Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Chapter 16 is one of the most complex sections of Embracing Defeat because it examines the subject of public memory. Dower analyzes dozens of textual sources—from the convicted war criminals’ final words to fictional literature. His investigation reveals diverse perspectives: blaming the Japanese leadership for defeat, Christian and Buddhist perspectives, and even the public rehabilitation of convicted war criminals all the way to getting elected for political office.

The author points out that the winning side in war usually makes heroes of everyone who fights for it. It also offers some meaning: “Triumph gave a measure of closure to grief” (486). In contrast, the losing side struggles with closure, the defeat leaving their grief “raw and open” (486). These questions of meaning and memory surpass cultural differences and are universal. For the Japanese, their loss made them question the responsibility for defeat. Major Japanese publications, such as Mainichi, discussed the far-reaching subject of “war responsibility” (491). This discussion amounted to “pointing fingers at those leaders who were primarily responsible for the great ‘crime’ of bringing about ‘miserable defeat’” (491). However, the journalists failed to display self-reflection and “were not particularly interested in exposing the nature of Japan’s aggression or its victimization of others” (491). They even failed to mention the well-known war crimes, like the Rape of Nanking.

The way the imperial army’s behavior fits into public memory is one of the author’s key discussions. Dower argues that many Japanese, especially men, were aware of the imperial forces’ wartime atrocities. They witnessed them personally or simply learned about them. At the same time, the civilian deaths in Allied aerial bombings of Japan and, specifically, the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, complicate this issue. The first survey for the public prior to the occupation “pronounced Hiroshima and Nagasaki a ‘living hell’” (492). The survey proceeded to provide graphic details about the effects of radiation, describing the “’evil spirit’ possessing Hiroshima” (492). Dower believes:

There was a widespread sense of having experienced a forbidding, surreal new dimension of existence which no other people could hope to comprehend. Such consciousness of nuclear destruction became an integral even if not always evident part of all subsequent attempts to come to terms with the war’s meaning. It reinforced a pervasive sense of powerlessness and lent an eerie kind of specialness to what might otherwise have felt like a pointless defeat (492-93).

The question of the victims and aggressors and, at times, the blurred lines between them, is another central theme in Dower’s book.

There was also a religious dimension to discussing the aftermath of the war, defeat, and grieving the war dead both among Japan’s Christian minority and the Buddhists. Dower returns to Shigeru Nabara, Tokyo University’s President. Nabara experienced “a heavy burden of personal guilt for having encouraged his students to support the wartime mission of ‘our glorious nation’” (487). After the war, however, he became one of the war’s biggest critics and a peace advocate as a result of “a conversion experience” (487). Buddhist thinking about the meaning of war appeared in the famous Harp of Burma (Biruma no Tategoto) written by Michio Takeyama. This fictional work addressed the subjects of guilt, suffering, and making amends within the framework of Buddhism. Takeyama’s main character, Yasuhiko Mizushima, is an ex-soldier. This protagonist “became the great fictive consoler of the souls of the country’s war dead” by wandering through the jungle of Burma as a priest and burying the remains of the Japanese soldiers (502). Dower describes Mizushima’s self-reflection:

Tormented by the question, so central to Buddhism, of why there is so much suffering and misery in the world, Mizushima concludes that humans will never understand perfectly. Still, Japan had brought its recent suffering upon itself. Our country waged war, was defeated, and now suffers. That is because our desires got out of hand (502).

Takeyama’s answer to his protagonist’s predicament is the service of others.

Some Japanese, however, expressed anger at the leadership, especially those convinced of “Class A” war crimes. Some anger was directed at General Hideki Tōjō, a wartime prime minister, who was convicted as one of the main culprits. The writer Jan Takami described his anger as follows:

Cowardly living on, and then using a pistol like a foreigner, failing to die. Japanese cannot help but smile bitterly. Why did General Tōjō not die right away as Army Minister Anami did? Why did General Tōjō not use a Japanese sword as Army Minister Anami did? (492).

Tōjō accepted responsibility for war at the tribunal and was ultimately convicted. The quote conveys the writer’s view of Tōjō’s suicide attempt as dishonorable. Ultimately, the former prime minister was executed as a war criminal in December 1948.

Whereas some war criminals were executed, others “made the transition from notoriety to celebrity status and commercial success without even making an interim stop at Sugamo” (511). One such example is the Masanobu Tsuji, a former colonel. At the end of the war, though he was a wanted war criminal, he was able to stay in China, then return to Japan “disguised as a Chinese professor” (511). Tsuji lived in secret “with the full knowledge of General Willoughby and the support of former army colleagues” (511). Ultimately, the US lifted his war-criminal designation, and Tsuji was elected to the House of Representatives in the Ishikawa prefecture.

Tsuji’s case was unexceptional in terms of rehabilitation. In the early 1950s, Japanese publishers released more than 15 books featuring the final words of war criminals who had been executed. These final words came in the form of death poems, letters to families, and their final statements in general: “Their compatriots were giving these men the last word in the most effective manner possible, by letting them speak as if from the grave” (415). Dower describes the most famous of these books, Testaments of the Century (Seiki no Isho), released in 1953 and featuring 692 executed war criminals. The author believes that this book and others like it were compelling because “these words reflected the thoughts and emotions of men looking death in the eye” (416).

However, Dower does not find a sense of glorification or anger in Testaments of the Century. Instead, there was “an overwhelming feeling of waste, regret, and sorrow” (519). Because death was imminent for these war criminals, Dower suggests that the “final words of the war criminals were not so different as might be imagined from those of the student conscripts killed in the war” (519).