Is it possible to have a book about transformation, and yet somehow miss the transformation? Dower's Embracing Defeat is a monumental work, that somehow feels like it misses the essence of Japan's re-invention in the wake of the war.

Dower's work is organized thematically, first psychologically, with the shock of defeat, then materially with starvation and the black market, the culturally, then politically with the new constitution, censorship, and war crimes tribunals, and finally with laying the foundation for the rise of Japan in the 1960s.

It's really an incredible story. The Japanese, who prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prepared to die with bamboo spears in their hands against the full might of the Allied forces, surrendered and accepted occupation almost completely, letting MacArthur's army of occupation remake their country from top to bottom with almost no overt violence. It wasn't easy, of course. A psychological depression overtook many. Prostitution became a leading industry. Black marketeers thrived, while ordinary people starved or suffered at the hands of gangsters. The 'democratic' transition was imposed by above. American censorship was comprehensive, with the leading topic being the existence of American censorship, an Orwellian mess that stifled open society, even as the arts underwent a small renaissance. The war crimes trials, which sentenced seven Class A war criminals to death while protecting Emperor Hirohito, were a colonialist farce.

The problem with this primarily thematic organization is that the temporality of the occupation gets compressed. There are very real differences between the periods of real famine and deprivation immediately in the wake of surrender, the normalization around 1948, the pushback against the Left and embrace of old militarists as the Korean War turned hot, and the formal ending of the occupation. Dower's book has lots of detail about the resilience of a whole people, but fails to find a thesis.