John W. Dower > Quotes

“What the diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.”
― John W. Dower, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945

“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

“There are many such parallel declarations in the propaganda of both sides, and these become even more suggestive when we consider another passage in General Blamey's speech. "You have lost many comrades," he told his men," but you have learnt that it is the highest and sweetest achievement of us all that we should die for our country." Such words could have been placed in the mouth of a Japanese commander almost without change (they would not have said "sweet"); but when the Japanese did speak of the nobility of dying for emperor and country, their enemies offered this as evidence of their peculiar fanaticism, irrationality, even collective psychosis and death wish. The Japanese, in turn, belittled the Allied dead. Holy wars permit scant space for reflecting on a common humanity, whether the commonality lie in bravery and idealism, or obedience and helplessness, or arrogance, oppression, and atrocity.”
― John W Dower

“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

“Most of the propaganda the Allies and Japanese engaged in concerning the enemy's atrocious behavior was rooted in actual occurrences, and the horror, rage, and hatred this provoked on all sides was natural. Of greater interest now, however, is the way such behavior was offered as confirmation of the innately inferior and immoral nature of the enemy-- a reflection of national character-- when, in fact, the pages of history everywhere are stained with cruelty and unbridled savagery. The "civilization" which both the Allies and the Japanese claimed to be defending had failed to stem these impulses, and World War Two simply witnessed new as well as old ways of carrying out mass destruction and individual violence. Allied propagandists were not distorting the history of Japan when they pointed to much that was cruel in the Japan's past. They had to romanticize or simply forget their own history, however, to turn such behavior into something uniquely Japanese-- to ignore, for example, the long history of torture and casual capital punishment in the West, the genocide of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere by the sixteenth-century conquistadores, the "hell ships" of the Western slave trade, the death march of American Indians forcibly removed from the eastern United States in the 1930s, the ten thousand or more Union prisoners of war who died at Andersonville during the U.S Civil War, the introduction of "modern" strategies of annihilation and terrorization of civilians by Napoleon and Lee and Grant and Sherman, and the death marches and massacres of native peoples by the European colonialists in Africa and Asia, right up to 1941. In their genuine shock at the death rituals which the Japanese military engaged in, moreover, the Westerners tended to forget not only their own "epics of defeat" (immortalized in names such as Roland, Thermopylae, the Alamo, and Custer), but also the self-sacrifice against hopeless odds of thousands of Allied fighting men. To give but one example, the number of United Kingdom airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater than the number of Japanese who died as kamikaze pilots. The acceptance of certain death by the latter did indeed set them apart, but the difference can be exaggerated”
― John W Dower