Tracing the history of Japanese aggression from 1853 onward, Hoyt masterfully addresses some of the biggest questions left from the Pacific front of World War II.

Approximately three million Japanese died in a conflict that raged for years over much of the globe, from Hawaii to India, Alaska to Australia, causing death and suffering to untold millions in China, southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as pain and anguish to families of soldiers and civilians around the world. Yet how much do we know of Japan's war?In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese home front during the devastating raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses of how this violent conflict affected the lives of ordinary Japanese people.'Oral History of a compellingly high order.' Kirkus Reviews'This book seeks out the true feelings of the wartime generation [and] illuminates the contradictions between official views of the war and living testimony.' Yomiuri Shimbun

Japanese memories of World War II exert a powerful influence over the nation's society and culture. Michael Lucken explores how the war manifested in literature, art, film, funerary practices, and education reform, creating an idea of Japanese identity that still resonates from soap operas to the response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China convened national courts to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law. Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.

The Russo-Japanese war saw the first defeat of a major European imperialist power by an Asian country. When Japanese and Russian expansionist interests collided over Manchuria and Korea, the Tsar assumed Japan would never dare to fight. However, after years of planning, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian Port Arthur, on the Liaoyang Peninsula in 1904 and the war that followed saw Japan win major battles against Russia. This book explains the background and outbreak of the war, then follows the course of the fighting at Yalu River, Sha-ho, and finally Mukden, the largest battle anywhere in the world before the First World War.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

The book explores the critical importance of Pan-Asianism in Japanese imperialism. Pan-Asianism was a cultural as well as political ideology that promoted Asian unity and recognition. The focus is on Pan-Asianism as a propeller behind Japan's expansionist policies from the Manchurian Incident until the end of the Pacific War.

In Rana Mitter's tense, moving and hugely important book, the war between China and Japan - one of the most important struggles of the Second World War - at last gets the masterly history it deserves.

Based on twenty years of research in formerly secret archives, this book reveals for the first time the full significance of War Plan Orange—the U.S. Navy's strategy to defeat Japan, formulated over the forty years prior to World War II.

‘I had no qualms fighting the Australians, just as I have killed without remorse any of the Emperor’s enemies: the British, the Americans and the Dutch’, so admits Takahiro Sato in this ground-breaking oral history of Japan’s Pacific War. Thanks to years of research and over 100 interviews with veterans, the Author has compiled a fascinating collection of personal accounts by former Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen. Their candid views are often provocative and shocking. There are admissions of brutality, the killing of prisoners and cannibalism. Stark descriptions of appalling conditions and bitter fighting blend with descriptions of family life. Their views on the prowess of the enemy differ with some like air ace Kazuo Tsunoda who believed the Australians ‘worthy’. Some remain unrepentant while others such as Hideo Abe are ashamed of his part in Japan’s war of aggression. The result is a revealing insight into the minds of a ruthless and formidable enemy which provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the Second World War.