John W. Dower

Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia

Fiftieth anniversaries are unlike other commemorative occasions, especially when they are anniversaries of war. Participants in the events of a half century ago are still alive to tell their emotional personal tales. Their oral histories confront the skepticism and detachment of younger generations who have no memories of the war. Historians with access to materials that were previously inaccessible (or simply ignored) develop new perspectives on the dynamics and significance of what took place. Politicians milk the still palpable human connection between past and present for every possible drop of ideological elixir. History, memory, scholarship, and politics become entangled in intricate ways.1 All this is predictably apparent in this fiftieth anniversary of the conclusion of World War II in Asia. Where the end of the war against Japan is concerned, however, the contemporary commemorations have become unusually contentious, especially in the United States. Why such controversy now, when for all ostensible purposes we are commemorating the Allied victory over an aggressive, atrocious, and fanatical enemy? The answer, of course, lies in the atomic bombs and the fact that victory over Japan entailed incinerating and irradiating men, women, and children with a weapon more terrible than any previously known or imagined. Triumph and tragedy became inseparable. At the same time, in the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the so-called total victory of the United States became fused with a future of inescapable insecurity. The bombs marked both an end and a beginningthe end of an appalling global conflagration in which more than 50 million people were killed and the beginning of the nuclear arms race and a new world in which security was forever a step away and enormous resources had to be diverted to military pursuits. It is a measure of the impoverishment of our present-day political climate in the United States that Americans have been denied a rare opportunity to use the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reflect more deeply about these

Occupied Japan: A working bibliography

AbstractAmong the more puzzling hiatuses in the study of postwar Japan as well as postwar Pacific capitalism has been the relative paucity of scholarship on the occupation of 1945-1952. Puzzling be...

10 Points of note: Asia and the Nixon Doctrine

AbstractAlthough the President first enunciated the “Nixon Doctrine” informally on Guam in July 1969, the precise meaning of that doctrine has remained ambiguous ever since. Transcripts of this ini...