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Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton/The New Press, 1999.
Few cultural transformations have been equal to that imposed on the Japanese in 1945. A nation whose doors had been opened to Western trade for less than a century (discounting the earlier limited incursions of the Portuguese and the Dutch) suddenly found itself the unintentional host to hundreds of thousands of conquering Americans whose culture (and language) were to leave a permanent mark on Japan. In this book, John Dower, who teaches history at MIT, examines the mutations in Japanese politics and culture that took place during the immediate postwar period. The book is of interest to students of doublespeak principally for: ( 1 ) Dower's many observations concerning political language manipulation by both the occupiers and the occupied and (2) interpenetrations between language and culture in postwar Japan.
Surrender?
Emperor Hirohito's radio speech to the Japanese people announcing the capitulation, although a rhetorical masterpiece, deserves some criticism for its doublespeak. For one thing, it was given in archaic court language that few Japanese could understand, thereby simultaneously lending emphasis to the august position of the speaker and occluding and muddling some of the less palatable ideas that were put forward. For another, we can find beneath this layer of distance and obscurity further ambiguity, even where the language can be clearly translated into contemporary Japanese. Some of this escapes Dower, who, for example, fails to note the ambiguity (and implied threat?) in Hirohito's statement that "the war had not necessarily" gone in "Japan's favor." The author does point out, however, that Hirohito did not once use words that could be translated "surrender" or "defeat" and that the emperor managed to confirm in the speech his continued belief that the premise for Japan's belligerence had been "the liberation of East Asia: ' Dower also notes the Emperor's brilliant characterization of the surrender as a supremely moral act on the part of the Japanese people, a self-abnegating sacrifice offered up for salvation of all mankind in the face of impending atomic warfare:
To continue the war further could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race, but also to the destruction of...