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Professor JOHN DOWER (Author, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of
World War II"): I felt very good.

LAMB: Why?

Prof. DOWER: Well, because it had been a long haul, and because it's
a subject that usually specialists read about. And I--I thought it
was wonderful that--that it was reaching an audience beyond my type of
an academic community, and that was gratifying.

LAMB: This cover--the picture--means something. What is it?

Prof. DOWER: Well, it's the very moment when the Japanese people
were hearing the emperor's voice--which they had never heard
before--on August 15th, 1945, and he was telling them that the war had
been lost. And most people didn't have radios at the time, so in
rural areas and in the cities even, they gathered around a single
radio. They'd been told there'd been an important broadcast, and they
listened to his voice. And that was the moment when the book begins.

And I also wanted in the photograph--and I wanted that on the cover
because I wanted to get the experience of ordinary people. What does
it mean to be told you fought a war and lost?

LAMB: The emperor, you say in the book, was 44 years old. What was
his name--at the--at--at the end of the war--what was his name? And
how did he relate to the--that populous then?

Prof. DOWER: Well, Emperor Hirohito was emperor beginning in 1926.
So he had come on the throne as a very young man. And two
decades--from '26 to '45--Japan had gone to war in his name. And they
said they were fighting for the imperial way, and he had lent himself
to that. He was a very detached man. He'd been socialized not to
really communicate with ordinary people. He spoke in a very ornate,
formal language that was really quite different. He really was
a--a--someone once said to me, reading about it, it was like the wolf
boy; he had been isolated from real contact with people.

And at this moment, the question was: How do you tell people that
you've asked them to fight, really, for 15 years, from the beginning
of the 1930s? He himself proposed that he would make the broadcast
and that people would then follow that. And his reasons for doing so
were complicated. They were very complicated. And my position
regarding him is a little complex, also, and a little bit, perhaps,
different than what other people have said.

LAMB: Explain that.

Prof. DOWER: Well, the usual view has been that Emperor Hirohito was
a--a man who was divorced from real policy-making and was basically a
pacifist at heart. He was, in fact, a--a very--he wasn't a--a war
monger, but he was a man who was a--really attentive to detail, and he
knew what was going on. And all of the commands and decisions went
before him. So he knew exactly what was going on and whether he--he
went along, and he lent his name to this.

But when the war ended, then the question is: `Well, what do we do
with this man?' His reasons for ending the war were basically that he
knew they had lost, and he was afraid that the situation was so bad,
that it could lead to real upheaval in Japan of the throne itself. He
was always talking about, `The throne itself could be in jeopardy.' So
I--I regard him as a fascinating political figure, whereas the people
used to put him up as kind of an abstract symbol. I--I think he's a
very interesting man.

LAMB: You work where on a full-time basis?

Prof. DOWER: I work at MIT. I'm the professor of history at MIT.

LAMB: In Boston.

Prof. DOWER: Yes.

LAMB: And this book for you is what number?

Prof. DOWER: Oh, well, if you count sort of edited volumes
and--and--and writings, it's about the seventh. But a--as a real
monograph, it's about the fourth.

LAMB: Up early in the book, I gather you're married to a Japanese
woman.

Prof. DOWER: My wife is Japanese.

LAMB: Where did you meet her?

Prof. DOWER: I met her when I was an undergraduate, so that was
long, long ago. And I met her in Japan.

LAMB: What's her name?

Prof. DOWER: Her name is Yasko.

LAMB: And how did you end up getting married? What's this--what were
the circumstances?

Prof. DOWER: Well, the circumstances were that--that I really
thought she was terrific, and I pursued her and...

LAMB: Where? In--in Tokyo? Were you there?

Prof. DOWER: It was in Japan, and then it was in the States, and
then it was back in Japan. I was in publishing for a while. I had
dropped out of school, and I went back to Japan and met her, and we
married. Again, that was way back in the s--1960s. We've been
together 40 years.

LAMB: What was--at that time, did she speak English?

Prof. DOWER: Oh, yeah. And she's been--it--one of the reasons I do
history as I do is because we chat a great deal, and we talk about
these things. And the type of materials that I--I'm after are all
over Jap--all over. I--I'm trying to understand the Japanese
experience from all sorts of material, not just formal documents, but
songs and films and--and all sorts of things. And there's so many
nuances, and--and it's--it's always been nice to have someone to chat
with and--and--and to talk these things over with.

And--but because someone like myself has this personal experience in
Japan--meaning I have all sorts of in-laws, I have all sorts of, of
course, professional contacts in Japan--my sense of the Japanese is,
really, a sense of very interesting, diverse group of human beings,
you see. So the usual cliches that people fall into, `The Japanese
are' blank, because of my experience, they just don't hold.

LAMB: How long or how often have you been in Japan?

Prof. DOWER: Well, I--I--I--I've been in Japan probably, all told--I
worked there for about three years, I taught a little, then I was in
publishing and book designing, then I came back to school. And I've
now lived in Tokyo, I've lived in Kyoto, I've lived in Komocora. I've
lived on the West Coast of Japan, where my wife comes from, a city
called Kanazawa, one of the few cities in Japan that wasn't bombed
during World War II. But--so it's, all told, four or five, six years
that I've spent in Japan, back and forth, back and forth.

LAMB: Go back to the book award. Did--did anybody ever tell you why
you got it?

Prof. DOWER: No. I d--I don't understand it. It--it looks to me
like--I don't understand the procedures, and th--I think there's an
element of the lottery in all of this. You know, there's so many good
books out, and--and that you--you're selected is a good bit of luck.
I--I have no idea.

LAMB: The reason I ask you is I--I wonder, you know, as you were
putting this book together, what made your book, in your mind,
different than anyone else that had ever written a book about after
the war was over in Japan?

