Daily Life In Wartime Japan 1940 1945

Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945 is 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.

The population of wartime Japan (1940–1945) has remained a largely faceless enemy to most Americans thanks to the distortions of US wartime propaganda, popular culture, and news reports. At a time when this country’s wartime experiences are slowly and belatedly coming into focus, this remarkable book by Samuel Yamashita offers an intimate picture of what life was like for ordinary Japanese during the war. Drawing upon diaries and letters written by servicemen, kamikaze pilots, evacuated children, and teenagers and adults mobilized for war work in the big cities, provincial towns, and rural communities, Yamashita lets us hear for the first time the rich mix of voices speaking in every register during the course of the war. Here is the housewife struggling to feed her family while supporting the war effort; the eager conscript from snow country enduring the harshest, most abusive training imaginable in order to learn how to fly; the Tokyo teenagers made to work in wartime factories; the children taken from cities to live in the countryside away from their families and with little food and no privacy; the Kyushu farmers pressured to grow ever more rice and wheat with fewer hands and less fertilizer; and the Kyoto octogenarian driven to thoughts of suicide by his inability to contribute to the war. How these ordinary Japanese coped with wartime hardships and dangers, and how their views changed over time as disillusionment, impatience, and sometimes despair set in, is the story that Yamashita’s book brings to the American reader. A history of life during war, Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 is also a glimpse of a now-vanished world.

This book presents an unforgettably honest account of the effects of World War II and the ensuing American occupation in Japan's Oita prefecture, from the perspective of the Japanese citizens who experienced it. Through harrowing firsthand accounts from more than forty Japanese men and women who lived in the region, we get a strikingly detailed picture of the dreadful experiences of wartime life in Japan. The interviewees are wide-ranging and include students, housewives, nurses, teachers, journalists, soldiers, sailors, Kamikaze pilots, and munitions factory workers. And their collective stories range from early, spirited support for the war on to more reflective later views in the wake of the devastating losses of friends and family members to air raids, and finally into periods of hunger and fear of the American occupiers. Detailed archival materials buttress the personal accounts, and the result is an unprecedented picture of the war as felt in a single region of Japan.

This volume portrays the daily life of ordinary Japanese civilians on the home front during World War Two. Drawing extensively on wartime records and early postwar recollections of people who lived through the war era, the book reveals a surprisingly cohesive society that bore up remarkably well. Originally published by W.W. Norton and Company in 1978.

This book analyzes the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952). It begins by explaining why Japan spent roughly fifty years building its own colonial system and declaring war on China and the Western Allies, only to decide after military defeats, two atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war, to surrender before being invaded. It goes on to describe the controversial issues surrounding the conduct of the Occupation forces, the largely American reform proposals and the shifts in policy as the Cold War developed. Particular emphasis is placed on women’s issues, the Japanese and American reactions to President Truman’s decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur, the tensions surrounding the requirement that the Japanese allow US military bases to stay in Japan and the still ongoing debate over the American decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Despite all this, the book concludes that particularly when compared with later Allied nation building efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the current state of US politics, the Occupation experience was, on the whole, a relatively positive one for both the Japanese and the US-Japan alliance.

The fall of Singapore and the brilliant victories achieved since the start of the war mean we are protected, but I don’t know just how grateful I should be. —Takahashi Aiko, housewife, February 1942 This is my final departure from the home islands. I have paid my respects to those who have helped me. I have no regrets. —Itabashi Yasuo, navy kamikaze pilot, February 1944 We had rice gruel for lunch again. There was no tofu in it, but there were potatoes.... We went through with the closing ceremony and received our report cards. Everyone was there. From now on, I’ll persevere and not fail. —Manabe Ichiro, primary school student, July 1944 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 schoolchildren 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.

“Monumental… [A] vast and detailed study that is surely the finest single-volume history of World War II. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire.” – The Wall Street Journal A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain’s leading military historian A New York Times bestseller Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain’s most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the “last imperial war,” with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath—which extended far beyond 1945. Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

Grassroots Fascism profiles the Asia Pacific War (1937–1945)—the most important though least understood experience of Japan's modern history—through the lens of ordinary Japanese life. Moving deftly from the struggles of the home front to the occupied territories to the ravages of the front line, the book offers rare insights into popular experiences from the war's troubled beginnings through Japan's disastrous defeat in 1945 and the new beginning it heralded. Yoshimi Yoshiaki mobilizes diaries, letters, memoirs, and government documents to portray the ambivalent position of ordinary Japanese as both wartime victims and active participants. He also provides penetrating accounts of the war experiences of Japan's minorities and imperial subjects, including Koreans and Taiwanese. His book challenges the idea that the Japanese people operated as a mere conduit for the military during the war, passively accepting an imperial ideology imposed upon them by the political elite. Viewed from the bottom up, wartime Japan unfolds as a complex modern mass society, with a corresponding variety of popular roles and agendas. In chronicling the diversity of wartime Japanese social experience, Yoshimi's account elevates our understanding of "Japanese Fascism." In its relation of World War II to the evolution—and destruction—of empire, it makes a fresh contribution to the global history of the war. Ethan Mark's translation supplements the Japanese original with explanatory notes and an in-depth introduction that situates the work within Japanese studies and global history.

This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems.