In pursuing this unfolding inquiry, I found that my most precious resource was time to read, write, and rewrite. My greatest debt is to two generous institutions that made such time available: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A multiyear Mellon grant enabled me to focus more attention on this (and one other) project, and Harriet Zuckerman at the foundation was a particularly gracious source of encouragement. The Institute initiated the Mellon grant and, ever since I joined its faculty almost two decades ago, has been supportive of the attempt to balance research and teaching. Through all this, I have had the good fortune of being associated at MIT with a collegial department, History, in a forward-looking School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
The extensive notes reveal my great debts where the substance of the inquiry is concerned. One reason these are so long is that I tend to use notes as a kind of “supplementary commentary” to elaborate on cryptic observations. Beyond this, however, the notes should convey how much I have learned and borrowed from other writers and writings. We historians tend to be addicted to “primary” sources—documents, government publications and hearings, memoirs, diaries, contemporary popular discourse, and the like—and I have tapped these. So have others before me, however, and I hope I have succeeded in conveying how much I have benefitted from their research.
This debt to other writers exists at several levels. One involves several generations of scholarship focused on World War II—and, more specifically, on the road to war in Asia and the Pacific, the Pearl Harbor attack, strategic bombing and the decision to target noncombatants and ultimately to use the atomic bombs, and the postwar occupation of Japan. As a longtime academic, I was familiar with much of this literature but revisited it with new comparative questions in mind.
These questions stemmed, of course, from September 11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed. The Web has made resources available in ways undreamed of when I began doing history in the 1960s: documents, reports, speeches, interview transcripts, articles, and polemics are all much more easily accessible. At the same time, however, books and articles in the traditional print media have flourished. I have drawn on declarations, insider reports, and memoirs from a range of perspectives, but wish to call particular attention to my indebtedness to the many investigative journalists who also are frequently cited in the notes. They have been indefatigable, and must be seen as the invaluable oral historians of our time—asking hard questions close to the events, and recording answers that otherwise would be lost to history. The notes also reveal my debt to the writings of a number of insightful analysts of terror and counterterrorism, as well as of Islam and the Middle East crisis more generally.
Cultures of War carries the joint imprint of W. W. Norton and The New Press, and I am grateful for the unstinting support of Edwin Barber and Andre Schiffrin at these two distinguished publishing houses. They, along with my agent, Georges Borchardt, have been patient with my sense of an evolving inquiry and consequent disregard of projected deadlines. Kana Dower and Ken Dower helped guide me through computer challenges, and Margo Collett tracked down many hard-copy and online materials. Bedross Der Matossian and Hamid Rezai clarified the writings in Middle East languages that appear in some of the illustrations. As Cultures of War moved into production, I received invaluable assistance from a range of individuals, and am pleased to have the opportunity to thank them here: Mary Babcock for copyediting; Elyse Rieder for clearing illustration permissions, Chris Welch for producing a display-page design that incorporates my interest in visuals, and the strong support staff at W. W. Norton—Julia Druskin, Nancy Palmquist, and especially Melanie Tortoroli, who kept everything on track.
Finally, as always, I thank my wife, Yasuko, for her support and patience. This time around I filled a sizable portion of our living room in Boston with books and papers, and more or less took up permanent residence there. This is called colonization when undertaken by bodies larger and more formally constituted than me, and I will remain forever impressed by, and thankful for, her grace in refraining from mentioning this.
July 5, 2009