John W Dower
Biographic Data
| ID | 279165 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John W Dower |
| GIVEN NAMES | John W |
| FAMILY NAME | Dower |
| SIGNATURE | DOWER J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 257 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
This book documents for the first time previously hidden Japanese atrocities in World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. Another chapter…
Japan and the United States: Reflections on War, Empire, Race and Culture
John Dower, who is now emeritus professor of Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an essential influence during my years as a correspondent in Japan. I (and I know numerous others) considered him a giant in his field, one of the few scholars who were required reading for anyone with a serious commitment to covering a nation notorious for its opacity, its complex history, and the ideological shroud Americans draped ov…
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
The violent American century: War and terror since World War II
The Violent "American Century" addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945. World War II marked the apogee of industrialized "total war." Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastat…
Violence, Okinawa, and the 'Pax Americana
This unannotated essay was written for Okinawan readers of the Ryūkyū Shimpō, where it appeared in translation in four installments on September 25, 27, 29 and October 3, 2017. It has been slightly compressed for readers of the APJ. Dower's observations are addressed at length in his recent annotated book The Violent American Century (Haymarket/Dispatch Books), which will be published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in a translation by Yuki Tanaka …
The Failure Of Imagination: From Pearl Harbor to 9-11, Afghanistan and Iraq
The Asia Pacific Journal is proud to offer its readers a preview of John W. Dower's new book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: Norton 2010). In the first days after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prominent American news sources reacted by invoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the event as an act …
Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage & Grief: Hamaya Hiroshi's Photos of the Anti-Security-Treaty Protests
In earlier issues of APJ, we introduced three image-driven treatments of protest in prewar and postwar Japan: Andrew Gordon, "Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905"; Christopher Gerteis, "Political Protest in Interwar Japan: Posters & Handbills from the Ohara Collection (1920s-1930s," part 1 & part 2; Linda Hoaglund, "Protest Art in 1950s Japan: The Forgotten Reportage Painters." The following "visual essay" by Justin Jesty, a…
The San Francisco System: Past, Present, Future in U.S.-Japan-China Relations
NOTE: This essay, written in January 2013, appears as the first section in a book co-authored by John W. Dower and Gavan McCormack and published in Japanese translation by NHK Shuppan Shinsho in January 2014 under the title Tenkanki no Nihon e: “Pakkusu Amerikana” ka-”Pakkusu Ajia” ka (”Japan at a Turning Point-Pax Americana? Pax Asia?”; the second section is an essay by McCormack on Japan's client-state relationship with the United States focusi…
Protest Art in 1950s Japan: The Forgotten Reportage Painters
The following article is a reprint of a unit developed by MIT Visualizing Cultures, a project focused on image-driven scholarship. Click here to view the essay in its original, visually-rich layout. And see the complete image galleries here. In the coming months the Asia-Pacific Journal will reprint a number of articles on the theme of social protest in Japan originally posted at MIT VC, together with an introduction by John W. Dower to the serie…
Visualizing Protest in Modern Japan
Between 2002 and 2013, the Visualizing Cultures (VC) project at M.I.T. produced a number of "image-driven" online units addressing Japan and China in the modern world. Co-directed by John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa, VC tapped a wide range of hitherto largely inaccessible visual resources of an historical nature. Each topical treatment-which can run from one to as many as four separate units-formats and analyzes these graphics in ways that, ideall…
Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World
Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World
The Failure of Imagination: From Pearl Harbor to 9-11, Afghanistan and Iraq
The Asia Pacific Journal is proud to offer its readers a preview of John W. Dower's new book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/ 9-11/ Iraq (New York: Norton 2010). In the first days after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prominent American news sources reacted by invoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the event as an ac…
Japan's Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga of Suppression of Free Speech and Thought
Japan Focus Introduction. History often taps us on the shoulder unexpectedly. War and occupation-and, more particularly, occupied Iraq vis-a-vis occupied Japan a half-century ago- is a good example of thisIn this case, the tap on the shoulder really began in 2002 as a crude, hubristic shove. In the propaganda campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, officials in the Bush administration frequently evoked the example of Japan afte…
Mocking Misery: Grass-Roots Satire in Defeated Japan
Ground Zero 1945: Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors
These drawings and paintings by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb were created more than a quarter century after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They are provided courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and form part of a much larger archive of more than 2,000 images and annotations. Posted at Japan Focus on April 27, 2005
Haiboku o dakishimete: Dainiji Taisengo no Nihonjin
Remaking History: Bush's comparison of Iraq with postwar Japan ignores the facts
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Warning from history: Don't expect democracy in Iraq
You have written about the occupation of Japan by the United States after World War Two. Does this have any relevance to what might take place in a post-hostilities Iraq, should the United States carry out its threat to go to war against that country
Occupations and Empires: Why Iraq is not Japan
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The Other Japanese Occupation
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Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Commentary: 'Culture,' Theory, and Practice in U.S.-Japan Relations
Journal Article “Culture,” Theory, and Practice in U.S.-Japan Relations Get access John W. Dower John W. Dower Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 24, Issue 3, July 2000, Pages 517–528, https://doi.org/10.1111/0145-2096.00231 Published: 17 December 2002
