Embracing Defeat Quotes

“For all their talk of democracy, the conquerors worked hard to engineer consensus; and on many critical issues, they made clear that the better part of political wisdom was silence and conformism. So well did they succeed in reinforcing this consciousness that after they left, and time passed, many non-Japanese including Americans came to regard such attitudes as peculiarly Japanese.”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as “the white man’s burden.”2”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“We can prove that most Americans don’t believe in pushing people around, even when we happen to be on top.”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“Enduring political and social revolutions generally emanate from below. Certainly, they must ultimately come from within the indigenous society. Never had a genuinely democratic revolution been associated with military dictatorship, to say nothing of a neocolonial military dictatorship—which, when all was said and done, is what MacArthur’s command was.”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“Over two years later, Osaragi Jirō, a distinguished author respected for his humanism, wrestled frankly with the same issue. A British acquaintance, he wrote, had asked why the Japanese did nothing about their street children. His immediate response was that they lacked the financial resources, but on reflection he realized this was disingenuous. In fact, he concluded, as a people they simply lacked love toward strangers. He himself was no exception. In all honesty, he had to admit that he had no desire to take in these filthy urchins and try to straighten out their characters. Could it be, Osaragi mused, that Japanese were shallower than other peoples when it came to love?49”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“Similarly, the preoccupation with their own misery that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all groups and peoples construct for themselves.”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

“In the most sweeping of material calculations, it was estimated that the Allied assault on shipping and the bombing campaign against the home islands destroyed one-quarter of the country’s wealth. This included four-fifths of all ships, one-third of all industrial machine tools, and almost a quarter of all rolling stock and motor vehicles. General MacArthur’s “SCAP” bureaucracy (SCAP, an acronym for Supreme Command[er] for the Allied Powers, was commonly used to refer to MacArthur’s command) placed the overall costs of the war even higher, calculating early in 1946 that Japan had “lost one-third of its total wealth and from one-third to one-half of its total potential income.” Rural living standards were estimated to have fallen to 65 percent of prewar levels and nonrural living standards to about 35 percent.16”
― John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II