Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

The future remained terribly uncertain, and the enormity of the nation’s humiliation had only begun to sink in. The country’s utter subjugation was reinforced by the dramatic setting of the surrender ceremony itself. The imperial navy had long since been demolished. Apart from a few thousand rickety planes held in reserve for suicide attacks, Japan’s air force—not only its aircraft, but its skilled pilots as well—had virtually ceased to exist. Its merchant marine lay at the bottom of the ocean. Almost all of the country’s major cities had been fire bombed, and millions of the emperor’s loyal subjects were homeless. The defeated imperial army was scattered throughout Asia and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, its millions of surviving soldiers starving, wounded, sick, and demoralized. But Tokyo Bay was clogged with hundreds of powerful, well-scrubbed American fighting ships. At a thunderous theatrical moment, the sky was all but obscured by a fly-by of some four hundred glistening B-29 bombers accompanied by fifteen hundred Navy fighter planes. The imperial soil was being desecrated by the landings of wave upon wave of well-fed, superbly equipped, supremely confident GIs—an army of occupation whose numbers, in a short time, would surpass a quarter of a million. A country that had celebrated its mythic “2,600-year anniversary” in 1940, and prided itself on never having been invaded, was about to be inundated by white men.