John W. Dower

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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.

Dower earned an American Studies bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1959. During the 1960s he was a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 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 academic journal Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Dower eventually sat on the editorial board of the journal alongside Noam Chomsky and Herbert Bix.

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.

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.

He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, San Diego, and he is currently Ford International Professor of History at MIT.

In 2004, he was awarded the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, in recognison of his decisive and influential contribution to the study of history.

[edit] Visualizing Cultures

"Visualizing Cultures" is a course that John Dower teaches at MIT since 2003, together with Shigeru Miyagawa. 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, materials from Visualizing Cultures were posted on MIT's OpenCourseWare, a public website which makes the content of some MIT courses available to the world at large.

In April 2006, the OpenCourseWare website of "Visualizing Cultures" was announced on the main page of the MIT website, which raised a stir among Chinese students studying in the US, some of whom found the material offensive.(CNN report). Dower's course materials included some woodblock prints produced in Japan as propaganda during the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894-1895. One of the prints illustrated Japanese soldiers executing "violent Chinese soldiers," with human heads scattered on the ground and blood gushing from the captives' necks. The authors and MIT received a number of complaints. 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.

After a week of meetings, the authors of "Visualizing Cultures" and members of the Chinese community at MIT announced that they had reached a compromise. The authors agreed to include additional context in controversial sections prior to republishing their work. [2] The website is currently back online.

[edit] Selected works

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999; W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-32027-8)
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese experience, 1878-1954 (1988; Harvard University Press; ISBN 0-674-25126-1)
Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1995; New Press; ISBN 1-56584-279-0)
Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (1975; Pantheon; ISBN 0-394-70927-6)
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986; Pantheon; ISBN 0-394-75172-8)
The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory, Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995)
Fear and Prejudice in U.S.-Japan Relations - Ethics & International Affairs Journal, Volume 3 (1989)