This is the definitive story of how the United States attempted to turn Japan into a democratic and peace-loving nation by drafting a new constitution for its former enemy--and then pretending that the Japanese had written it. Based on scores of interviews with participants in the process, as well as exhaustive research in Japanese and American records, the book explores in vivid detail the thinking and intentions behind the drafting of the constitution. Confusion and strife marked planning for the democratization of Japan, first in Washington, then in occupied Tokyo. Policy makers in the State, War, and Navy departments, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House contended bitterly over how to devise an "unconditional surrender" that would minimize Allied casualties while according the victor supreme authority over a soundly defeated Japan. By war's end, there were still no firm guidelines on a host of crucial issues, including how the Japanese system of government could be made acceptably democratic. The first months of occupation were chaotic, with General MacArthur organizing his staff around loyal followers and edging out experts sent from Washington. Hampered by a narrow interpretation of the terms of surrender and wishful thinking about Japanese compliance with American expectations, MacArthur set in motion a fiasco. Because of a translator's error, Prince Konoye, three-time Prime Minister of Japan, thought MacArthur had entrusted him with revising the Japanese constitution and assembled a staff of constitutional law experts and set to work. However, conservatives in the Japanese cabinet denounced his efforts and produced their own version, which MacArthur found unacceptable. MacArthur then secretly instructed his staff, with its very limited knowledge of either Japan or constitutional law, to draft a new Japanese constitution, which amazingly they did in a week's time. Expecting approval of its own draft, the Japanese cabinet was stunned when presented with a completely different American document. So unrelenting was the pressure exerted by MacArthur's officers that it was clear to members of the cabinet they had no choice but to adopt the American draft more or less intact, and publish it as their own. Because of the broad range of its meticulous research, the book will be a standard reference not only for students of Japanese history but also for legal scholars, diplomatic historians, and political scientists.

Offers brief sketches of famous and ordinary Japanese citizens, including Yukio Mishima, Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, and Nagisa Oshima.

Grassroots Fascism profiles the Asia Pacific War (1937–1945)—the most important though least understood experience of Japan's modern history—through the lens of ordinary Japanese life. Moving deftly from the struggles of the home front to the occupied territories to the ravages of the front line, the book offers rare insights into popular experiences from the war's troubled beginnings through Japan's disastrous defeat in 1945 and the new beginning it heralded. Yoshimi Yoshiaki mobilizes diaries, letters, memoirs, and government documents to portray the ambivalent position of ordinary Japanese as both wartime victims and active participants. He also provides penetrating accounts of the war experiences of Japan's minorities and imperial subjects, including Koreans and Taiwanese. His book challenges the idea that the Japanese people operated as a mere conduit for the military during the war, passively accepting an imperial ideology imposed upon them by the political elite. Viewed from the bottom up, wartime Japan unfolds as a complex modern mass society, with a corresponding variety of popular roles and agendas. In chronicling the diversity of wartime Japanese social experience, Yoshimi's account elevates our understanding of "Japanese Fascism." In its relation of World War II to the evolution—and destruction—of empire, it makes a fresh contribution to the global history of the war. Ethan Mark's translation supplements the Japanese original with explanatory notes and an in-depth introduction that situates the work within Japanese studies and global history.

The Association for Japanese-Language Teaching (AJALT), renowned for its Japanese for Busy People series, has developed a comprehensive course for teaching Japanese to young adults in English-speaking countries. Japanese for Young People is a three-level series, designed primarily for middle school and high school curricula (with an optional starter level for elementary students) encouraging systematic Japanese-language acquisition through an enjoyable but structured learning process. With an emphasis on coordination of structure and verbal communication skills, this first Student Book introduces the building-blocks of Japanese grammar through Key Sentences, Dialogues, Exercises, and Tasks. This Student Book is accompanied by a fully-illustrated Kana Workbook which features over 100 pages of activities and games to familiarize young students with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries before advancing to the next level in the series. With color illustrations and cultural notes throughout, Japanese for Young People provides an unintimidating start to learning one of the world's most difficult languages.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

This is the unlikely but true story of the Japanese American Citizens League's fight for an official government apology and compensation for the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Author John Tateishi, himself the leader of the JACL Redress Committee for many years, is first to admit that the task was herculean in scale. The campaign was seeking an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began with an acutely divided community: for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it; money was a taboo subject; the question of the value of liberty was insulting. Besides internal discord, the American public was largely unaware that there had been concentration camps on US soil, and Tateishi knew that concessions from Congress would come only with mass education about the government's civil rights violations. Beyond the backroom politicking and verbal fisticuffs that make this book a swashbuckling read, Redress is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens; how to restore honor; and what duty it has to protect such harms from happening again. This book has powerful implications as the idea of reparations shapes our national conversation.

The Japanese constitution as revised by General MacArthur in 1946, while generally regarded to be an outstanding basis for a liberal democracy, is at the same time widely considered to be—in its Japanese form—an document which is alien and incompatible with Japanese culture. Using both linguistics and historical data, Kyoto Inoue argues that despite the inclusion of alien concepts and ideas, this constitution is nonetheless fundamentally a Japanese document that can stand on its own. "This is an important book. . . . This is the most significant work on postwar Japanese constitutional history to appear in the West. It is highly instructive about the century-long process of cultural conflict in the evolution of government and society in modern Japan."—Thomas W. Burkman, Monumenta Nipponica

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

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