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John Dower is our preeminent historian of Japan as it emerged from World War II. His two books, War Without Mercy about the race hatreds and stereotypes that fuelled both sides as the war in the Pacific reached a fever pitch of slaughter and atrocity, and Embracing Defeat, his Pulitzer Prize winning history of the postwar occupation, should really be a boxed set. Some members of the Bush administration reputedly studied Dower's occupation book in the run-up to war and were eager to make the Iraq/Japan linkage. It seemed so flattering, back whenever that was. It seemed, in the mind's eye of our occupation bureaucrats, to reflect so well on us -- two brutalized countries, whose people were to be liberated from brutal fallen regimes and offered the glories of democracy. But that seems long ago now, doesn't it?

In his piece below, Dower, a thoughtful, careful historian and a man who should know his occupation analogies, makes another kind of linkage – not postwar Japan/postwar Iraq but expansive, prewar Imperial Japan/the present government of the United States. The real distance between August 1945 and May 2003 turns out not to be between defeated Japan and defeated Iraq, but between victorious America and victorious America. I know of no better or more provocative piece for locating us in our present world. Tom

The Other Japanese Occupation

By John W. Dower

As we enter a dramatically altered world, both internationally and domestically, it is only natural that we look to history for bearings, points of comparison, glimmerings of the familiar. In these predictable uses of the past, "Japan" has emerged as a small trope for both horror and hope. Thus, September 11 became our generation's Pearl Harbor (headline writers across America turned, almost instinctively, to "Day of Infamy!"). Our new global enemies have been declared an "axis of evil" (with North Korea presumably replacing the Japan of the 1930s). And now we have the sanguine scenario of the democratization of "occupied Japan" after World War II as a model for post-hostilities Iraq.

None of these analogies withstand serious scrutiny, and looking back at occupied Japan should really remind us both how fundamentally different Iraq is from the Japan of 1945 and also how far the United States itself has departed from the ideals of a half-century ago. Liberalism, internationalism, serious commitment to human rights, a vision of economic democratization in which the state is assigned an important role -- these were watchwords of the Americans who formulated initial policy for occupied Japan. In the Bush administration, they are objects of derision.

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