War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

by John W. Dower

Book Overview

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD - AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST - A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States."

In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War--race--while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394751728
• ISBN13: 9780394751726
• Release Date: February 1987
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 399 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Look At Selves and Others

This is a thought-provoking treatise about the hate and racism found in all peoples of the world. It causes one to take stock of what is, and what was in a very violent and trying time. Both the Japanese and the Americans, among others, propagandized their populations to get them to hate "the enemy." This book looks at the techniques and substance used by both sides in the Pacific War of 1931 to 1945 and how it affected the attitudes of each toward the other. I recommend this as a good read for anyone who is interested in the Pacific conflict and what was used to fan the antagonists into the fury that brough about, fought, and ended the bloody Pacific War.

A book to set you thinking about the present

War Without Mercy is not a comprehensive history of the Pacific War; if that's what you want, look elsewhere. Neither is it an "apologist's" account of the American conduct of the war, as some reviewers have suggested. If your mindset is "the Japanese deserved to suffer," don't read this book. If, however, you are interested in how racial stereotypes--views of the enemy as subhuman, primitive, childlike, animalistic, and so on--play a role in wartime, then read Dower's scholarly, engaging account of how the Americans thought about the Japanese and how the Japanese thought about the Americans. Dower never minimizes the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese as they set about conquering other Asian countries and building their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but he provides a brand new perspective on why the Allies despised the Japanese as a people far more than they did the Germans. Not only will this book help you to understand how the dehumanization of the enemy makes possible the devastation of civilian populations, it will also make you think about the stereotypes of the enemy we encounter every day as the U.S. continues to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Race and power in the Pacific War

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower begins "War Without Mercy" with an amusing account of his inspiration for the book: While working on a history of postwar Japan, Dower wrote a sentence noting how quickly and easily the virulent race hatred of the war years dissipated during the American occupation. Of course, he then had to include another sentence explaining the racial aspects of the war itself, which quickly became a paragraph, then a section, then a chapter, and finally this book, "War Without Mercy". The original history of postwar Japan, meanwhile, sat unfinished on a shelf. The main criticism of "War Without Mercy" given by other reviewers is that it is too narrow to serve as a comprehensive history of the war -- in particular that it tries to explain the entire conflict only through race and does not devote enough attention to Japanese atrocities and war crimes. This criticism unfortunately misses the point of Dower's book: he is studying racism itself, but for some reason many of his critics seem to think he is trying to use it to explain all and sundry. "War Without Mercy" is not and makes no pretense of being a book about the Pacific War in general or even about atrocities and war crimes themselves. Instead it started as a mere tangent in a larger work and focuses on racial aspects of the war between Japan and the United States, especially the images each side used to describe the other and the war itself, along with some study of how they evolved after the fighting stopped. As a history of race and power in the Pacific War, "War Without Mercy" is superb: well-organized, clearly written and offering interesting insights. It is divided into four sections, the first of which establishes the importance of the subject by showing how it contributed to the unique ferocity of the war in the Pacific: "Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race hate" (11). The second section studies American images of their Asian enemy, as apes, primitives, children, and 'little yellow savages', and of the war itself as a racial war between white and colored, while the third does the same for the Japanese side. Although the Japanese portrayed Europeans and Americans as decadent, impure, and downright demonic, they viewed their Asian neighbors in much the same contemptuous way as did Western imperialists. The final section explores the transition from war to peace, and the ways in which images and symbols were transformed: the apes became pets and the children became students, while on the other side the western demons shared their secret knowledge. At the same time, the negative images used during the war were transferred to the Soviet Union and (especially) Maoist China. Meticulously documented, "War Without Mercy" reveals many fascinating aspects of the Pacific War commonly overlooked in more comprehensive studies. I was especially interested to read about contemporary concerns that American rhetoric of r

Detailed, provoking, enlightening, fascinating, frightening

Magnificently documented and detailed. Very focused on the issue of racial motivations, behaviors and practices leading to and during World War II in the Pacific. Balanced enough. The subtitle should be the title, "Race and Power in the Pacific War." This isn't a history of Pacific WWII; it's narrow. It is what it represents itself to be. Anyone interested in WWII will, of course, need to study the history from other dimensions. Arguably, it helps a lot if you already have a reasonable sense of the history of Japan from 1868 up to and including WWII. Don't look for endless descriptions of the atrocities each side perpetrated on the other; some are mentioned, but the gory details are absent.Be prepared, it's a tad disorganized and you'll have to reach your own conclusions. The insightful gems are sometimes nearly hidden in the details. Others, such as the "Yamato [superior, or 'leading race'] Race" concepts, thread through the book, but oddly aren't even found in the index.But the book may be enlightening about today's behaviors as well. Some of the underlying Japanese values and beliefs that lead to WWII clearly still survive and prosper among many Japanese managers and executives. Japanese business behaviors, that to Americans often seem completely irrational, seem far more logical when viewed in the context of traditional Japanese thought. If you need to understand the Japanese, then unfortunately, this is a necessary and fascinating read.