ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John W. Dower was Ford International Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Cultures of War was written, and retired to become professor emeritus in June 2010, as the book was in press. Prior to MIT, he taught at the University of Nebraska (1970–71), University of Wisconsin–Madison (1971–86), and University of California–San Diego (1986–91). He worked for several years as an editor and book designer in Tokyo in the early 1960s, and as an academic later spent a number of research years living in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Kamakura with his wife, Yasuko, and their children.

His scholarly work on modern Japanese history and U.S.-Japan relations has been attentive to several interrelated areas of concern. One is Japan and Asia in the turbulent modern world; another, the links as well as discontinuities between the years prior to and after the end of World War II in 1945; and another, overriding all, the dynamics of war, peace, and power observed from multiple perspectives. Professor Dower first addressed these themes in the dissertation research that became the baseline for his first scholarly book, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (1979). In two later books on war and peace—War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999)—he devoted increasing attention to social, cultural, and psychological developments at grassroots levels, drawing on Japanese- and English-language materials ranging from films and political cartoons to popular songs and publications to vernacular slogans and slurs. War Without Mercy won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and, in Japan, the Masayoshi O–hira Memorial Prize for distinguished scholarship on Asia and the Pacific. Embracing Defeat won two book prizes in Japan and seven in the United States. The latter included the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bancroft Prize for work in American history and diplomacy, and Fairbank Prize for a scholarly book on Asia since 1800. Twelve of his early essays on a range of prewar and postwar topics were collected in the 1993 book Japan in War and Peace.

The graphics in Cultures of War reflect another of Professor Dower’s abiding interests: visual images that invite close reading and may open new windows of perception. His first published book, drawing on his sojourn as a book designer, was The Elements of Japanese Design (1971). In 1980, he edited A Century of Japanese Photography, 1840–1945, an English edition of a major Japanese sampling of the first hundred years of photography in Japan, and in 1985 he and John Junkerman published The Hiroshima Murals, on the collaborative political art of the painters Iri and Toshi Maruki. The following year, he was executive producer of a doumentary film on the Marukis, directed by John Junkerman and titled Hellfire—A Journey from Hiroshima, which was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2002, Professor Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa established the Visualizing Cultures project at MIT (visualizingcultures.mit.edu), a pioneer venture in image-driven scholarship and public education focused on Asia in the modern world.