This collection of diaries gives readers a powerful, firsthand look at the effects of the Pacific War on eight ordinary Japanese. Immediate, vivid, and at times surprisingly frank, the diaries chronicle the last years of the war and its aftermath as experienced by a navy kamikaze pilot, an army straggler on Okinawa, an elderly Kyoto businessman, a Tokyo housewife, a young working woman in Tokyo, a teenage girl mobilized for war work, and two school-children evacuated to the countryside. Samuel Yamashita's introduction provides a helpful overview of the historiography on wartime Japan and offers valuable insights into the important, everyday issues that concerned Japanese during a different and disastrously difficult time.

An intimate history of the lives of ordinary Japanese during World War II that introduces us to housewives in provincial cities struggling to feed their families while supporting the war effort, a conscript from northern Japan who endured the harshest and most abusive training imaginable to learn to fly, Tokyo teenagers mobilized to work in wartime factories, children evacuated from the big cities to a life in the countryside with little food, bullying, and no privacy, farmers pressured to grow more rice and wheat with less fertilizer and fewer hands, and a Kyoto octogenarian whose inability to contribute to the war effort leads him to contemplate suicide.

Poke, spam musubi, and loco mocos are currently the rage on the mainland United States, and restaurants serving "local food" have popped up not only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle but also in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. Who could have predicted the popularity of over-the-top and carb-heavy plate lunches, spam musubi, and poke bowls? What explains this? One quick answer is Hawai'i Regional Cuisine. The twelve chefs who grandly announced in 1991 the establishment of what they called Hawai'i Regional Cuisine may well have paved the way. Their commitment to using locally sourced ingredients of the highest quality at their restaurants quickly attracted the interest of journalists writing for national newspapers and magazines. Yet even after they gained national acclaim and celebrity, the HRC chefs never forgot local food, and many created haute-cuisine versions of Hawai'i's fare, such as saimin, the malasada, and the loco moco. Samuel H. Yamashita's Hawai'i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai'i Eats is the first book dedicated to the HRC movement. It is based on interviews with thirty-six chefs, farmers, retailers, culinary arts educators, and food writers, as well as on nearly everything written about the HRC chefs in the national and local media. Yamashita follows the history of this important regional movement from 1991 through 2016, offering a boldly original analysis of its cuisine and assessment of its impact on the islands. Hawai'i Regional Cuisine will satisfy those who are passionate about food and intrigued by how the HRC movement changed the food scene in the islands.