Prof. DOWER: Well, I do--I do several things that are different.
I--I really have tried to come into this book. Usually people who do
Japan after the war come in from the American side. They say, `Japan
was defeated in 1945.' That took place in August, 1945. The Americans
came in and occupied Japan until April, 1952. So Japan was not an
independent nation. It's almost twice as long as the time of the
Pacific War. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war was three
and a half years. Then for another six and a half years, Japan was
not a sovereign nation, and the Americans controlled Japan. And so
people have always come in and said, `Japan's American interlude,' and
they've usually come in from the American documents.

What I was trying to get at was: What does the experience of
defeat--shattering defeat--mean for anyone? I mean, it's very
different than winning or--that--that's not a--a simplistic statement.
It's very different because you have to rethink everything. And
I--and I have a chapter in there called What Do You Te--What Do You
Tell The Dead When You Lose? There were three million Japanese dead.
And h--you know, what do you say when you're told, `Well, it's all in
vain. And now--we were on the wrong track. We have to start over.'

But when we said `the Japanese,' because of my sense of `the
Japanese,' it wasn't that I wanted to know just what the emperor or
the leaders who left all those records said. I wanted to know what it
meant for ordinary people: soldiers, widows, women, children. My
wife was--you know, at--at our age, she was a youngster when the war
ended. What did it mean for youngsters? And my feeling--because I've
been involved with Japan for so long--was that this was the great
experience that shaped the whole postwar generation, to have fought
and lost and rebuilt. And that's what I wanted to get at.

And because I'm--I'm so interested in those people that you see on the
front cover, as well as the policy-makers, I think it made it a little
different. I'm--I'm--I'm more tuned to--interested in pop culture,
general trends. And so I really tried to range over many Japanese,
many voices.

LAMB: What was the population of Japan right near the end of the war,
and what is it today?

Prof. DOWER: Well, the Japanese used to--they always talked about
their--their propaganda was, `The 100 million hearts beating as one,'
and that's one of the cliches that I don't think was true during the
war and certainly wasn't after. The 100 million is like `all of us.'
The real population at the end of the war was about 70 million. And
the loss in the war--I mean, the loss of people who suffered at
Japan's hands was enormous, and that's part of the story. But the
loss in Japan was about two million fighting men and one million
civilians die in the war, which meant that almost everyone in Japan
who survives has a personal contact, a personal story with death. And
that shapes very much how they think about the war, their
victimization. Today, the population is about 120 million.

LAMB: If you put Japan inside of an American context, how big would
it be physically?

Prof. DOWER: It would be about like California.

LAMB: At the end of the war, how many people had Japan killed?

Prof. DOWER: Well, it--those numbers are s--are stunning, you know.
When we go back as historians now and--we're saying, `Well, you know,
how many million are killed?' And we can't get it straight. It was
horrendous. I worked--in a previous book--I had done a book on the
war before this called "War Without Mercy," which just focused on the
war years, but from the American and the Japanese sides. And I really
tried to get the figures. The people who suffer, by far, the most at
Japanese hands are the Chinese. And the numbers that I--the best
numbers I could come up with for Chinese killed in the war with Japan,
at that time, were 10 million to 15 million. But you s...

LAMB: What years?

Prof. DOWER: Well, 1931, but that's the question because: How do
you count these numbers? You--it--the--the war ends--the book begins
on August 15, 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese die after that
date. In China, there's famines, there's--there's disorder that's
caused by what the Japanese do. So the point is the--for the Chinese,
it's from really 1931--and particularly from 1937--until the end of
the war. But you must keep in mind that there are people dying after
the war. The Chinese now are bumping the numbers up, and I--I don't
know on what basis.

One of the forgotten people--we don't even think of it: the people of
Indonesia. I mean, Westerners--it doesn't even get in the books now.
Perhaps a million people in Indonesia were killed. In the
Philippines, 100,000 or--or--or more in the Philippines. So the
numbers of Asians that are killed are very large. The number of
American combat men killed in the Pacific War is probably around
100,000. It--it's a very--I mean, you can't say ha--more suffering,
less suffering, but it is enormous suffering.

What happens in a situation like this is that the Japanese cause the
death of enormous amounts of Chinese and other Asians. But because
their own losses were so enormous also, this is what they remember
more. So they see the war as having victimized them, and that's good,
but it's bad. What it has done is instill a deep anti-militarism and
pacifism in the Japanese people. There's a real hatred of war there.
War came home to Japan, where 66 cities were destroyed or--or
v--or--or seriously damaged. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the 65th,
66th. So they think about that, and that makes them anti-war--deep
anti-war sentiments, I think, to the present day in Japan. At the
same time, makes them forget what they did to others.

LAMB: You have a photograph in the book of a devastated Tokyo.

Prof. DOWER: Yeah.

LAMB: How much did we bomb Tokyo?

Prof. DOWER: We bombed it enormously. And--and one of the striking
things, if you pick up any memoir--we--we began the first--Tokyo was
the--well, this is a complicated issue. Everyone talks about the
atomic bombs, and debates about the morality of the atomic bombs are,
you know, very central to our controversies in America. But the real
moment where America changed policy, I think, was in March, 1945, when
the Americans decided their high-level bombing targeting factories,
wasn't working. And in March 9th and 10th, 1945, they went over--went
in over Tokyo and began the new policy of napalm bombing.

And that raid in March destroyed 14 square miles in downtown Tokyo.
And then they continued to hit the city after that, so that the first
people to arrive in Japan--it's--it's almost a standard phrase in the
memoirs and reminiscence, they say, `We landed in Yokohama. We got on
a truck or something. We drove into Tokyo,' which then would have
been a couple of hours drive. And there was nothing. There was
nothing. It was a ruined landscape. It was a moonscape. There was a
chimney here and metal--they all talk--occasionally there were
metal--big metal safes and mile after mile of rubble.

