Seminars & Short Courses
Starting Over: Japan’s Occupation Years
John W. Dower’s seminal work, Embracing Defeat (2019), fundamentally reshaped the understanding of the Occupation period and postwar Japan. It challenged conventional postwar historiography that narrated the Occupation as a top-down, largely American story of Japan’s demilitarization, democratization, and reinvention as staunch US ally. By re-centering this story on Japanese voices and experiences and exploring psychological, cultural and social aspects of the Occupation, Dower framed the period as dynamic process involving the occupiers and the occupied.
With Embracing Defeat as its core text, this seminar focuses on the “demilitarization and democratization” years (1945-1947) of the US Occupation as Japanese experience and history.