Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

In “Transcending Despair,” Dower systematically addresses all the horrors of postwar recovery in Japan: the general psychological state of the Japanese, extreme food shortages, malnutrition, the looting by the Japanese officials after the surrender, an increased rate of serious illnesses, homelessness, hyperinflation, and the black market. He starts off by comparing the war experiences of the Americans and Japanese, respectively. For Americans, the Second World War lasted for just under four years. With the exception of Pearl Harbor, most of the fighting did not affect the American territory or American civilians. In contrast, the war lasted for almost 15 years for the Japanese, starting with their entry into Manchuria in 1931 and followed by a full-scale war against all of China in 1937. The Japanese civilians experienced the devastation of aerial bombings, which destroyed up to 40% of urban infrastructure (as Dower outlined in the previous section of the book). The author thus compares the Americans’ “self-righteous confidence” with the Japanese “socialization for death” (87).

The term kyodatsu literally means “collapse.” This term was first limited to clinical psychology, denoting despair and physical exhaustion. However, in the postwar Japanese society, the term gained currency and was broadly applied to describe the condition in which much of the Japanese society found itself.