Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In a daily vignette that perfectly symbolized the U.S.–Japan relationship, an American MP and a Japanese policeman directed traffic together at the busy Hibiya intersection—with the Japanese always giving his signals a moment after the MP’s. “We could walk from one end to the other” of Little America, the wife of an American colonel recalled, “without being out of sight of an American face or an American vehicle.” This gave the occupiers a sense of familiarity and security—and provided a stark contrast to the surrounding “mile upon mile of wasteland, heaped with ashes, charred wood and rusty metal,” where their subjects were attempting to reconstruct their lives.9 For some, the separation between these two worlds was unbridgable, and properly so. “To me,” a woman attached to the occupation as a civilian employee recalled with unbridled contempt, “the world beyond our brightly lighted Allied billets, offices and railroad coaches was largely peopled by warped and ugly creatures from some Oriental Nibelungenlied;