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John W . Dower (b. 1938) is an American author, professor, and historian; his primary focus is modern Japan and U.S.-Japan relations. He is perhaps best known for his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Letters for General Nonfiction, the National Book Award in Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Yamagata Banto Prize for Creative Work on Japan by a Non-Japanese Scholar. 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ...
The gold medal awarded for Public Service in Journalism The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical compositions. ...
The National Book Award is one of the most important literary prizes in the United States, presented annually for the best books by living U.S. citizens published in the U.S. The awards have been presented since 1950 in at least one category, and are presently awarded in each...
The Bancroft Prize was established in 1948 with a bequest from Frederic Bancroft and is awarded by Columbia University for books about diplomacy or about the history of the Americas which were first published the year before. ...
Dower earned an American Studies bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1959. During the 1960s he was a member of a group of Asian scholars wishing to reconcile their work with the new political landscape that developed as a result of the Vietnam War. The group established the revisionist academic journal Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Dower eventually sat on the editorial board of the journal alongside Noam Chomsky and Herbert Bix. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...
Amherst College is an independent liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. It is the third oldest college in Massachusetts. ...
1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The 1960s decade refers to the years from 1960 to 1969, inclusive. ...
Combatants Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) United States of America South Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand the Philippines Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) Strength ~1,200,000 (1968) ~420,000 (1968) Casualties South Vietnamese dead: 230,000 South Vietnamese wounded: 300,000 US dead...
In Parson Weems Fable (1939) Grant Wood takes a sly poke at a traditional hagiographical account of George Washington Historical revisionism is the reexamination of historical facts, with an eye towards updating histories with newly discovered, more accurate, or less biased information. ...
Academic publishing describes a system of publishing that is necessary in order for academic scholars to review work and make it available for a wider audience. ...
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ...
In 1972 Dower earned a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University. He later expanded his dissertation, a biography of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, into the book Empire and Aftermath. In 1975 he published a selection of writings by historian and Canadian diplomat E. Herbert Norman, a book Dower introduced as tribute to one of his inspirations. 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1972 calendar). ...
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ...
Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...
Shigeru Yoshida (吉田 茂 Yoshida Shigeru, September 22, 1878–October 20, 1967) was the Prime Minister of Japan from 1946 to 1947 and from 1948 to 1954. ...
1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ...
Dower has long been an advocate for international peace, and was the executive producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Hellfire - a Journey from Hiroshima in 1988. Academy Awards The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent film awards in the United States and most watched awards ceremony in the world. ...
1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
He has taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, San Diego, and he is currently Ford International Professor of History at MIT. The University of Wisconsin is a public university in the state of Wisconsin. ...
The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD) is a public, coeducational university located in La Jolla, California. ...
Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ...
In 2004, he was awarded the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, in recognison of his decisive and influential contribution to the study of history.
Visualizing Cultures "Visualizing Cultures" is a course that John Dower teaches at MIT since 2003, together with Shigeru Migayawa. In this course, Dower discusses how visual images shape the identity of peoples and cultures, focusing on American and Japanese societies. The course makes use of a large number of images related to modern Japanese history. In 2006, the contents of this class were included in MIT's OpenCourseWare, a website where the content of some MIT courses is made publicly available.
In April 2006, the OpenCourseWare website of "Visualizing Cultures" was announced on the main page of the MIT website. This generated a strong response from an important part of the international Chinese community, especially from a large number of Chinese students studying in the US, who found the website controversial and offensive. On the course website, John Dower presented some propagandistic wood prints produced in Japan during the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Some of these pictures illustrated the beheading of Chinese captives, both civilian and military, by Japanese soldiers in a bloody, gory and detailed way, heads were chopped off and scattered on the ground and blood were shown gushing from necks. The authors and MIT received a huge amount of protests and Japanese-born Prof. Miyagawa was sent "a large number of explicit hate mail and death threat messages." [1] In response, the authors decided to temporarily remove the contents of this course from MIT's OpenCourseWare and released a statement, as did the MIT Administration. MIT's student newspaper, The MIT Tech, covered the story. Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ...
Front page of The Tech, issue of January 18, 2006 The Tech, first published in 1881, is the oldest and largest campus newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the first newspaper to be published online. ...
Within MIT, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association took an active role in the protests and sent a letter to the MIT administration requesting the authors to include warnings about the nature of the pictures and to provide proper historical context to the prints, since they considered the existing text insufficient. On the contrary, other members of the MIT community claimed that the authors of "Visualizing Cultures" had done nothing wrong and had been unfairly critiziced. History Professor Peter C. Perdue, in an Open Letter to Chinese Students at MIT, stated that this controversy "is not a case of unintentional insensitivity, but of deliberate misrepresentation." The uproar was generated when a group of students selected a particularly sensitive image from the website, removed the caption that explained its context, and broadcast it in the Internet, thus distorting its original meaning in "Visualizing Cultures". In fact, in the removed caption corresponding to the picture "Illustration of the Decapitation of Violent Chinese Soldiers", which has originated the controversy, Prof. Dower described the scene as "unusually frightful" and "shocking"; he considered the topic as a "racial stereotyping", "as disdainful of the Chinese as anything that can be found in anti-Oriental racism in the United States and Europe at the time", and asserted that this constituted the "poisonus seed" for the "atrocius flower four decades later, when the emperor’s soldiers and sailors once again launched war against China." For this reason, Prof. Perdue and other members of the MIT community feel that "those who broadcast the image without its context had malicious motives. They intended to whip up anti-Japanese hatred in order to promote a political agenda." [2]. Others outside MIT expressed critical opinions about the Chinese MIT students who complained. History Professor George Wei, president of the Chinese Historians in the United States, stated that he didn't understand "what’s going on in the minds of these Chinese students — they’re looking at things in a simplistic way.” “In general, students from China, especially those who’ve been trained in technology and science, lack proper training in humanities and social sciences, and they don’t know how to look at historical events, to see things in context.” [3]
Peter C. Perdue's open letter got strong refutes from members of the Chinese community. They pointed out it is false to claim that "the uproar" was generated by "distribution of some selected pictures out of context," because the course page of "Visualizing Cultures" was openly available to everyone in the world, and the link to the course was prominently shown on MIT's main page. By the account of many protestors, they simply went to the course page and looked at the pictures there and read the surrounding texts. Many readers pointed out that, even if there were statements condemning the atrocities committed by Japanese armies, as a whole the texts were very unclear on this point. Some members of the Chinese community felt also offended because, in some parts, the authors expressed appreciation for the "artistic value" of the pictures, for example by describing the poses of Japanese soldiers as "heroic" or by considering certain woodprints as of "exhilarating beauty." On the contrary, other members of the Chinese community considered that "context of images was sufficient" and conveyed their "support for the work done by Professors Dower and Miyagawa in bringing an important part of our past into light", supporting "the return of the Visualizing Cultures project on the Web." [4]
The conflict was solved after a week of meetings between the authors of "Visualizing Cultures" and members of the Chinese community at MIT. The authors agreed to include additional context in controversial sections prior to republishing their work. [5]
Selected works
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999; W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0393320278)
- Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese experience, 1878-1954 (1988; Harvard University Press; ISBN 0674251261)
- Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1995; New Press; ISBN 1565842790)
- Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (1975; Pantheon; ISBN 0394709276)
- War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986; Pantheon; ISBN 0394751728)
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