What is Reddit's opinion of War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

A few anecdotes from the era that shine light on some of the topics raised:

Here is the highly regarded and probably shrewdest foreign policy analyst under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (had his opinion carried the day there would have been escalation of Vietnam War), George Ball:

>"You never know when the Japanese are going to go ape"...He described the Japanese "as repeatedly unpredictable and irrational".

http://japanwatching.com/environment/78-dont-cry-for-me-kyoto

In John Dower's classic, War Without Mercy, the Japanese were very quickly turned into "harmless children" (infamous quote of General MacArthur to that effect) under US occupation (shown via cartoons and other depictions), and I was struck by persistence of that stereotype (esp. in enchantment with electronics and gadgets) when I once was browsing through Life Magazine's special on 1964 Tokyo Olympics:

>During the war Westerners were told of the "child mind of the Jap conscript." After the war, the same newspapers and magazines spoke of "Seventy Million Problem Children"; and cartoonists had a field day depicting the Japanese as infants in the crib or, more often, children attending General MacArthur's School of Democracy. Such paternalism was unquestionably the essence of MacArthur's attitude toward the Japanese- and Oriental people in general. His guiding philosophy during the occupation, he stated widely in publicized Senate hearings in 1951, after President Truman had recalled him from Asia, had been to treat the Japanese as twelve-year-olds. This was not an incautious remark, for the former supreme commander went on to expound his position at some length, explaining in the process why he believed the Japanese might be more receptive to American-style democratic ideas than the "mature" Germans. "The German problem is a completely and entirely different one from the Japanese problem," MacArthur informed the senators. "The German people were a mature race. If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years. Like any tuitionary period, they were susceptible to following new models, new ideas. You can implant basic concepts there. They were still close enough to origin to be elastic and acceptable to new concepts..."

https://www.amazon.com/War-without-Mercy-PACIFIC-WAR-ebook/dp/B007GZKQCY

https://theolympians.co/tag/life-magazine

Sean Connery was also in news in a way movie publicity departments would not have preferred concerning 'You Only Live Twice':

>After the movie was shot, Sean Connery was asked by Japanese reporters whether he found Japanese women sexy. His answer "No" was not very popular in Japan, and the Japanese started giving him bad names.

https://www.moviemistakes.com/film1432/trivia

War without Mercy is a good one. It covers both the Japanese and the United States perspectives on the war from an ethnic and cultural standpoint.

https://www.amazon.com/War-without-Mercy-PACIFIC-WAR-ebook/dp/B007GZKQCY