Now there were parts of Tokyo that hadn't been bombed, including the
Imperial Palace. The Americans deliberately tried to avoid bombing
the emperor's palace. And there were parts of downtown Tokyo that
they didn't bomb, and that's what they moved into and turned it into a
kind of little America with the American headquarters. But that
devastation was enormous.

LAMB: What were the total number of Japanese that the Americans
killed in their bombing?

Prof. DOWER: In the bombing all told?

LAMB: All bombings.

Prof. DOWER: Well, these numbers, again, are very hard to--to put
together. We now--the numbers that I think are the most accurate now,
if we take the atomic bombs--the numbers in the--for the atomic bombs,
are about 140,000 in Hiroshima, plus or minus 10,000. And, of course,
this is a question, too, you know, because there's long-term deaths
and there's immediate deaths. And in Nagasaki, about 70,000 dead,
plus or minus 10,000. So that's 210,000 killed in the atomic bombs.

The other bombings of cities are very hard, strangely, to get the
statistics. But I put the other--the best numbers I've been able to
come up with in ballpark figure is around 400,000 people. So that
puts us up over 600,000. Then you have lots of civilians--people
don't even know these stories. For example, there were many Japanese
civilians in Manchuria who, once the war ended, had to come back. And
we estimate now that 100,000 died coming back from Manchuria in
'45-'46. Severe winters.

I--I--one of the times, before I even got into this, when I was living
in Japan, there was a woman--I was living in a house I had rented, and
there was a Japanese woman who helped take care of the house--very
nice woman. And as I got to know her and--and my wife got to know
her, she told us she had been in Manchuria with her husband and four
children, and on the way back husband and all four children died on
the way back.

So this is the kind of--it--the--but we--we--we don't have the full
numbers; that's why I used that ballpark about a million people coming
back that--that--about a million people that are not military people
who die as a result of the war. So what--what you get with a woman
like that is--and it's a good example to understand Japan today--her
sense is how we suffered in war and how war is terrible. It's not
that--that Americans were terrible. It's not that Chinese were
terrible. It's a sense that what a horror war is. And whenever
milit--your leaders tell you, `We've got to this. We've got to do
this. We've got to invade,' don't listen to them. Find a peaceful
way out.

But she's not thinking about what--what the Japanese did to the
Chinese, you see. Although the women's movement--and I have enormous
respect for--for women and--and citizens' movements in Japan, who
don't make it into the newspaper, because if you're in Japan,
those--it's those women who lost their husbands, lost their sons.
They're very clear on no more wars.

LAMB: Just based on what you know and having been over there a lot
and written a lot about them, what are the chances that Japan would go
to war again in--you know, in the foreseeable future?

Prof. DOWER: Well, you know, this is a really ironic thing because
the--ever since 1950--when the Americans went into Japan in 1945,
under jon--General Douglas MacArthur, they said to them, `We're
disarming you.' And this was wartime propaganda. `We will take out
all of your war-making potential, and you will never wage war again.'
Then they went in, and MacArthur said, `We'll totally disarm you.' So
there is no military, there is no army, there is no navy, in theory.
The ministries are--are taken down. We gave them a constitution.
It's our language which says Japan will never exercise the right of
belligerency again, the famous Peace Constitution--in 1947, we gave it
to them.

And what I do in the book is show people that was a wonderful thing.
So many people embraced this. `We can become a beacon of peace in the
future. We can have--you know, th--there's nothing else to have pride
in. Maybe we can have pride in setting a new path in the future.'

In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and the Americans have been after
the Japanese ever since. They were actually pushing them before the
Korean War, `Change that Constitution. You have to have a military.'
And the pressure from the US for Japan to take part in these things
has been enormous ever since then. It was incredible. The time of
the Korean War, John Foster Dulles and the Americans came in and said
to the Japanese, `You got to have a military. We want you to have a
military of 300,000, 350,000 men.' The rest of the world is looking
on, said, `You want to rebuild their military now, five years later,
after that horrid war?'

And it split the Japanese people. The conservatives said, `Well, we
can't quite do it, but we'll work toward it.' And other people said,
`This is outrageous. We cherish those ideals because, you know, it
reflected what we felt.' So what you have in Japan today is a real
complex situation in which Americans are pushing on Japan saying,
`Rearm. We want you to, you know, take more active role in
peacekeeping.' They t--took terrific ridicule during the Gulf War:
checkbook diplomacy, `Won't put your men on the line.' And the
conservatives in Japan are saying, `Yeah, we can't hold up our face.
People are laughing at us.' And other people in Japan are saying,
`No.'

My feeling is that popular sentiment in Japan still is very strong
against this, but my feeling also is they'll change the Constitution
in--in the very ne--in the near future to permit them to send more
troops abroad. But if you take polls in Japan today, everyone--we
write a lot about the rise of nationalism in Japan today because it is
rising on the right wing. But if you go in and take polls--what
drives the right wing crazy is you go in and take polls, and young
people say, `I'm not going to fight for my country. I don't want to
go into the war, you know. I mean, there are other things in life
I--you know, even if we're invaded, I'm not sure I want to fight.' And
so the young people have no sense of militarism, as in the past.

LAMB: Where was this picture taken?

Prof. DOWER: Well, this is the most famous picture of the defeated,
occupied Japan. It's General MacArthur standing next to Emperor
Hirohito. It was taken in General MacArthur's private quarters. He
was living in the former US Embassy. And it was taken on September
27, 1945. He went in and he invited the emperor to visit him, and
they stood together. And that picture was shown all over Japan.

LAMB: How old is MacArthur in this picture?

Prof. DOWER: MacArthur is 65.

LAMB: How often did those two men meet?

