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This week, I'm going to recommend Embracing Defeat by John Dower, which, yes, I have recommended on the podcast before, but seriously, not for nothing is this book considered the best history of the U.S. occupation of Japan ever written.

Pretty much everything Dower's ever done is frankly considered to be a masterclass

in the subject of writing history in a way that's both accessible and really, really deep in terms

of scholarship. Go to audible trial. Blackness in Japan, Part 5.

In hindsight, I think it's sometimes easy for us to forget just how audacious, bizarre, and unprecedented

the U.S. occupation of Japan was.

The idea that one country could, as a result of a war, move in and remake another society from the ground up,

and that that was morally acceptable, was pretty unprecedented in 1945.

The only other conflicts that I can think of before that point with similar endings were,

frankly, either civil wars or wars of imperialism, which ended in the construction of colonies.

And the occupation is something that I have to admit I feel a bit ambivalent about.

On the one hand, I am a fan of democracy, hopefully everyone listening to this podcast is as well,

and I think it's hard to dispute that Japan is better off under its current

democratic government than it was under the old military-dominated regime.

On the other, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea that those ends justify the

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