujitani's "Race for Empire" - addressing the similarity between the US treatment of Japanese Americans and the Japanese treatment of the Korean nationals during the war. However, I think anyone who follows American or Japanese foreign policy (or both) today should take a look at this book - it is seriously worth reading.

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pacific theater was home to some of the most brutal rhetoric of World War II. American politicians and generals called for the extermination of the Japanese people, and their Japanese counterparts fought to establish a new world order with their own race superior to all others. Both sides were willing to commit atrocities against the other, justifying torture and murder with propaganda that portrayed the victims as less than human. But in the post-war world Japan and the US are close allies. What happened to the hatred between the two sides? How did we go from an environment where Japanese civilians would kill themselves and their families rather than live under American rule, to one where the nations are friends?

Dower explores the racial attitudes in the war that made the atrocities and dramatic shift in relations possible. Racism was used as a weapon by both sides to motivate their citizens, but it also led to fatal tactical errors as generals bought the propaganda (the Japanese for instance weren’t prepared for submarine attacks, because they believed the Americans did not have the fortitude to pilot them effectively) The first half of the book focuses more on the Americans, and the second half deals with the Japanese attitudes and the post war years. The book is readable enough for anyone, but has enough meat on the bones to be interesting to students of the pacific war. This book is an excellent read and belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in World War II or in how racial stereotypes influence public policy.

[David Haws · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 accomplishments up close, and the accomplishments of others at a distance. Demagogues, to co-opt our efforts, give us a rationale to support our innate sense of superiority—pointing to something obvious that we share with the demagogue. The Japanese could point to 2600 years of shared polity in the grace of 天照大神; but Americans come from such diverse cultures, the only visual thing the majority of us had in common was our pale skins.

Our material orientation is so strong, it’s hard for us to give place to mere ideas; yet it’s the idea that binds us together: that everyone has a right to work toward their own moderate, achievable degree of happiness. Anyone who believes this is part of our American family; should be honored and welcomed. Those who don’t believe this—especially if they fail to believe from such a privileged position as we enjoy here—should be someplace else.

[Brad Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 upbringing. So much of the Pacific War arose directly out of these incompatible worldviews, and Dower is able to tie much of the war together into the theme of race and culture.

Oh, and it's not just a "white men are evil" story. The entire second half of the book focuses on racism and prejudice from the Japanese side. Dower makes it clear that it was mutual misunderstanding that led to a tragic war, not the oppression by powerful white men.

If you think you know about World War II, you need to read this book. I don't say this about many things, but it opened my eyes.

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 think the most impressive aspect of the book is that Dower walks the tightrope of equally treating both the American and Japanese with almost mathematical precision. This is an impressive achievement, especially considering that some scholars who set out to treat two sides equally in a subject often fail to do so.

One pet criticism I would make of the book is that it is almost interminable!