Haunting voices from a dark, disgraceful past, which afford a
stunning and revelatory panorama of Japan's WW II experience.
Counting its aggressions in Manchuria and China, Japan (whose death
toll exceeded three million) was in constant battle from 1931
through V-J Day. Cook and her husband (History/William Paterson
College) spent nearly four years gathering reminiscences from
dozens of ostensibly ordinary people who survived the lengthy
conflict variously called the Pacific, Greater East Asia, or
15-Year War. Adding just enough background and big-picture
perspectives to give coherence to first-person narratives, the
authors largely allow their sources to speak for themselves. Among
those willing to tell their typically grim stories are combat
veterans of campaigns from Nanking to Okinawa; builders of the
infamous Burma railway;, unrepentant officers; technicians who
participated in barbarous medical experiments on POWs; journalists
whose dispatches extolling "victories of the spirit" owed more to
the military regime's police powers than to reality; cabaret
dancers; diplomats; and home-front victims of America's incendiary
as well as atom-bomb assaults. Also represented are troops who
served with brutal occupation forces; the widow of a kamikaze
pilot; conscripts trained as human torpedoes; Koreans dragooned
into rear-area labor battalions; and those convicted of war crimes.
About the only significant groups not included in the wide-ranging
canvas are the industrialists who supplied an overmatched imperial
war machine and members of resistance groups. Like its Axis
partner, Japan tolerated no dissent and was able to command
consensus support from an unquestioningly obedient populace that,
notwithstanding the disclosures at hand, still appears capable of
collective denial when it comes to assuming even regional
responsibility for the horrors of a global conflagration. Oral
history of a compellingly high order. (Kirkus Reviews)
A "deeply moving book" (Studs Terkel) and the first ever oral
history to document the experience of ordinary Japanese people
during World War II "Hereafter no one will be able to think, write,
or teach about the Pacific War without reference to [the Cooks']
work." -Marius B. Jansen, Emeritus Professor of Japanese History,
Princeton University This pathbreaking work of oral history by
Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook was the first book ever to
capture the experience of ordinary Japanese people during the war
and remains the classic work on the subject. In a sweeping
panorama, Japan at War takes us from the Japanese attacks on China
in the 1930s to the Japanese home front during the inhuman raids on
Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, offering glimpses of how the
twentieth century's most deadly conflict affected the lives of the
Japanese population. The book "seeks out the true feelings of the
wartime generation [and] illuminates the contradictions between the
official views of the war and living testimony" (Yomiuri Shimbun,
Japan). For decades, American and Japanese readers have turned to
Japan at War for a candid portrait of the Japanese experience
during World War II in all its complexity. Featuring essays that
contextualize the oral histories of each tumultuous period covered,
Japan at War is appropriate both as an introduction to those
war-ravaged decades and as a riveting reference for those studying
the war in the Pacific.
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