Japan at war : an oral history

Resource Information

The work Japan at war : an oral history represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bates College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Japan at war : an oral history

Title remainder

an oral history

Statement of responsibility

Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook

Creator

• Cook, Haruko Taya

Contributor

• Cook, Theodore Failor

Subject

• Japan -- History -- 1926-1945
• Oral history -- Japan
• Personal narratives
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Japan
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Japanese
• Biographies

Genre

• Personal narratives
• Personal narratives, Japanese
• Biographies

Language

eng

Summary

This pathbreaking work of oral history captures for the first time ever - in either Japanese or English - the remarkable story of ordinary Japanese people during World War II. In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese homefront during the inhuman raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses of how this century's most violent conflict affected the lives of the Japanese population. Japan at War documents a huge range of experiences, from long-ago memories of being taught to play at soldiering in school to personal accounts of carrying out horrendous medical experiments and ruthless massacres. Here are the soldiers and sailors caught in the jungles of New Guinea and on the seas around the Philippines. Here, too, are proud builders of the Burma railway, and unrepentant generals, as well as conscripts whose political or intellectual training made them unwilling participants in the horrors wrought by their country. Japanese newspapermen, filmmakers, artists, cabaret dancers, and diplomats speak candidly about their wartime experiences, adding a whole new dimension to the now-famous symbols of kamikaze pilots and human torpedoes. As they crisscrossed Japan seeking out survivors of a war that cost that country over 3 million lives, the authors encountered every form of human response: those who held to their principles and those who gave in to opportunism, those who controlled events as well as the many - including women and children - who were caught up in the horrific whirlpool. No book to date has captured the complex range of Japanese experiences and emotions as does Japan at War. This is a monumental work of history - one to which Americans and Japanese will turn for decades to come

Biography type

collective biography

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

maps

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction