Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World

Ways of Forgetting looks at the key moments in the relationship between two national powers focusing on Japanese perceptions of the United States: how the Japanese saw Hiroshima, the American occupation, and the changes in their own lives. We also catch a glimpse of Japanese attitudes toward their own war crimes. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Dower offers blistering comments on Bush’s attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq by citing Dower’s own work on the U.S. occupation of Japan.
The book is a fascinating and probing look at the ways in which we remember the tangled history between the United States and Japan and how it is still invoked today.