John Dower's latest book, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World, is a collection of previously published essays spanning from 1975 to 2005. Most of the pieces date from the 1990s and early 2000s when questions of history and memory dominated discussion and analysis of the past, while the 1975 piece is Dower's famous essay on E. H. Norman, the brilliant Canadian historian and diplomat. Its inclusion is fluent with the book's other contributions as well as the central aim of the compilation, which is to examine Japanese history through Japanese eyes (here as with most of Dower's work in ways that focus on Japan's mid-twentieth century wars).

In this manner, it is fair to say that this recent collection presents a splendid example of “you can judge a book by its cover”. The graphic artist(s) responsible for the book's cover jacket worked with an image that Dower explicates in the book's third essay, “Japan's Beautiful Modern War.” The painting at stake is Ezaki Kohei's Capture of Guam (1941), and the jacket's designer(s) smartly zeroed in from the large canvas onto the eyes of the Japanese soldiers lying on the ground in the center. This draws attention to Dower's objective, which is to examine the mid-century wars as Japanese perceived them, not simply in terms of the memory and forgetting debates that would prevail decades later. In broad strokes, Dower's aim would obviously be an easier task materially and historiographically had Japan ultimately been the victor, or – equally important as Dower emphasizes throughout his work – had so much of the wars' histories become less embroiled in questions of war responsibility and guilt writ large.

Dower explicates Ezaki's picture of the Japanese troops making their assault on Guam towards the end of the book's third chapter, an essay originally published as part of an exhibition catalogue for a show on wartime textiles at Bard College in 2005. Dower explains that the show's focus was to demonstrate that “particularly on festive occasions, boys, men, and even women could literally wrap themselves in aestheticized patriotism” (p. 66). For his part, Dower explains his own position right away by opening the essay with a scathing assessment of the judgment of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal: “No serious scholar today would endorse th(e) simplistic conspiracy thesis (of Japanese policymakers' … ‘common plan or conspiracy’ to wage ‘wars of aggression’ ever since 1928),” Dower writes, “which so blithely ignores imperialist rivalries in Asia and the collapse of the capitalist world order in the Great Depression that began in 1929” (p. 67). Lest Dower be viewed through this comment as any sort of apologist today, he immediately notes, “At the same time, no one can ignore the fact that the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931 marked the beginning of a new level of Japanese aggression and expansion on the Asian continent” (p. 67).

From this balanced perch, Dower launches into an explication that contextualizes some of the textiles featured in the “path-breaking” exhibition at Bard curated by Jacqueline Atkins – kimonos with tanks on them, for example, much like T-shirts one sees on American teenagers today valorizing the violent conquest of Iraqi cities – by reading the fabrics together with poster art and paintings. The Ezaki painting that features the men's eyes was among the art objects that the United States returned to Japan in the 1960s (having confiscated them as enemy propaganda during the occupation). By contrast, Dower describes that “the tradition of Japanese-style painting (Nihonga), with its delicate washes and flat, stylized renderings, proved particularly adaptable to propaganda suggesting the purity and discipline of Japan's mission as ‘the Light of Asia’” (p. 103). In this manner, Dower succeeds in making clear the need to grasp that many of the things that became “taboo” immediately after Japan's defeat in 1945 had only a short time earlier not only been viewed as socially positive but also as desirable by many Japanese.

Dower expands on this theme from various angles throughout the collection's other essays, perhaps most elegantly in Chapter 9, “Mocking Misery: Grassroots Satire in Defeated Japan.” This piece was originally intended for his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. As he explains in introductory remarks, he had to make cuts, including these insightful and poignant pages in which he considers a moment in modern Japan “… just a few months after the surrender, when daily life was very difficult indeed” (p. 228). From the song lyrics that reference the prevalence of the black market at that moment (set to earlier tunes) to New Year's children's games that depicted “the folly of the recent war and the deservedly humiliating fall from grace of the country's erstwhile leaders” (p. 237), Dower eloquently unveils a social setting that offered the counter-weight to the earlier moment of war-glorifying kimonos: gone are the tanks invading Chinese cities on children's clothes, now Japanese kids would ring in 1946 with new twists on the old syllable game, including “‘TO / Even old men are breaking out in cold sweat’ (toshiyori mo hiyaase) Graphic: three trembling men, one in military cap, with one of them thinking ‘war crimes’ as well as ‘YO / Thanks for quitting the war’ (yoku koso yamete kudasatta) Graphic: seven smiling faces of ordinary people” (pp. 240–41).

The final two essays in the collection, “Lessons from Japan about War's Aftermath” and “The Other Japanese Occupation,” move readers into Dower's most recent area of focus: comparing Japan's mid-twentieth-century wars (especially its occupation of Manchuria) with the United States' twenty-first-century campaign against and occupation of Iraq. The themes are fleshed out in his 2010 book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq, and here in this volume the essays from that larger work offer an enticing way to circle back to the Norman essay that opens Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering. At its heart, Dower's essay about E. H. Norman, “E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History” set the stage for his own career (Dower's, that is) as a passionate humanist who would confront mind-boggling horrors (in Dower's case the reality of America's ongoing wars – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) with the hope that his learned analysis and insights about the past might make for better and more peaceful future action (after all, if historians do not have hope what do we have?). Describing Norman, Dower writes, “… throughout his thought there exists the inherent tension of commitment to the basic values of human life and civilized behavior and the confrontation with situations in which violence, the antithesis of these values, may appear to be the only recourse remaining to destroy a system which represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government” (p. 26).

In this latest collection, Dower makes clear that he is not retreating.