Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat, Japan in the Wake of World War II, published by W. W. Norton in 1999, is a Pulitzer Prize winning scholarly history of Japan's social, cultural, political and religious transformation in the years following its 1945 surrender, including the American occupation's reshaping of Shinto's institutional status and the postwar proliferation of new religious movements. Dower is a historian of modern Japan working from extensive archival and Japanese language source material. Its strength is the range and depth of that archival grounding across every layer of postwar Japanese society, widely recognized within the field as the standard account of the period. Its limit is precisely its breadth, a single volume covering the whole postwar transformation necessarily treats any one religious development as part of a larger social history rather than in the depth a study focused specifically on that religious movement would offer, so a narrow doctrinal or institutional claim benefits from a source with that narrower focus.