Prof. DOWER: They met 11 times during the occupation. MacArthur was
the emperor's best supporter. Nobody supported the emperor like
MacArthur. Before he knew a thing about the emperor, he knew he
wanted to support the emperor. So he invited him to visit. This was
the first visit, September 1945. They met a total of 11 times, always
at MacArthur's headquarters. This is n--a revolutionary thing. The
great emperor of Japan is going to another person's place; immediately
shows the difference in authority. And those meetings were kept
secret on the Amer--kept secret.

LAMB: What was Douglas MacArthur's job and title?

Prof. DOWER: Douglas MacArthur was called the supreme commander for
the Allied Powers. And, in theory, it was an occupation run by the
victorious Allies in World War II. So that meant Britain, China,
Australia, New Zealand, France got in on it, the--the Dutch and so on.
In theory, although it was called `supreme commander for the Allied
Powers,' it was an American show. The Americans ran the occupation.
And he--his authority was unquestioned. In fact, they told him right
at the beginning, `Your authority in Japan is unquestioned.'

LAMB: What was he like then?

Prof. DOWER: He was imperious--every bit as imperious as the emperor
had ever been, and many of the joke was--one of the jokes at the time
was, `How can you--we be a democracy if we've got two emperors?' That
was the Japanese joke at the time. When the Americans heard about the
joke, it was a vaudeville act. Someone came in and said, `They're
saying terrible things. There's this guy, you know, in a nightclub,
and he's doing a vaudeville act and--and he's making jokes about
democracy and having two emperors.' And the Americans rushed in and
closed down the show. It was a real problem because he was pushing
democracy, but he was functioning as an absolute and unassailable
leader.

LAMB: There's a photograph here in your book that says, on this
chart, `Mid Summer Mass Dance Party in Appreciation of General
MacArthur's Sincere Aide for Japan's Foods'--I can't--I can't read it
where I am.

Prof. DOWER: The food crisis.

LAMB: `Food Crisis.'

Prof. DOWER: Well, that's a wonderful photo because--I--I like it
particularly because it's--aid is misspelled, A-I-D-E. So you know
the Japanese wrote it themselves. It's a--there--but MacArthur was
enormously popular. People really were impressed with a man who was a
man of war, who comes in and says, `You must become'--he's the one who
says to them, `You must become a nation of peace. This is how you can
become a beacon in the world. You can become the Switzerland of
Asia.' He's a--this is MacArthur, and he was generous.

And what that particular dance party and poster was, in 19--in 1945,
when the war ended, was just about harvest time. And the
Japanese--their merchant marine was gone. Their empire was gone.
There were no imports coming into Japan. And as it happened, they had
the worst harvest of grains and foodstuffs in Japan that they had had
in decades in 1945. And so malnutr--nutrition was enormous. People
were dying of--of--of--of malnutrition on the streets. For two or
three years in Tokyo, they were picking up bodies on the streets.

MacArthur moved--and so they were talking about hundreds of thousands
would die of starvation. It was really miserable. MacArthur moved
very quickly to divert American military supplies and other materials
into Japan to help avert the food crisis. And people said, you know,
`This is generous.' I mean, he said, `This is necessary because,
otherwise, there'll be unrest,' but he also didn't want to see people
starving, and people were very impressed. So that was the summer of
1946. They'd gotten through that--that terrible crisis of '45-'46 in
good part by Americans sending them flour and various other very basic
foodstuffs.

LAMB: What was General MacArthur's relationship to the Japanese on a
day-to-day basis?

Prof. DOWER: Non-existent. Non-existent. MacArthur
never--MacArthur spent his entire time in Japan moving between his
house in the American Embassy and his office in a requisition building
in downtown Tokyo called the Dai Ichi Building. He would shuffle back
and forth, and he never took a single trip elsewhere in Japan. He
rarely talked to any Japanese, except very high-ranking people like
the prime minister or the foreign minister or the emperor. He
never--he--he was simply isolated. I--he seemed to get his knowledge
from--well, as he would claim, sort of from God and some vague--we
never really know. He was reading his intelligence reports, but he
had zero contact with the people, and that was his idea: that they
would then respect him as this great detached, almost divine
authority, and he would then tell them to be democratic. What an
irony.

LAMB: Did you ever meet him? Did you ever meet him?

Prof. DOWER: I never met him.

LAMB: If he were sitting here and you--you were going to do a little
ol--oral history and then say to him anything you wanted to say him,
based on all you know about him, what would you--what would you feel
about him? What would you want to say to him?

Prof. DOWER: I think he was a very, very impressive person, and he
wa--I would--he would be distraught at my--some of my approaches to
this. But he felt that--that--that Japan had come out of the defeat
and occupation and that it was a genuinely viable democracy, and I
would agree with him. I think that postwar Japan is a country that is
not militaristic, and that is a very flawed democracy, as I think most
democracies in the world are. I don't think--I don't know of a
perfect democracy, but it's a real democracy. It has a real
anti-militaristic spirit, and it cha--there was a change there. And
it was by defeat and by the opportunity.

And when he went in--he's a very conservative man in American
historical circles. For example, he's famous for the--his suppression
of the Bonus Marchers, the World War I veterans who had marched on
Washington to get benefits. And he came in as a military man and
suppressed this demonstration. He walks into Japan and says, `Open up
the labor movement. Let's have protection for labor, right to strike,
bargain collectively. Let the Communists come out of prison. Let's
have a legal Communist Party. We're going to break up the big--the
big Zaibatsu. We're going to promote real civil liberties. We're
going to have a pacifist constitution.' It's an amazing it--if it
hadn't come from MacArthur, it would have been called a left-wing,
progressive a--agenda. And it cracks open the system, and the people
really welcome it.

