Tales by Japanese Soldiers - Hardcover

Nunneley, John; Tamayama, Kazuo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0304355283 ISBN 13: 9780304355280

Publisher: Cassell, 2001

Synopsis

From war diaries and memoirs come first-person accounts of how the common soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army fared during the Second World War. The focus is on the Burma front, where nearly 200,000 of the 300,000 Japanese troops met their deaths. Their stories tell how they started out eager to conquer a faraway land, and how they came to feel isolated and virtually forgotten, with the constant battering by Allied air superiority and submarine attack.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr Kazuo Tamayama is secretary of the Japan-British Society, is actively involved in the reconciliation of the Japanese and British peoples, and was awarded an honorary MBE in 1998. John Nunneley fought the Japanese in Burma, and was wounded in 1944. He is chairman of the Burma Campaign Fellowship Group, which exists to promote British-Japanese friendship. John Nunneley is the Chairman of the Burma Campaign Fellowship Group, a British veterans' association devoted to the promotion of understanding and reconciliation amongst former enemies.

From Publishers Weekly:

Very few memoirs of Japanese soldiers who fought in WWII have come to light, so the Japanese combatant of that era has become something of a mythic figure, viewed chiefly through the recollections of former enemies. This volume, originally published in the U.K., offers a rare series of first-person accounts from at least one group of men who served with the Imperial Japanese Army. Filled with pathos and humanity, these 62 tales reveal what life was like for ordinary Japanese soldiers on the bloody Burma front. Here we find a Japanese soldier stunned at being denied an expected discharge on December 8, 1941. He soon learns the reason his commanders need him to remain in uniform, and then has trouble convincing others in his unit that Japan has in fact declared war on the United States. Elsewhere, a frightened nurse hiding in the jungle is surrounded by "horrible worms." Rather than be captured by the enemy, the nurse tries to strangle herself with her belt. (She is captured and survives to tell her harrowing tale.) Japanese soldier Manabu Wada gives a cigarette to a British prisoner who is assigned to a bridge construction crew. While the British prisoner is smoking Wada's cigarette, he begins to criticize the Japanese for inefficient use of prisoner labor. The two men argue, but he and the British prisoner end their heated conversation with a handshake. "Because he spoke with such confidence of the virtues of his mother country," Wada writes, "I bore him respect and at the same time had an affection for him." Wada then repeats a Japanese proverb: "Yesterday's enemy is tomorrow's friend." All told, this is a West-friendly collection from long-silent voices.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cassell
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0304355283
• ISBN 13: 9780304355280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240