Rowman & Littlefield Publishers The Scars of War: Tokyo During World War II - The Writings of Takeyama Michio (Asian Voices)

Takeyama Michio, the author of Harp of Burma, was thirty-seven in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Husband, father of children born during the war, and teacher at Japan's elite school of higher education in Tokyo, he experienced the war on its home front. His essays provide us with a personal record of the bombing of Tokyo, the shortage of food, the inability to get accurate information about the war, the frictions between civilians and military and between his elite students and other civilians, the mobilization of students into factory jobs and the military, and the relocation of civilians out of the Tokyo area. This intimate account of the "scars of war," including personal anecdotes from Takeyama's students and family, is one of very few histories from this unique vantage point. Takeyama's writings educate readers about how the war affected ordinary Japanese and convey his thoughts about Japan's ally Germany, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and the immediate postwar years. Beautifully translated by Richard H. Minear, these honest and moving essays are a fresh look at the history of Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. Review Readers can see the real picture of what Japan's intelligentsia experienced and what their thoughts were in those days. The essays are superbly well translated. A must. . . . Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--CHOICE A masterful translation of ten essays by one of postwar Japan's most interesting thinkers, this work ought to dispel our simplistic notions of Japan as a nation of unthinking followers during World War II. The complexity--and sharp turnings--of Takeyama's own ideas are troubling and provocative. And his vivid descriptions of ordinary people during the war--housewives stealing food to feed their hungry children, pampered and hedonistic Higher School boys scandalizing patriotic Hitachi factory workers, soldiers in China dying of boredom rather than battle--make the war somberly, but richly, human.--James L. Huffman, Wittenberg University No one has been as assiduous as Richard Minear in pursuing the hard moral questions of World War II--on both sides of the Pacific. This portrait of a committed humanist under simultaneous siege by enemy bombs and his own country's rabid nationalism is both startling and heartbreaking.--Jay Rubin, Harvard University About the Author Richard H. Minear is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and translator of Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey.