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Cook, Haruko Taya and Theodore F. Cook. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. 479 pp. ISBN 1-56584-039-9 (paperback) $14.95.
There have been innumerable films made about all facets of Japan’s involvement in World War II. Nonetheless, the fact that Hollywood has recently produced Letters from Iwo Jima, a Japanese language film that seeks to humanize the role of Japanese soldiers during one of the bloodiest battles of the war is certainly a watershed event in popular representations of the military during that period. Clint Eastwood’s film is one of the more successful attempts in recent years to glean the true motivations behind some of the more visible aspects of the war in the Pacific theater. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t still disputes and denials over the depiction of wartime events, all of which continue to perpetuate misunderstanding by both Japanese and Americans.
Indeed, the Japanese government is responsible for continuing to promote this misinformation including, in particular, the omission of controversial issues about the war in school textbooks. The Japanese Ministry of Education, as an example, has recently ordered textbook publishers to revise chapters pertaining to the Japanese army’s role in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which over a quarter of the population were killed. Many of those killed were Okinawans and Okinawan civilians, whom the Japanese soldiers used as human shields against the Americans. Others were forced to commit mass suicide or induced by military propaganda to kill themselves. The revised passages in new official textbooks would simply state that “there were some people who were driven to mass suicide.”
There are so many books published on World War II that outsiders might wonder what is important about this book. The historiography of Japan in World War II is extensive. However, the 38 oral histories compiled by Japanese scholars Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook offer individual stories, not broad generalizations. They capture the war within the lives of housewives, soldiers, government officials, doctors, artists, as well as adults who were children in the 1940s. With each interview placed first in historical context, the survivors recall their experiences during the war that took the lives of over 3 million Japanese and affected other untold millions in the Pacific and Asia.
The testimony elicits empathy for the ordinary citizens caught up in a war fueled by patriotism to the Emperor. Sixteen-year-old Tetsuko relates her experience in a factory making a new “secret weapon,” paper balloons carrying incendiary bombs to be launched in Honshu and carried in the jet stream to North America. Learning forty years later that some of the balloon bombs did reach America and did, in one instance, kill five children on a picnic in Oregon, Tetsuko told Haruko Cook that she was “stunned.” Until then, she relates, she thought that only Japanese were the victims of the war.
Other oral histories evoke horror, with former soldiers recounting honing their bayonet skills on civilians, and doctors, on medical experiments in China with live patients. Shigeaki Kinjo also describes the Japanese army’s cruelty to Okinawans during the 1945 battle. A professor at a Christian junior college, he disputes the notion of group suicide, a term he says was invented only after the war. What Kinjo describes instead was the military’s euphemism of “gyokusai” which meant surrendering one’s life “joyfully for their country.” In his case, members of his village killed each other as the Americans approached, with the survivors like him later stunned to see Japanese soldiers still alive, not having joined in their “sense of unity.” Though it took him more than twenty years, he told his interviewer that “survivors must testify.”
This book is highly recommended for public, high school and academic libraries. As the Cooks have explained, the individual experiences of those who were “caught up in that enormous conflict seem somehow never to have emerged from collective images of a fanatical nation at war.” Their book answers the questions of what was the war like, how did they survive, what influenced them and what did they learn from their experiences. No amount of denial by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe or the Ministry of Education can silence the powerful yet very human testimony of these individuals.
There have been innumerable films made about all facets of Japan’s involvement in World War II. Nonetheless, the fact that Hollywood has recently produced Letters from Iwo Jima, a Japanese language film that seeks to humanize the role of Japanese soldiers during one of the bloodiest battles of the war is certainly a watershed event in popular representations of the military during that period. Clint Eastwood’s film is one of the more successful attempts in recent years to glean the true motivations behind some of the more visible aspects of the war in the Pacific theater. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t still disputes and denials over the depiction of wartime events, all of which continue to perpetuate misunderstanding by both Japanese and Americans.
Indeed, the Japanese government is responsible for continuing to promote this misinformation including, in particular, the omission of controversial issues about the war in school textbooks. The Japanese Ministry of Education, as an example, has recently ordered textbook publishers to revise chapters pertaining to the Japanese army’s role in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which over a quarter of the population were killed. Many of those killed were Okinawans and Okinawan civilians, whom the Japanese soldiers used as human shields against the Americans. Others were forced to commit mass suicide or induced by military propaganda to kill themselves. The revised passages in new official textbooks would simply state that “there were some people who were driven to mass suicide.”
There are so many books published on World War II that outsiders might wonder what is important about this book. The historiography of Japan in World War II is extensive. However, the 38 oral histories compiled by Japanese scholars Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook offer individual stories, not broad generalizations. They capture the war within the lives of housewives, soldiers, government officials, doctors, artists, as well as adults who were children in the 1940s. With each interview placed first in historical context, the survivors recall their experiences during the war that took the lives of over 3 million Japanese and affected other untold millions in the Pacific and Asia.
The testimony elicits empathy for the ordinary citizens caught up in a war fueled by patriotism to the Emperor. Sixteen-year-old Tetsuko relates her experience in a factory making a new “secret weapon,” paper balloons carrying incendiary bombs to be launched in Honshu and carried in the jet stream to North America. Learning forty years later that some of the balloon bombs did reach America and did, in one instance, kill five children on a picnic in Oregon, Tetsuko told Haruko Cook that she was “stunned.” Until then, she relates, she thought that only Japanese were the victims of the war.
Other oral histories evoke horror, with former soldiers recounting honing their bayonet skills on civilians, and doctors, on medical experiments in China with live patients. Shigeaki Kinjo also describes the Japanese army’s cruelty to Okinawans during the 1945 battle. A professor at a Christian junior college, he disputes the notion of group suicide, a term he says was invented only after the war. What Kinjo describes instead was the military’s euphemism of “gyokusai” which meant surrendering one’s life “joyfully for their country.” In his case, members of his village killed each other as the Americans approached, with the survivors like him later stunned to see Japanese soldiers still alive, not having joined in their “sense of unity.” Though it took him more than twenty years, he told his interviewer that “survivors must testify.”
This book is highly recommended for public, high school and academic libraries. As the Cooks have explained, the individual experiences of those who were “caught up in that enormous conflict seem somehow never to have emerged from collective images of a fanatical nation at war.” Their book answers the questions of what was the war like, how did they survive, what influenced them and what did they learn from their experiences. No amount of denial by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe or the Ministry of Education can silence the powerful yet very human testimony of these individuals.
Submitted in May 2007 by Mary Louise Haraguchi, UHM LIS Student
Note
Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History,” New York Times 1 April 2007, A12.
Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History,” New York Times 1 April 2007, A12.
