Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The Indian justice took palpable pleasure in suggesting the hypocrisy of the victors’ case. He quoted England’s prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs at some length, for example, on how the Japanese had followed the precedents of European imperialism, sometimes “with almost pedantic exactitude.” Similarly, in discussing the “Amau Doctrine” of 1934, in which Japan had enunciated its special rights and interests in China, Pal observed that this definition of national interest “finds obvious precedent in the conduct of the United States in pursuance of the Monroe Doctrine.”69 The prosecution’s attempt to condemn the Japanese for conspiring to promote feelings of “racial superiority” through their educational system did not exactly impress him—as it had the prosecutors—as something for which the Japanese could be uniquely condemned. On this issue, he was more rueful than bitter. He quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee on how “race-feeling” had been fundamental to modern Western society, and pointed to the discrimination that Japanese and other Asians had endured in recent times at the hands of the dominant white powers. Ultimately, though, he saw the inculcation of feelings of racial superiority as “a dangerous weapon in the hands of . . . designing people from the earliest days of human history.”70