Where I disagr--and he holds on to a demilitarized Japan longer than
almost anyone else. Right up to the Korean War, he wants Japan
demilitarized. Then he says, `We've got to build a little force
because our men are in Japan.' Where I disagree with him most strongly
is--and he would--he would be just furious. I mean, he would
just--smoke would come out of his ears if he were sitting here now and
I said, `You made a mistake keeping the emperor, Hirohito on the
throne. I think you made a mistake on that.' And he would--he says
that's the key to the stability, and I'd say that's--that was the
problem; that was a mistake.

LAMB: When did Hirohito die?

Prof. DOWER: Hirohito lived on and on. He was 44 when the war
ended. He died in 1945 and he died in 1989 as a man who was about 89
when he died. And so he just went on and on and on. And one of the
things was, because he lived so long, and the Americans came in and
said, totally without war responsibility, and because he lived so--on
so long, it became kind of a taboo to talk about the emperor's role,
and then the whole issue of war responsibility became obscured because
MacArthur decided before he arrived in Japan--this is one of my
arguments, `I gotta keep this emperor.'

And so the first--at that first meeting, they never investigate the
emperor seriously. He walks in and he says, `Oh, it's such a pleasure
to meet you.' We have the--the records now from the Japanese side.
It's not well known, but we do have the minutes from that first
meeting. `It's wonderful to meet you, your--Your Highness.' And he,
you know--and then, `I know how much you hated what was going on
during the war years.' And, you know, `How this is such a difficult
thing for you.' And he put all this image on this man and said, `If I
use him.' And then the emperor comes out and says, `Yes, let's be
democratic.' `That's good, I can use him.'

The other thing was, they're always worried about communism, and as
long as you keep the emperor, and don't do anything to him, you won't
have upheaval that could lead to riots, chaos and communism, as they
always said. So he really felt he had to keep this man on the throne
and I'm not sure that was the wisest decision.

LAMB: Where did you grow up?

Prof. DOWER: I grew up in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I'm
a--I'm a New Englander.

LAMB: What--what towns?

Prof. DOWER: Prov--I--I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, went to
public school in Providence, Rhode Island, then I want to
undergraduate at Amherst College and then I did some graduate work at
Harvard and then I worked in Japan and then I did the PhD at Harvard.

LAMB: What was the family like?

Prof. DOWER: My...

LAMB: Mom and dad. Yeah.

Prof. DOWER: ...my family?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Prof. DOWER: Well, my family was a--was a very good middle-class
family. I'm the only child. My father was a--a bookkeeper, an
accountant in a company. My--the--the most interesting thing, I
think, for my experience, is that if--if I were an Asian, I would have
a clear--Asian-American--I would have clear label. I would be a
sansei, which means third generation. You know, issei is first
generation, nisei is second generation. For third generation you're
called sansei.

Well, all my grandparents were--were immigrants. I'm a
third-generation American and I--there's a grandparent from Prague by
way of Vienna. There's a grandmother, his wife, from Vienna. And
then on my father's side, there's Irish-English. And so I'm a
third-generation American with this kind of mixed background. And
they settled at--my mother's side, settled in Providence, Rhode
Island, because her father was one of those--they talk about the hands
of Prague, the wonderful hands of Prague, these anonymous craftsmen
and artists. And he was one of those hands at the turn of the
century, which I just learned recently, who was a jewelry designer and
came to America and set up--was brought in as a designer in costume
jewelry in Prov--Providence, Rhode Island, and, you know, did very
well. When I grew up he had--there was a lot of land there. It was
kind of open.

LAMB: Where...

Prof. DOWER: Grapevines.

LAMB: Where did you get your PhD from?

Prof. DOWER: I got the PhD at Harvard.

LAMB: And what was it in?

Prof. DOWER: It was in history and Far Eastern languages.

LAMB: What was your dissertation on?

Prof. DOWER: My dissertation was on the--the man wh--a man named
Yoshida Shigeru, Prime Minister Yoshida. He's like Adenauer was in
Germany. He was 65 when the war ended. He was a former diplomat and
then he becomes prime minister of Japan. He's very conservative, but
not militarist. He became prime minister of Japan from 1946 to
'54--there was an interruption, but basically. So he's the--he's
the--the major political figure in the political party system in
postwar Japan.

LAMB: When did you say to yourself, `I want to go to Japan?' First
time?

Prof. DOWER: I said it in 1958 when I was a junior in college and I
said it because I figured it was as far away as I could go without
being on my way back.

LAMB: And what was the--Japan draw, though, itself? I mean, you
could have gone to Korea and the...

Prof. DOWER: I was very much in--in literature, and I'm hard of
hearing, I'm very visual. And I was very much drawn to cultural
things. I was very much draw to--to the visual culture of painting,
gardens, architecture and so on. And I found that being there made me
very curious about why these things--you know, how do you explain
these things? But being in a foreign country like that makes you also
very curious about yourself. Why am I like I am? As opposed to, you
know, how do we explain these things? And then the other--so--so that
was the--the draw and I originally went in to work more on literature
and culture.

LAMB: How long have you been hard of hearing? How long?

Prof. DOWER: Have I been...

LAMB: Been hard of hearing?

Prof. DOWER: I've been hard of hearing since college days.

LAMB: And how's that affected your life?

Prof. DOWER: Well, it's a kind of a blessing because of--in--in many
ways 'cause I don't hear a lot of things, so I can work at peace. It
makes it very hard to--and--I--I--I tend to beg out of committee work
at the university because I don't process all that discussion, so that
makes it--that's a blessing, I think.

It--when I do my classes, the students learn to--to adjust to it, and
I kin--kind of work the room. If I go out and lecture, it's--it's
helpful for me to work the room, which I enjoy; getting closer. It
makes it a little less formal. It--it's made me much more
susceptible, though, to the--to the written word. As a historian, I
really go at the record of the time, and I think it's partly because
of this that I don't do so much oral history and listening to
reminiscences, that I've really tried to go in and recreate it by
what's written at the time.