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Part 1 Victor and vanquished: shattered lives - euphemistic surrender, unconditional surrender, quantifying coming home ... perhaps, displaced persons, despised veterans, stigmatized victims gifts from heaven - from above, demilitarization and democratization, imposing reform. Part 2 Transcending despair: Kyodatsu - exhaustion and despair - hunger and bamboo-shoot existence, enduring unendurable, sociologies of despair, child's play, inflation an…
Haiboku o dakishimete: Dainiji Taisengo no Nihonjin
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954
This detailed biography of Japan's postwar prime minister was favorably received in the United States and has sold widely in translation in Japan
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman
Recent Japan in Historical Revisionism: Occupied Japan as History and Occupation History as Politics
For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as …
Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia
Journal Article Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia Get access John W. Dower John W. Dower Henry R. Luce Professor of International Cooperation in the history faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 3, December 1995, Pages 1124–1135, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945119 Published: 01 December 1995
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
Journal Article War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. By John W. Dower. (New York: Pantheon, 1986. xii + 399 pp. $22.50.) Get access George E. Moore George E. Moore San Jose State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1074–7075, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904148 Published: 01 March 1987
Science, society, and the Japanese atomic-bomb project during world war two
On January 7, 1978, the front page of The New York Times carried a headline reading “Japanese Data Show Tokyo Tried To Make World War II A-Bomb.” This is history as news—but history of a politically consequential sort nonetheless, although it can be used in different ways. It is of interest to students of science, technology, and the state who are concerned with arms control and anti-nuclear proliferation, for example. At the same time, it can be…
Delusion Moso
The Eye of the beholder: Background notes on the US-Japan military relationship
In the last half century, the pivotal steps in American-Japanese relations have been paced off at roughly ten-year intervals. At the Washington Conference of 1921-1922, American and other Western pressure brought about cancellation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and forced Japan to rely upon uncertain international guarantees for its security. The Manchurian Incident of 1931 dispelled the professed hopes of the twenties, and a full decade later P…
Delusion Moso
Points of note: Asia and the Nixon Doctrine
Although 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 initial briefing exist, but have never been published and cannot be quoted directly. As Administration supporters explain it, such ambiguity is deliberate and essential; any greater spelling out of American intentions would place the United States in a straight-ja…
Hebi-Tsuina-Sakazuki
The Elements of Japanese Design: A Handbook of Family Crests, Heraldry, and Symbolism
Occupied Japan: A working bibliography
Among 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 because it can be argued that the contours of the contemporary Japanese state were significantly shaped (or not reshapen) in these years. Puzzling because the occupation and the two succeeding years which capped it with the Mutual Security Agreement offer an exce…
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman
Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan
Recent Japan in Historical Revisionism: Occupied Japan as History and Occupation History as Politics
For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as …
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman
Introduction to “People under feudalism”
In June 1947, the Canadian diplomat and historian E. Herbert Norman was invited to address a memorial service for his father sponsored by citizens in Nagano, Japan. Norman's father had been a respected Methodist missionary in Nagano, and he himself had lived there until his late teens. In the context of the recent war and unfolding occupation and “democratization” of Japan, he chose to dwell upon several themes: the nature of feudal society and t…
Science, society, and the Japanese atomic-bomb project during world war two
On January 7, 1978, the front page of The New York Times carried a headline reading “Japanese Data Show Tokyo Tried To Make World War II A-Bomb.” This is history as news—but history of a politically consequential sort nonetheless, although it can be used in different ways. It is of interest to students of science, technology, and the state who are concerned with arms control and anti-nuclear proliferation, for example. At the same time, it can be…
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954
This detailed biography of Japan's postwar prime minister was favorably received in the United States and has sold widely in translation in Japan
Rethinking World War II in Asia
Art, children, and the bomb
Among the various arguments which were advanced by Americans in the summer of 1945 in support of using the atomic bombs against Japan, there is one that has been generally neglected. We might call it the concept of idealistic genocide
War Without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War
Racist War for Civilization
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
Journal Article War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. By John W. Dower. (New York: Pantheon, 1986. xii + 399 pp. $22.50.) Get access George E. Moore George E. Moore San Jose State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Pages 1074–7075, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904148 Published: 01 March 1987
The Volatility of Japanese-American Relations
Ōkubo Genji and the institute of Pacific relations: The unfinished agenda
In 1972 Ōkubo Genji and I had lunch together at a restaurant near the Canadian embassy in Tokyo. It was our first meeting. I had approached him to talk about E. H. Norman, little imagining that he would become a treasured friend
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
A Rejoinder
Research Article| May 01 1988 A Rejoinder Howard Schonberger Howard Schonberger Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1988) 57 (2): 209–218. https://doi.org/10.2307/4492267 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation H…
Fear and Prejudice in U.S.–Japan Relations
At the time of writing, Dower observed mounting tension in U.S.-Japan relations. He identified two factors as contributing to mutual fear: differences in capitalism on national and international levels, and stereotypical perceptions based on racial phobias. The author describes major characteristics inducing pessimism based on rational fears concerning economic well-being, national pride, and “cultural values.” While densely intertwined economica…
History (45 works) · Political science (37 works) · Japanese History and Culture (29 works) · History (26 works) · Law (21 works) · Ancient history (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (13 works) · Economic history (12 works)