On War Without Mercy

Crucial for understanding the way race was constructed in both the United States and Japan during the Pacific War.

Edit: 11 October 2021

I first read this four years ago, and am still deeply impressed by it. It holds up so well after some 35 years. Dower’s intervention that the Pacific War, with all its brutality, can only be understood if it is framed as a race war.

Americans saw Japanese as savages and madmen, labels that they refused to give to Germans (despite the level of brutality exhibited by Germans towards Jews and Slavs, “German” crimes were instead labeled as “Nazi”). The Japanese, in contrast, saw Americans and other European imperial powers as monsters and demons. Both saw the other as inhuman, or at least some lesser type of human (Americans actually framed the Japanese as “superhuman” as a result of events in December 1941, meaning the only label the Japanese did not receive was “human”). This racial lens to the war fed into the committing of atrocities, and this atrocities further enflamed racial tensions, making the war in the Pacific much more violent for (Western European) soldiers than the war in Europe.

After the war, these racial labels were reshaped, although not denied. The Japanese “ape” became a Western pet, while Japanese senses of purity allowed them to purge their society of militaristic and feudalistic attitudes. The labels that Americans gave to the Japanese were then reappropriated to new contexts during the Cold War: to the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, and even the Soviet Union (which was perecived as an “Asiatic” Slavic state).

Altogether, this is some really outstanding work. I think one chapter is my favorite single history book chapter of all time: “Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus.” When I first read this, I was blown away, and that continues to be the case.