All of history can be wonderful but very misleading because we all
know, if we're going to--if I'm going tell you what things were like
when I was 20, I'm not 100 percent reliable. But if I can go back and
get that written record, but--so--and the other thing is that I do a
great deal, in my work, with visual materials. And--and so a number
of years ago I began to stop--and I was one of the first, earlier
people in the Japan field to start looking at cartoons, films,
posters, advertisements, pop art, to understand history itself.

LAMB: What's this?

Prof. DOWER: Well, this is a wonderful cartoon which came out in a
little book of--all of cartoons--by a Japanese cartoonist named Katto.
Katto is the family name, Katto Etisdo. And Katto Etisdo was a--was a
very talented cartoonist who, during the war years, did propaganda
cartoons, as just about everyone did. It was their country and
you--you said you wanted to win the war. But the--when the war ended,
he embraced, as so many people did, the opportunity for a more open,
peaceful society. And one year after the emperor's broadcast, in
August 1946, he published a little book of cartoons. It was his
cartoons from the year called, "The Revolution We Have Been Given."
And that...

LAMB: Explain this cartoon.

Prof. DOWER: And that was the opening thing. This was--that was his
opening graphic, August 15th, 1945. You can see the date, the 15th.
It is an exhausted woman and man. She's dressed in the costume that
people wore fighting fires from the air raids. They wore a hood and
they would go out--there's a bucket--trying to put out these infernos
when cities burned, trying to put them out with--with literally a
bucket brigade. He's wearing--he's wearing the--a soldier's uniform.
He's a demobilized soldier, as of that date, and he's holding over his
should a bamboo spear. Because at that time the Japanese militarists
were telling the people, `You've got to defend the homeland against
invasion,' and they were--they were actually equipping people with
bamboo spears. And the caption to the--to--to it says--this is the
exhaustion at the moment of defeat--and the caption says, `What
absurdity, to think that we were going to go out and beat people with
atomic weapons with bamboo spears.' And what he was capturing was the
immediate response at the end of the war is, `The war is horrible and
this leadership were idiots.'

LAMB: A bunch of American names are throughout your book. Bonner
Fellers. Who is he?

Prof. DOWER: Bonner Fellers was a very interesting military officer
who eventually, by this time, was a general. He was interested in
Japan as a subject of study, and he actually was very fond of Japan in
the 1920s because he had college classmates who came from Japan. In
the 1930s he began to train himself as a psychological expert on
Japanese psychology. And by the end of the war, he was MacArthur's
chief of psychological warfare in the southwest Pacific command. And
he had enormous influence, I think, and I argue here, in shaping
MacArthur's thinking about the emperor and Japanese psychology.

LAMB: Is it Faubion Bowers?

Prof. DOWER: Faubion Bowers. Faubion Bowers just passed away and
it--it's a loss of a great benefactor to Japan as well as a wonderful,
colorful man. Faubion Bowers was a young officer who was MacArthur's
driver in those early days, and he was a very irreverent fellow. He
was one of the--so--he--he writes very wonderful, witty vignettes of
MacArthur and what it was like to be driving the grand man.

But Bowers--really fascinating qualities--and--and--and the reason
he's so interesting to us, was that he knew Japanese and he was an
aficionado of Japanese theater, and particularly Kabuki theater. So
when he went into Japan, he spoke Japanese and he had a knowledge
and--and a love for traditional Japanese theater that he immediately
pursued.

Now one of the things that happened was that they immediately came
in--the Americans--and said all this traditional theater, Kabuki
theater and puppet theater and--and everything, is full of militarist
stories. So they banned all of the--most of the Kabuki repertoire,
and all of these things. Feudal men with warfare, `Ah, you know,
militarism.'

So all this was banned. Bowers became the great patron of the, as he
called it at the time, the starving Kabuki actors. He was literally
bringing food to them from the PXes and he became someone who worked
for the rehabilitation of--of traditional theater, and he was someone
who understood a Japan other than the people committing atrocities.

LAMB: During the occupation period, from 1945 to 1952, how many
American soldiers were based in Japan?

Prof. DOWER: Well, you know, the--they start out with the end of the
war--about 400,000 Americans move into Japan. And then it settles
down to about 200,000 at any given time. You drop into Japan from
1945 to 1952, there's about 200,000 American soldiers based there.
But they're rotating, and I've never actually added it up. And my
guess would be about a million American military and many of them
bringing dependants...

LAMB: What...

Prof. DOWER: ...are--are--are moving to Japan.

LAMB: The SCAP, which stood for Supreme Command of Allied...

Prof. DOWER: Yes, it--it--it means Supreme Command for the Allied
Powers, which is the headquarters, but it is also sometimes is applied
to MacArthur as Supreme Commander. SCAP we call it.

LAMB: GHQ is used a lot.

Prof. DOWER: Yeah. GHQ is the general headquarters under
MacArthur's command and that is really the command section. And
there's--we're talking about--really thi--this is the
grouping--SCAP--right under MacArthur that's addressing not military
issues about troops stationed in Asia, but the issues of what do we do
with Japan. And it has a whol--GHQ, general headquarters, has a
government section, has an economic and scientific section, has a
civil intelligence and education section, has a counterintelligence
section. And we're talking about, at the peak, maybe 1,500 Americans
who are really in an--in extraordinarily responsible positions of
policy-making.

LAMB: Who wrote the Japanese--the new Japanese constitution?

