Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

In Allied eyes, the Japanese simply had reaped what they had sown. The terror bombing of Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was seen as an appropriate homecoming for the horrors Japan had visited on others throughout Asia and the Pacific. Early in 1949, when occupation authorities finally relaxed their restraints on the publication of intimate personal accounts of the effects of the atomic bombs, they conveyed this notion of righteous punishment literally. At General Willoughby’s insistence, the first printing of Nagai Takashi’s Nagasaki no Kane (The Bells of Nagasaki) had to include a lengthy American-prepared appendix about “The Sack of Manila” by Japanese forces in 1945. Such victor’s logic was obtuse. It easily could be taken as suggesting that Nagasaki and Manila were comparable atrocities—hardly what the Americans intended.