John Dower is emeritus professor of history at the Massachusetts institute of Technology. His prize-winning scholarship on Japan and the United States includes War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999). He was a founder and co-director of the online “Visualizing Cultures” project at MIT visualizingcultures@mit.edu, which includes over fifty image-driven historical units focusing on Asia—especially Japan and China--in the modern world.