The title is striking. It seizes your attention.
“Embrace” means to take up readily or gladly, like “embrace a cause.”
In the book “Embracing Defeat” by John Dower, the title refers to how Japan dealt with its loss in World War II. How Japan came to terms with its defeat and moved from imperial militarism to a peaceful democracy.
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and many other book prizes.
Dower, in his choice of title and his substantial page meditation on postwar Japan under American occupation from 1945 to 1952, posits that the nation faced it, reflected deeply, and transformed itself during the postwar occupation period.
Do the Japanese accept that they were wrong in their actions during WWII?
Dower in 1999 says in his epilogue chapter that “More than a few held the [war] in memory as one waged against communists and warlords in China and against European and American imperialists in Southeast Asia. Many, where the most horrendous Japanese atrocities are concerned, remained in denial.” (p. 563 Penguin paperback)