Women Against War

If there is any doubt as to why women (or even men) should be against war, the forty personal war experiences related in this book will resolve that doubt. The book's impact is extremely powerful. Few could remain unmoved or continue to be indifferent to the cruelty of war after reading these accounts. But why should anyone, including those who are are already committed to the antiwar cause, subject themselves to such an excruciating, and at times horrifying, reading experience? For the simple reason that opposition to war must be grounded, not in abstractions, but in life, in the experience of the human race. For the simple reason that genuine antipathy toward war must be based on empathy, empathy with people who are not family or neighbors, but people from a different place and time. The war forming the background for the book is World War II, with some references to the Korean and Vietnam wars. The contributors are all Japanese women from all walks of life. Their recollections, divided into ten categories according to the nature of the experience, include accounts of women trying to make their way back to Japan amid postwar chaos in foreign lands (Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, Sakhalin); and accounts of nurses, of teachers, of women struggling to provide for themselves and their families in the ruins of a defeated Japan, of victims of the Hiroshima bombing, of women who prostituted themselves to American servicemen, of women who contracted tragic marriages and liaisons with American soldiers or who were the alienated offspring of such marriages, of women widowed by war, and of women who overcame seemingly insurmountable wartime obstacles to emerge triumphant. Although each woman's story is uniquely tragic, there is a common thread: each has become a woman against war.