Now I'm reading a book called Embracing Defeat, written by John W. Dower, who is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the MIT.
The reason why I started reading this book is because I thought it might give me an answer for this question:
Why do Japanese people love American(things, too)s so much even though we are losers of the war?
2 atomic bombs killed 300,000 people in 2 days, air raid over Tokyo killed about the same, and totally we lost about 3 million
people but still we love Americans.
By reading this book, it gave me a lot of thoughts not only the answer for the question above but a lot more about other things.
I'd like to list things that I found remarkable from this book.
1945, August 15th, the emperor Hirohito announced the surrender to the US. It was such a shocking event for the Japanese people
who were told that they were winning the holy war until a second ago to hear what the emperor said.
After a few days, the occupation army arrived, then surprisingly Japanese people welcomed them cheerfully. The people are so
defeated, they lost everything, and the country was devastated. People were eating too little, they were eating even powder of
dried blood of pigs and cows, etc. Since the occupation army arrived, people's expectation was great, and soon the General MacArthur became
sort of popular among the people.
Another outstanding finding was that General Headquarters of the Allied Forces and Japanese government back then established official
prositute from Japanese women for the occupation army so that they won't go start raping citizens (although it couldn't stop completely).
Since the society was devasted, many Japanese women worked as an official prosittute and earned quite good money. These women then
became a new symbol of Japan. Hanging out with Americans with a new western fashion (since they have money) which non-prositute
citizens were barely surviving. They were prostitutes who were discriminated by other Japanese, yet they looked COOL.
I haven't finish reading this book but it seems that the reason Japanese people love Americans were because of two major reasons.
One is that we had new hope on the occupation army that might change the davasted country for better, and those official prostitutes
who wore new western fashion were seen as cool.
Will add more once I finish this book. It is a great book so far!
