Japan at War: An Oral History

Following the release of Clint Eastwood’s epic film Letters from Iwo Jima, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, there has been a renewed fascination and interest in the Japanese perspective on World War II. This pathbreaking work of oral history is the first book ever to capture—in either Japanese or English—the experience of ordinary Japanese people during the war.

In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese home front during the inhuman raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses of how the twentieth century’s most deadly conflict affected the lives of the Japanese population. The book “seeks out the true feelings of the wartime generation [and] illuminates the contradictions between the official views of the war and living testimony” (Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan).

Japan at War is a book to which Americans and Japanese will continue to turn for decades to come. With more than 30,000 copies sold to date, this edition features an updated cover designed to appeal to a new generation of readers.

• The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
• Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai
• A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present
• World War Ii: A New History
• The World in Flames: A World War II Sourcebook
• Naomi
• The Pacific War: 1931-1945 (Pantheon Asia Library)
• The Best War Ever: America and World War II (The American Moment)
• The World War Two Reader (Routledge Readers in History)
• Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II