Prof. DOWER: In February--it's almost an anniversary, as we talk
'cause we're talking here in February. In--in February 1946,
MacArthur called in government section, which was a small--which was
an important but small section under GHQ--and he said, `We've got to
write a model constitution for the Japanese because what they're
coming up with--we told them they gotta change their old constitution,
which isn't democratic. And they're just coming up with--with
tokenistic, cosmetic stuff.'

`Therefore,' he said, `we have to draft a model constitution for the
Japanese.' And there was a feeling that they had to do it quickly and
so they called in a group from government section about--in the end,
about 20, 25 people, and they said to them--they're told, `General
MacArthur said you must write a model constitution for Japan.' They
said, `Yes, sir,' to--to Whitney, who was the head of government
section. `How long do we have?' He says, `You have one week.'

So in one week, this group of American men and some women drafted a
new constitution for Japan, which is one of the most remarkable,
progressive--liberal, progressive documents in the world. They gave
it to the Japanese, the Japanese then responded to it, translated to
it, debated it in their parliament, changed it over time. But they
passed it in 1947. Not a word has ever been changed because the
Japanese people have essentially accepted the ideals of that.

LAMB: One of the things--I--I noticed throughout your book, you kept
referring to the Japanese leaders that you were writing about as
breaking down in tears.

Prof. DOWER: Yeah.

LAMB: At times when they were even writing...

Prof. DOWER: Yeah.

LAMB: ...the constitution. What was the about? I mean, did that
surprise you?

Prof. DOWER: Well, the--the--it's the Japanese leaders. It's the
old guard. You know, what happens is they go in and the--the
governments, after the war, are very conservative. There's one moment
there was a socialist. He's a Christian member of the Socialist Party
who becomes prime minister after the war and--and runs a very shaky
coalition cabinet. But basically, the leadership remains
conservative, not militaristic, but civ--old, civilian conservatives.

And they don't want all these reforms. They think that Japan can't be
dem--democratic. They don't want all this stuff. But they're so
worried about the emperor, and MacArthur tells them, `You make things
democratic, the emperor will be OK.' Then he comes in and says,
`You've got to change the constitution.'

Now the old constitution says, `The emperor is supreme and
inviolable.' And the old constitution says Japanese people--it keeps
stressing--this is their rights, this is their--you know, this is
their--not--I'm sorry, it--it stresses this is their duties. They
have rights but only unless otherwise stipulated by law. So it's a
very conservative document which the Americans felt had enabled
militarism to take hold in Japan. It's not democratic.

There's no such thing as a citizen in Japan under the old
constitution. Everyone is a subject of the emperor. I actually fell
into the trap writing the book and I was talking about prewar Japanese
citizens, and I said to myself, `Wait.' You know, I've--you know,
there--there was no such thing as a citizen. Sovereignty resides
entirely in the emperor.

So suddenly these men of--of--are given this piece of paper and it
says, `Popular sovereignty.' Sovereignty resides in the people, the
emperor will be nothing but a symbol of the state. There will be no
military establishment whatsoever, is what it says, and it gives them
an incredible array of rights, including an ERA clause, that women
will have equal rights to men. And these men see this as violating
their national charter under which all of them had grown up.

And these men are deep--deeply devoted to the emperor. So they--when
they are faced with this fait accompli, the Americans say, `This is
what you've got to do.' They say, `We have no choice.' And in the book
I mention that several of the people, the prime minister and cabinet
ministers, weep that, `We have to do this.' But--you can say it's
forced on them, but Katayama, the socialist prime minister later, who
thought this was a grand constitution, says, `This was forced on the
conservatives. This was not forced on the Japanese people.' That this
was something and the people--it really was a well-received document.

LAMB: What does your Japanese wife, now American--she American now?

Prof. DOWER: She's a Japanese citizen still.

LAMB: Still?

Prof. DOWER: Yes.

LAMB: Well, what does she your thesis, your book? Do you argue about
anything?

Prof. DOWER: We talked about everything, but I never--the way we
work together is we always chat. We just chat about documents and
materials and language. It--it was wonderful, you know. I mean, you
know, it took so long to do the book, there were a lot of chats.

LAMB: How long did it take, by the way?

Prof. DOWER: Well, the previous book was 1986, but this came out in
1999. So--and I'd sort of been thinking about this before. So we're
talking 10 to 15 years. So there were a lot of conversations. But
once I do it, the relationship as we chat about it--but I don't move
the pages or the text past her. So I'll have to ask her when I go
back if she's read it.

LAMB: Where does she live, here?

Prof. DOWER: She's in Boston with...

LAMB: And what does she do?

Prof. DOWER: She's a potter.

LAMB: Have you all had children?

Prof. DOWER: We have three children.

LAMB: And in the book you say that some of the money for the project
came from the Japan Foundation.

Prof. DOWER: Yes.

LAMB: What did--who is the Japan Foundation?

Prof. DOWER: Well, back in, I guess--the Japan Foundation probably
came up in the 1960s. The Japan Foundation--academics have to draw on
many sources, so we--we have all sorts of things to go to. One is,
you know, the Social Science Research Council, National Endowment for
the Humanities. And in 1960s, money was put aside in Japan for the
study of projects relating to Japan--academic study of projects
relating to Japan. That money was called J--that foundation is called
the Japan Foundation. The committees that you apply to are American
committees. So if I'm going for the money and apply for grant to the
Japan Foundation, that grant actually is processed by a group of
American academics, usually, and to submit it as a regular grant
proposal. So there's no way the Japanese government has any say,
really, on--on the research or anything of this. It's money that's
been put into the public domain for the study of Japan.

LAMB: And in your introduction, you say, `I had the good fortune
being associated for a year with the postwar financial history
project...'

Prof. DOWER: Yeah.

LAMB: `...of the Japanese Ministry of Finance.' What was that?

