Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Responsibility for occupied Germany, Japan’s former Axis partner, divided as it was among the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union, lacked the focused intensity that came with America’s unilateral control over Japan. Germany also escaped the messianic fervor of General Douglas MacArthur, the postsurrender potentate in Tokyo. For the victors, occupying defeated Germany had none of the exoticism of what took place in Japan: the total control over a pagan, “Oriental” society by white men who were (unequivocally, in General MacArthur’s view) engaged in a Christian mission. The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as “the white man’s burden.”