Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation [Hardcover]

This book presents an unforgettable up-close account of the effects of World War II and the subsequent American occupation on Oita prefecture, through firsthand accounts from more than forty Japanese men and women who lived there. The interviewees include students, housewives, nurses, midwives, teachers, journalists, soldiers, sailors, Kamikaze pilots, and munitions factory workers. Their stories range from early, spirited support for the war through the devastating losses of friends and family members to air raids and into periods of hunger and fear of the American occupiers. The personal accounts are buttressed by archival materials; the result is an unprecedented picture of the war as experienced in a single region of Japan.

Edgar A. Porteris professor in the College of Asian Pacific Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan.Ran Ying Porteris a writer. Her most recent novel isBlack Dragon River.

"As the oral reminiscences incorporated into this deft and well-crafted historical overview illustrate, however, local residents were at the epicenter of numerous critical occurrences during both WW II and its aftermath. An army regiment involved in the 1933 attack on Nanjing in China; the naval base preparing the fleet for the Pearl Harbor attack; numerous national military and political leaders; a training center for kamikaze pilots—all called Lita home. During the American occupation, a regional command post was located in Beppu, the prefecture’s largest city. Pulling together the recollections of some 40 individuals from Lita and the larger narrative of Japan at war and in defeat thus provides an engaging, critically important, and nicely balanced account of a period in Japanese history often under-acknowledged in Japan itself. Also intriguing: the interplay between important incidents associated with the war and the related individualized remembrances thalS*