December 30, 2003
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Award-winning historian John W. Dower presents the timely and engrossing lecture Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11

Summary Facts:

• John W. Dower
• Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11
• Author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
• Dower is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Thursday, February 5
• 4 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• Free
• Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535

John W. Dower, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, will present the lecture Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, on Thursday, February 5 at 4 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. This is a free event.

Dower, the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss the lessons to be learned from history, and examine the parallels and differences between the end of World War II and the declared end of the recent Iraq war. In an editorial titled “History in the Remaking” published in the Los Angeles Times on December 8, 2003, Dower wrote: “In a recent speech in London, President Bush declared that not only were we making ‘substantial progress’ in Iraq but that ‘much of it has proceeded faster than similar efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II.’ What are we to make of this murky use of history? The truth is that what is happening in Iraq presents a stunning and fundamental contrast to what took place in occupied Japan and Germany over half a century ago—and not a positive one.” Dower’s detailed, meticulously researched presentation will lay out the crucial differences between 1945 Japan and 2003 Iraq.

Professor Dower’s most recent book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (2001) examines Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war, when the country was under the control of American occupation authorities from 1945 to 1952. This lengthy study weaves a complex tapestry of social, cultural and political history, and devotes as much attention to ordinary lives and trends in popular consciousness as it does to top-level policy making. A logical extension of Dower’s long engagement with issues of war, peace, power and justice in modern Japanese history and U.S.-Japan relations, Embracing Defeat has received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. “Extraordinarily illuminating,” asserts the Wall Street Journal. “Dower has deftly mixed history from the ’bottom up’ and ’top down’ to produce what is surely the most significant work to date on the postwar Japanese era.”

Among his other books, Dower has authored War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986). This path-breaking comparative study of the racial, psychological and propagandistic aspects of the war from both Anglo-American and Japanese perspectives won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. The New York Times called War Without Mercy “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”

Currently Dower, along with his MIT colleague Shigeru Miyagawa, is engaged in the project “Visualizing Cultures” aimed at wedding the systematic insights of historical and cultural analysis to an extensive digital database of visual images. The first unit created as part of “Visualizing Cultures” juxtaposed Japanese and American images that told the story of Commodore Perry’s pivotal voyage to “open” Japan to the West in 1853-1854. Dower, Miyagawa and their students explored history and intercultural understanding through the images cultures produce of themselves and each other.

Before teaching at MIT, Dower held positions at the University of California, San Diego from 1986 to 1991 and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1971 to 1986. In addition to his teaching and writing, in 1986 Dower was the executive producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Hellfire—A Journey from Hiroshima. The film, directed by Michael Camerini and John Junkerman, explored the collaborative political art of painters Iri and Toshi Maruki.

Courtesy of UCSB Bookstore, books by John Dower will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

This event is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and the UCSB Global and International Studies Program with support from the “Critical Issues in America” Endowment, administered by the Office of the Provost, College of Letters and Science.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.