Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In 1950, Japanese readers got their first unvarnished view of the Pacific War from the perspective of the American fighting man when the translation of Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead appeared and quickly became a bestseller. As an enduring impression, however, Mailer’s gritty novel paled before a selection of letters and other writings by university students killed in the war. Edited by progressive intellectuals and evocatively titled Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen! The Voices of the Ocean), this extraordinary exercise in transforming war words into peace words was inspired by the belief that these intimate communications from the very maw of the war itself would be read as an eloquent cry for peace. The letters rocketed to the top ranks of bestsellers and almost immediately became the basis for a movie of the same name.