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Questions and Answers:
Professor John Dower
John Dower, Elting E. Morison Professor of History, uses visual materials and popular culture to reexamine modern Japanese and US-Asian history. His award-winning books include War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize. How do projects like the documentary film Hellfire and the book that accompanied it, which present a Japanese couple's compelling artwork about the atomic bombs, change how people understand history? In many ways, I fear, words have begun to lose their meaning. We live in a world of spin and euphemism and, increasingly, plain anti-intellectualism, where people seem to be losing whatever capacity they may once have had for sympathetic imagination. And where horrendous events like war and the killing of civilians are concerned, I think we also encounter a kind of psychic numbing. Some things are just too horrible to imagine. Even now, after September 11, while Americans are indeed profoundly traumatized by visions of terror come home, most of them still do not extend that vision to an appreciation of the true nature of violence wreaked on others in foreign places -- including the violence we ourselves may have perpetuated in the past or be planning for the future. Visuals help break through this failure of sympathetic imagination, although it is a struggle. For we Americans, and especially our young people, also live in a world so saturated with "virtual" violence that it is an enormous challenge to convey real as opposed to fictionalized pain and death. When we did Hellfire in the mid-1980s, we were trying to move as closely as possible to the human and individual consequences of nuclear war by dealing with artists who had been in Hiroshima immediately after the bomb was dropped. They felt compelled to convey the horrors they had seen as intimately and powerfully as they could --which in their case meant by painting. This was a new vehicle of visual expression, as opposed to the photographs and old newsreel footage which were fairly familiar by then. Painting helped bring the terrible subject alive in new ways. In the end, nuclear weapons, and war in general, are a human tragedy, but it still remains terribly difficult to convey this to people who find comfort in either romanticization or denial. Beyond this, I should emphasize that visuals are a wonderful way of teaching history in general. They are "texts" we can read in exciting ways that really bring the past alive in a manner that can excite young people. This is why Professor Shigeru Miyagawa and I have embarked on a new project on "Visualizing Cultures" here at MIT that, hopefully, will succeed in utilizing the marvelous potential of the digital world to enhance historical appreciation of other peoples as well as ourselves. What lessons does Embracing Defeat draw about the resiliency of postwar eras? I really didn't know what to expect when I embarked on the study of Japan in the wake of World War Two many years ago. My earlier research had been on the Pacific War itself, and it was profoundly depressing. In Embracing Defeat, on the other hand, I think you can see a rediscovered sense of optimism about human nature. The title itself is a bit puzzling at first glance and deliberately so. However it conveys what I found in the Japanese experience after their miserable and atrocious war: that no one welcomed being defeated, but the vast majority embraced the opportunity to start over and create a "good society" free of militarism and repression. They had certainly been socialized to die for emperor and country if called upon to do so. What choice did they have? Once the war had ended in decisive defeat of the militarists, however, all the wartime propaganda and indoctrination turned to rubble -- just as the country itself had been turned into rubble. The victorious Americans came in and introduced a sweeping occupation program of "demilitarization and democratization" but it was the Japanese people themselves, at all levels, who implemented this agenda and made it work. How would you describe the current era in Japan's history? Japan is in the doldrums these days, and the prolonged economic slump has created considerable pessimism. Japanese journalists love to talk about a "second defeat," but this is nonsense. For all its problems and corruption and political ossification, Japan is still a viable democracy. And the Japanese people as a whole still endorse the antimilitarist ideals that emerged so powerfully in the wake of defeat. Apart from getting their moribund capitalism back in gear, I think Japan's leaders really face a global challenge of another sort, although it is somewhat heretical to say this. That is, one of the great legacies of the defeat and occupation has been Japan's friendship and intimate strategic relationship with the United States. The friendship is to be cherished, but the intimacy has been an unequal one -- what some Japanese refer to as a posture of "subordinate independence." When Washington whistles, Japan heels. This is psychologically enervating, and sooner or later Japan has to come up with political leadership capable of defining a more constructive, creative, multilateral vision of the country's ideal role in Asia and the world.
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology