Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

A week before the first occupation forces arrived, the novelist Osaragi Jirō addressed the dead more intimately in an “apology to departed heroes” in the daily Asahi, recounting his sleepless night in the wake of the emperor’s broadcast. The faces of acquaintances killed in the war had passed before him: a friend in publishing, an occasional drinking companion, the taciturn chef at a favorite restaurant, a man he saw only at college baseball games, a doctor skilled in writing waka poems. He spoke of them as stars fading away with the whitening sky of dawn, imagined them alongside an endless procession of shadows on the horizon, and asked them a question that would not leave the minds of many Japanese in the years to come: “What can we do to ease your souls?” The answer seemed clear enough to Osaragi at that moment. All one could do was rely on the emperor’s decision and look forward to the dawn of a day when, “shaking off old filth,” a new Japan would be built. Only then, when humiliation had been overcome, would it be possible to “dedicate a requiem” to the spirits of the dead. Only then, perhaps, would it be possible for the dead to “smile and rest in peace.”2