Review by Choice Review
Yamashita (Pomona College) makes judicious use of excerpts from more than 150 wartime diaries kept by Japanese civilians and soldiers to document and support a view of "daily life" in Japan between 1940 and the end of WW II in August 1945. The resulting interpretive perspective is at odds with the generally accepted notion that the empire's military leadership systematically misled the Japanese people. Instead, these recollections introduce a worldview substantially created and accepted by a general population indoctrinated into an unquestioning loyalty to emperor and state, willingly acquiescing to leadership demands and unwilling (unable?) to question their larger enveloping psychological environment. Aware that an imposed interpretation of the myriad experiences of those living through the war risks distorting the authentic experience of those actually caught up in the events, Yamashita allows individual voices to emerge in lengthy quotations that, above all, demonstrate the underlying humanity of ordinary Japanese: farmers, housewives, teenage factory workers, children sent to safety in the countryside. The result is a nuanced, detailed, and balanced account presenting a much more complex account of wartime home front Japan than most readers might be familiar with in the general absence, heretofore, of original source materials--namely, the wartime diaries themselves, many of which only recently became accessible. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Lee Arne Makela, Cleveland State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
