Japan At War [Paperback]

The Cooks present dozens of oral histories that are virtually unedited, presenting each interviewee's story just as it was told. The oral histories are grouped into chapters roughly by time period or theme, and each chapter has a succinct introduction that puts the oral histories that follow into their wider historical perspective. Each oral history is introduced with a very brief description of the interviewee, with a minimum of footnotes, often to writings previously published by the interviewee himself.

Because the histories are presented verbatim, one reads each of these stories of the war precisely as the teller of the story wants to remember it, complete with biases and fifty years of selective memory. Being already familiar with the broad historical events of the war, I found this utterly fascinating. There is the convicted war criminal who denies the Rape of Nanking took place, and adamantly refuses to admit that the white objects on the ground in his own collection of photographs are actually dead corpses. Then there is the military doctor who "remembered" performing practice surgery on unanaesthetized Chinese prisoners only after four years of Chinese Communist brainwashing. There's good reason to believe that such atrocities occurred, but did the Chinese force the doctor to recall a repressed memory of a real even, or did they just implant a false memory?

There is the Japanese prisoner of war who helped write propaganda leaflets for the Americans and who recalls his time in America as a POW as one of the happiest in his life. And then there is the Okinawan who tells of crushing his own mother's skull with a rock, because the Japanese military had convinced his family that the Americans were demons who would do unspeakable things to anyone unfortunate enough to fall into their hands alive.

One gets a sense of a people that were totally disconnected from the real war situation, and of a military that completely desensitized its members. There is a dreamlike, or perhaps I should say nightmarish, quality to almost all the interviews. The power of the book lies in the juxtaposition of so many recollections, filled with so many contradictory observations. Sometimes the contradictions are found in the same history, as is the case for the nurse who believes the Americans used poison gas in the battle for Okinawa, but who also professes astonishment at the excellent treatment she received after falling into their hands.

The accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo or the atomic attack on Hiroshima are naturally painful for an American to read. What is astonishing is how little malice the victims feel towards their attackers. There is one victim from Hiroshima who expresses horror that the United States still maintains a nuclear arsenal, but for most of the others the reaction is more like a shrug: "It was war."

This powerful book deserves to become a classic, alongside "All Quiet on the Western Front", "The Diary of a Young Girl," or "With The Old Breed."