Review of Dower's War Without Mercy

Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.

Pantheon Books, New York, 1986.

In this seminal work on the Pacific war John Dower, Professor of History at the Michigan Institute of Technology and Pulitzer Prize winning author, discusses the effect had in the Allied war with Japan. It is the author's opinion that racism and prejudiced attitudes played a role in the development of atrocious behaviors seen in the Pacific Theater. Dower supports his thesis by effectively and exhaustively researching his topic. Dower creatively integrates and combines sources from almost every are of period life. In his studies he includes war diaries, political speeches, journal articles from both sides, and perhaps most effectively, sources from popular culture including songs, movies and cartoons.

Dower's book is organized in three main sections. The first section, titled Enemies, is meant as an introduction to the materials and themes that will be used throughout the book and is by far the shortest. This section begins by discussing the differing racial opinions and how they played a part during the course of the war. Race became a weapon of convenience for propagandists for while both sides claimed righteousness, under scrutiny both sides had serious social problems the other side could exploit.

In the case of the United States, Dower mentions the American fight against Hitler's Master Race ideology. In doing so, the weight of several European and American scientists was thrown in to discredit the idea that any race had any significant advantages or disadvantages compared to any other. This stated, both the Americans and British maintained a level of second class citizens extremely evidenced in the way the Americans treated blacks and over a hundred thousand Asians who were placed in internment camps after Pearl Harbor. These facts assisted both the Germans and the Japanese in their respective propaganda campaigns. The Germans took the Western hypocrisy as proof of their claims of inherently inferior and superior races while the Japanese used it as a tool to bring other Asians within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere.

Other problems of hypocrisy also arose. As war came into the Pacific, the Allied powers fought under a banner of freedom and liberty, claiming to protect the Asian nations from falling under the Japanese hegemonic regime. The problem, as Dower notes, is that the Japanese did not invade independent nations, every Asian country they attacked was more or less totally controlled by outside colonial empires. This gave the Japanese the ability to argue that the Allies were not fighting to protect Asia, they were fighting to protect themselves from a unified Asia free of imperialistic rule.

Dower gives credence to the idea that this was not entirely untrue. The Yellow Peril mythos had proceeded for centuries and Japan was in a position, the Allies believed, to make it a reality. Dower even quotes the president of the United States saying "1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous" giving credit that such a threat of a Yellow Peril existed.

The diverging opinions on both sides gave rise to what essentially amounted to a propaganda war. In the United States, Dower mentions a Hollywood director named Frank Capra, who became one of the Americans most lethal weapons in the war of words. He began his propaganda career with the extremely successful Why We Fight series of pictures, the first of which, Prelude to War winning an academy award. The impacts of these films were increased by Capra's technique of using the enemy's own words and images against them. He used captured film footage spliced with his own work to relay his message.

This is the technique Capra used in the only one of his films solely devoted to the Japanese, Know Your Enemy Ð'- Japan. In this film, Capra continued his tradition of letting the enemy speak for himself. He uses images of peasants in the field and a steelworker at his forge to impress upon the viewers the intense regimentation of Japanese society, a body populous made up of mindless automatons. Capra uses the national religion of Shinto, organized with the Emperor at its head, to relay the message that the people of Japan are brainwashed dupes ruled by elite class of devious individuals whose goal is nothing less than world domination.

These images of a treacherous and devious foe play a larger part in the second section of the book, The War in Western Eyes. In this section it is shown through period propaganda how the west saw the Japanese as devious apes or vermin. In one period cartoon the Japanese are depicted as insects labeled Louseous Japanicus and lists the only cure for an infestation is the ample use of hand grenades and flame-throwers until the root of infestation is totally annihilated, i.e. Japan.

The Japanese themselves were not unversed in the realm of propaganda. Tsuji Masanobu, a Colonel in the Imperial Army, authored a pamphlet titled Read This and the War is Won, which was issued to all Japanese troops. In the pamphlet the Western powers are described as power hungry imperialists who had been striving for world domination for centuries as evidenced by their bloody past. The current war is shown as just another symptom of Westerners beastly nature and that they are intending to strengthen their grasp on the East as their ultimate prize. It is on this basis that Japan, at first successfully, makes the rallying cry to the Asiatic nations to fight back against the Western Imperialists.

Out of a similar vein Dower mentions the work of Mituyo Seo, the creator of Momotaro's Divine Troops of the Ocean. A feature length animation, the movie depicts Momotaro, a figure from Japanese legend, as a Japanese warrior come to save Asia from the demon imperialists from the West, in the film, the British in Singapore.. The film also provides a meaningful glimpse at how the Japanese viewed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere. The native islanders are depicted as being genial but simple peoples. Prescribing perfectly to the idea of proper place they are shown as more than willing to be the beasts of burden for the superior Japanese.

In the last section of the book, the Japanese belief of superiority is more thoroughly examine. In the chapter The Pure Self it is shown that feelings of racial superiority where not unique to the Western world. The only difference is that while for the West it was a matter of color, for the Japanese it was a matter of purity. They considered themselves more pure than any of the other races, hence it was their responsibility to create a "new world order that would enable all nations and races to assume their proper place in the world", i.e., beneath Japan.

Dower