Warriors Of Imperial Japan In World War Ii

‘I had no qualms fighting the Australians, just as I have killed without remorse any of the Emperor’s enemies: the British, the Americans and the Dutch’, so admits Takahiro Sato in this ground-breaking oral history of Japan’s Pacific War. Thanks to years of research and over 100 interviews with veterans, the Author has compiled a fascinating collection of personal accounts by former Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen. Their candid views are often provocative and shocking. There are admissions of brutality, the killing of prisoners and cannibalism. Stark descriptions of appalling conditions and bitter fighting blend with descriptions of family life. Their views on the prowess of the enemy differ with some like air ace Kazuo Tsunoda who believed the Australians ‘worthy’. Some remain unrepentant while others such as Hideo Abe are ashamed of his part in Japan’s war of aggression. The result is a revealing insight into the minds of a ruthless and formidable enemy which provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

In the history of the twentieth century, the role of the military intelligence services in the competition among nations is still murky. Among the world's foremost intelligence services, those of Imperial Japan remain the least known. Few stories are as compelling as those surrounding the Japanese Army's Nakano School. From 1938 to 1945, the Nakano School trained more than 2,000 men in intelligence gathering, propaganda, and irregular warfare. Working in the shadows, these dedicated warriors executed a range of missions, from gathering intelligence in Latin America to leading commando raids against American lines in Papua New Guinea, in the Philippines, and on Okinawa. They played major roles in operations to subvert British rule in India, and they organized Japanese civilians into guerrilla units that would have made the invasion of Japan a bloodbath. One graduate used his Nakano commando training to elude U.S. and Philippine military patrols until emerging from the jungle nearly thirty years after the war's end. In the decades after World War II, graduates of the school worked to obtain from the United States and Russia the release of imprisoned war criminals and the recovery of lost territory, including Okinawa. Based on archival research and the memoirs of Japanese veterans, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano shines a much-needed light into the shadows of World War II and postwar Japanese affairs.

Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also necessary to assess the United States' and her allies' policies toward Japan, and their reactions to its actions, extending from Manchuria in 1931 to Hiroshima in 1945. Gruhl takes the view that World War II started in 1931 when Japan, crowded and poor in raw materials but with a sense of military invincibility, saw empire as her salvation and invaded China. Japan's imperial regime had volatile ambitions but limited resources, thus encouraging them to unleash a particularly brutal offensive against the peoples of Asia and surrounding ocean islands. Their 1931 to 1945 invasions and policies further added to Asia's pre-war woes, particularly in China, by badly disrupting marginal economies, leading to famines and epidemics. Altogether, the victims of Japan's World War Two aggression took many forms and were massive in number. Gruhl offers a survey and synthesis of the historical literature and documentation, statistical data, as well as personal interviews and first-hand accounts to provide a comprehensive overview analysis. The sequence of diplomatic and military events leading to Pearl Harbor, as well as those leading to the U.S. decision to drop the atom bomb, are explored here as well as Japan's war crimes and postwar revisionist/apologist views regarding them. This book will be of intense interest to Asian specialists, and those concerned with human rights issues in a historical context.

Throughout the Pacific theater of World War II, Allied prisoners were often starved, tortured, beheaded, even cannibalized by Japanese soldiers. Yet, during the Boxer Rebellion in China and the savage Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Western press lauded the Japanese for their kindness to the enemy wounded and imprisoned. "Warriors of the Rising Sun" chronicles the Japanese military's transformation from honorable "knights of Bushido" into men of historic cruelty. Photos.

The debate over Emperor Hirohito's accountability for government decisions and military operations up to the end of the World War II began before the end of the war and has continued even after his death. This book documents this controversy while providing insights into the Showa emperor's role in military planning in imperial Japan. It argues that Hirohito both knew of and participated in such planning and offers evidence that he was informed well in advance of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor. Using Japanese primary sources, this text aims to show that Hirohito's participation in the decision-making process was entirely consistent with his intellectual background and his passionate belief in the significance of the imperial tradition for the Japanese polity (kokutai) in prewar Japan.

This book examines in detail the Japanese Infantryman who was, despite comparisons with the notorious German Waffen SS, an enigma to Westerners. Brutal in its treatment of prisoners as well as the inhabitants of the areas that it conquered, the Imperial Japanese Army also had exacting standards for its own men strict codes of honor compelled Japanese soldiers to fight to the death against the more technologically advanced Allies. Identifying the ways in which the Japanese soldier differed from his Western counterpart, the author explores concepts such as Bushido, Seppuku, Shiki and Hakko Ichi-u in order to understand what motivated Japanese warriors.