John W. Dower
Encyclopedia
John W. Dower is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author and historian.

Dower earned a bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...

 in American Studies from Amherst College
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...

 in 1959, and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1972, where he studied under Albert M. Craig
Albert M. Craig
Albert Morton Craig is an American academic, historian, author and professor emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.-Early life:...

. He expanded his doctoral dissertation, a biography of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, into the book Empire and Aftermath. Among his other books is a selection of writings by E. Herbert Norman
E. Herbert Norman
Egerton Herbert Norman was a Canadian diplomat and historian.-Early life and education:Born and raised in Karuizawa, Japan to Canadian Methodist missionaries, he studied at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, and Trinity College at Cambridge University...

, a study of mutual images during World War II entitled War Without Mercy, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Embracing Defeat about the Occupation of Japan. In 2000 Dower was awarded the Mark Lynton History Prize
Mark Lynton History Prize
The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual award in the amount of $10,000 given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression"...

.

Dower was the executive producer of the Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...

-nominated documentary Hellfire, A Journey from Hiroshima, and was a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was founded in 1968 by a group of graduate students and younger faculty as part of the opposition to the American war in Vietnam...

, sitting on the editorial board of its journal with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

, and Herbert Bix.

He has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

 and the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

. He is currently Ford International Professor of History at MIT.

Visualizing Culture
Visualizing Cultures Controversy
On April 23, 2006,the MIT website homepage posted a link to the "" project in its “Spotlight” section, a multi-media educational Website on East Asia directed by Professors John Dower of the History Faculty and Shigeru Miyagawa of Foreign Languages and Literatures, which is a part of MIT open...

s

"Visualizing Cultures" is a course that John Dower has taught at MIT since 2003, together with Shigeru Miyagawa. In this course, Dower discusses how visual images shape the identity of peoples and cultures, focusing on American and Japanese societies. The course makes use of a large number of images related to modern Japanese history. In 2006, materials from Visualizing Cultures were posted on MIT's OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative...

, a public website which makes the content of some MIT courses available to the world at large.

In April 2006, the OpenCourseWare website of "Visualizing Cultures" was announced on the main page of the MIT website, which raised a stir among Chinese students studying in the US, some of whom found the material offensive.(CNN report). Dower's course materials included some woodblock prints produced in Japan as propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

 during the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894–1895. One of the prints illustrated Japanese soldiers executing "violent Chinese soldiers," with human heads scattered on the ground and blood gushing from the captives' necks. The authors and MIT received a number of complaints. Japanese-born Prof. Miyagawa was sent "a large number of explicit hate mail and death threat messages." http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N21/21chineseculture.html In response, the authors decided to remove temporarily the contents of this course from MIT's OpenCourseWare and released a statement, as did the MIT Administration. MIT's student newspaper, The MIT Tech
The MIT Tech
The Tech, first published on November 16, 1881, is the oldest and largest campus newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Editions are published on Tuesday and Friday throughout the academic year, daily during freshman orientation period, Wednesdays during...

, covered the story.

After a week of meetings, the authors of "Visualizing Cultures" and members of the Chinese community at MIT announced that they had reached a compromise. The authors agreed to include additional context in controversial sections prior to republishing their work. http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N22/20vc.html The website is currently back online.

Selected works

  • The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory, Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995)
  • Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
    Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
    Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is a history book written by John W. Dower and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1999. The book covers the Occupation of Japan by the Allies between August 1945 and April 1952, delving into topics such as Douglas MacArthur's administration,...

    (1999; W. W. Norton
    W. W. Norton
    W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It is well known for its "Norton Anthologies", particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the "Norton Critical Editions" series of texts which are frequently assigned in university...

    )
  • Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese experience, 1878-1954 (1988; Harvard University Press; ISBN 0-674-25126-1)
  • Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1995; New Press; ISBN 1-56584-279-0)
  • Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (1975; Pantheon; ISBN 0-394-70927-6)
  • War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986; Pantheon; ISBN 0-394-75172-8)
  • Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (New York: Norton : New Press, 2010 ISBN 9780393061505).

External links

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