The Pacific War, 1931-1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan's Role in World War II

The author, Mr. Ienaga, fought through Japanese courts for ten years to get this book published. The Japanese establishment, which continues to deny any responsbility for the atrocities committed in the Emperor's name -- and, Ienaga argues, by the the Emperor's orders -- fought very hard to prevent its publication. Ienaga won his case in the Japanese courts, which is almost as amazing as this book itself. Fascinating, enlightening, and shocking, this is one of the best short histories of World War II.

If you want to try to understand Japanese interpretations of thier involvement in World War II, then this is a book you must read!This book is from a Japanese perspective (there are many different interpretations among Japanese scholars as he mentions in this book, and which he is railing against). He uses the term 15-year-war because of his belief that Japan was in a continuous state of aggression from 1931 onward. He agrues that this aggression was a mind set of most people at the time, and lists in great numbers the atrocities commited during the war (from the oppression in the conquered territories to oppression in the army and the home).Ienaga was a high school teacher during the war and was dismayed at the way in which his governemnt and many people embraced militarism and violent aggression overseas. His frustration with his own people is evident throughout the entire book as he complains about the lack of freedoms that people should have had to oppose the war (and those that protested it anyway were severely punished by the government).Some of the other reviewers complained of his bias, but to be fair this book is an analysis of events. This is NOT intended to be a text book. It is intended to present a method to understand the facts and events which a textbook would give you. He presents it very carefully and thoughtfully, and after reading the book you can judge the whether the conclusion was justified or not.I am encouraging you to read this book because I believe that his arguments are well thought out, and you can get a feeling for how deeply World War II effected this man's thought process.-ATRP.S. In regards to the Nanking massacre, the numbers on that incident have varied from time to time because of the cover up of it. I don't know for certain, but I would suspect that since Ienaga wrote this book in the 60's, the information on real numbers of dead might not have been available. Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking, was printed relatively recently and really helped bring to light the level of horror committed there.

Americans may be startled to pick up a 256-page book about the Pacific War and discover that Pearl Harbor isn't mentioned until page 135. That's a consequence of Ienaga's belief that the war actually began with the Japanese army's 1931 coup in Manchuria, which led inevitably to war with China, which in turn led to the wider war agaisnt the western Allies. Despite Japan's claims about liberating Asians from colonialism, its purpose in going to war was to obtain the raw materials with which to defeat China. That was one reason the Japanese treated the "liberated" peoples so badly--as badly as they treated their white PWs. Part of the blame goes to the Japanese military tradition, in which the officers were an elite and the troops were conscripted from the younger sons of tenant farmers. Brutality was the norm, and the enlisted men who stayed in the army and became sergeants were precisely those who would most brutalize the next batch of recruits. Draftees were called issen gorin--roughly, "penny postcards," because that was the cost and the method of obtaining one. Why husband the life of a soldier when he could be replaced for a penny? Ienaga explains that the enlisted soldiers were the bottom of the food chain, that they had no on upon whom to vent their brutality in return. During WWII, it was fashionable in the U.S. to show General Tojo as the Japanese dictator, making a trio with Germany's Hitler and Italy's Mussolini. But of course that was very far from true, as even American propaganda recognized, since sometimes the emperor Hirohito filled the same role. Ienaga is especially good at explaining this mystery, in which a dictator was imposed by a group of elder statesmen--then deposed when his usefulness was over. Tojo ruled the government and the army, but he never managed to rule the navy--he didn't even learn about the defeat at Midway until a month after four aircraft carriers and a major portion of the navy's fighter planes had gone to the bottom. This is a valuable book, one of only a half-dozen serious studies by Japanese scholars of World War II available in English. We didn't know our enemy in 1941; we hardly know him any better today.

I lived in Japan for three years, my initial reaction to the Japanese telling me that they were different to everybody esle was to simply say "you are human, like everybody else on this planet". While that was true, I came to realise that the Japanese are indeed different and that conformity - "the nail that sticks out will get hammered flat" is deeply embeded. While books such as Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai ISBN 0-586-20576-4 and a study of Shintoism, Amaterasu reveal layers. Saburu Ienaga as professor Emeritus at Tokyo University, attempted to write a true version of events for school text books. However, the true version is still not taught in Japan to this day as it would dishonour those who misguidedly fought bravely in the name of a puppet emperor ruled by an evil military government. What surprised me about the book was not the widely known consumate brutality of the Japanese soldiers (who lived in constant fear of death, if complience, belief and conformity were not 100%), but how the Americans and the other allies behaved after Japan surrendered. This is the untold story, as far as the West is concerned and will most likely remain so, as it is not pretty.Anyone going to, or doing business with Japan, must read this book, as it reveals much of why Japanese society is as it is today.