Prof. DOWER: Wonderful opportunity. The Japanese love having
official histories, love having official histories. So they are
always putting out these huge, multivolume "History of," you know,
"the Ministry of Finance," or the history of something. And the--the
hist--the Ministry of Finance in Japan has a whole series of volumes
which is Japanese financial policy in the, you know, 19th century,
Japanese financial policy from this to this.

And in the 1970s, they decided it was time to put out an official
history of Japanese financial policy from 1945 to 1952, the period
that they were occupied. And what they did was they have people in
their historical section, every--like the American bureaucracy has
historians, you know, the Army, the Navy, the State Department. We
all have historical offices here. The historical office there went
out in the Japanese academic community and brought in about 20--20 or
30 Japanese economic financial scholars, historians and specialists.
And they're very interesting because Japan has a broader political
range. So some of them are Marxist economists, some of them are
neo-Marxist, some were conservative. They bring all of these people
in. Then--because so much of the documentation from that period is in
English because it was an American occupation--they were sending
people over here to collect the documents, the millions of pages of
stuff, of course. And it was just coming available in the US because
we start to tr--let our documents go out 30 years, really, after the
event. So all sorts of interesting stuff was coming out in America.

And I had a grant at that time to go to Japan. And the minute that--I
was interested in this period, and the Ministry of Finance brought me
and a couple of other Americans in, saying, `Well, would you
participate in this project?,' you know. `You can sit here, you can
look at all our material and then you--you study it and give a report
to our study group.' So I had the rare opportunity--with a couple of
other Western scholars--of sitting there, doing research and having
access to all sorts of Japanese materials, but also helping them by
reading the Western stuff and then presenting it at a big seminar.

LAMB: How good's your Japanese?

Prof. DOWER: My Japanese is OK. It's--but I--I don't think I want
to do another big seminar to the Minister of Finance immediately.

LAMB: You won the National Book Critics Circle Award for "War Without
Mercy" and then you won the National Book Award for this book. What's
the difference in those awards, and what do they mean?

Prof. DOWER: Well, the National Book Critics Circle Award is
determined by book reviewers, prof--book reviewers in the media in the
United States. It's a very large group. And it is a--a--these are
really work-a-day book people and reviewers in the United States who
decide--pick a short list of the best books of the year, and then
announce a winner. And in 1986, I--I--I had done a book called "War
Without Mercy"--the subtitle is "Race and Power in the Pacific War,"
in which I was trying to look at the war from both the Japanese side
and the Western side. How were these two pe--antagonists--it was such
a vicious war--how were they looking at each other? One of the
reasons I got into that book is, I couldn't figure out how you could
have such a vicious war and such a really constructive occupation.
And so I ended up going back in the war. That book went up for the
National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Awards, and
it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This year, the new
book won the National Book Award and it's actually up for the National
Book Critics Circle Award, which will be decided later.

LAMB: Where--where did you write the book, physically?

Prof. DOWER: Where did I write it? Oh, I wrote it everywhere. It
was 13 years. I wrote it in Japan. I wrote it in the United States.
I--I used to take off--I--I--it's a lot of--a lot of work. I mean,
there's 18 chapters in the book. And, you know, sometimes a chapter
would take almost a year. Sometimes I could get a couple of chapters
done in a year. I went off and I'm--I'm a bit of a hermit. And so I
went off and secluded myself up in the rural area--Nagano prefecture
where the Olympics were for a summer--and just wrote about economics
up there for a summer.

I went to a lake in Minnesota--my wife and I fish. She's a great
fisher person. And so we were fishing and talking, doing history
and--and writing. I did that in Minnesota. I do a lot here. I--I
don't work at the university. I--I tend to work at my home and kind
of detach myself. I do things--I now live in--I have a house in
Falmouth. And I do--it's also on a fishing pond, and I--I tend to
just isolate myself from work in these various places.

LAMB: What do you write with?

Prof. DOWER: Well, I started this book--I'm--I'm--I'm at MIT,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But I'm--I'm sort of a
dinosaur in the modern age, and I started this book writing by hand.
I used to love to write by hand. There was a kind of esthetic to it.
But obviously, that--that didn't work out so by the end--I work on a
PC now.

LAMB: Are you quick?

Prof. DOWER: I'm quick. Give me on--yeah. I'm quick on this, yeah.
But--but something like this--a book like this, when it was finished,
it--I--it probably goes through 10, 12 drafts, a book like this. And
when it was finished, I had put sort of different drafts into my pile
of drafts, were sitting in a corner of a room. And it was well over a
meter tall of the many drafts I had gone through.
And--and--it--it--for me--and partly because I come out from
literature perhaf--perhaps, it's the--that process at the end. It was
much longer, for example. I had to get everything in. But it's the
proc--at the end of throwing things out and getting it down and
pulling it together. And there were things--you know, I'd say, `My
gosh, that was--that was the sum--that was four months work, but it
doesn't fit.' That's very painful, but I think that's what somehow
brings things together.

LAMB: Next book?

Prof. DOWER: Well, I--I've been thinking--I--I don't have it--since
it takes me so long--you know, it takes me 10 years, really, to do
a--to do one. So I don't have many more of those 10 years segments in
me. I think I've got one more. And I thought I wanted to do
something, perhaps, called "Facing East, Facing West," in which I
really go back to the opening of the American and European encounter
with China and Japan and East Asia in the mid-1900s. I'd go back to
then when Japan is forced open and China, as well--but--but
particularly Japan--and see how the Americans and Europeans, looking
at Asia, and how are they describing it and, in turn, how are they
being seen by the Asians. And so, it's holding mirror against mirror.
And that would enable me to go back to one of my loves, which is the
visual record and--as well as the textual record.

LAMB: Here's the cover of the book, winner of the National Book
Award, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II." Our
guest has been Professor John W. Dower of MIT. Thank you very much.

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Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II