Grassroots fascism : the war experience of the Japanese people / Yoshimi Yoshiaki ; translated and annotated by Ethan Mark.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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

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CHOICE Review

Discussions of war usually revolve around causation, military strategy, and end-of-conflict consequences. Yoshiaki (Chuo Univ., Tokyo) instead considers attitudes toward Japanese involvement in WW II expressed by "ordinary" soldiers and other citizens as revealed in contemporary letters, diaries, journals, government documents, and reminiscences composed at war's end. Readers are exposed to a variety of opinions, some self-serving (seeing economic opportunities in the empire's expansion) and others critical more of the conduct of the war than any consideration of its reasonableness. Yoshiaki includes voices of minorities within Japan as well as resident overseas Japanese, admirably contextualizing each speaker and allowing him (and occasionally, her) to speak in his own words. The result undergirds the author's contention that, far from being innocents duped by their military overlords, many Japanese supported the war, if only as a demonstration of the nation's intent to share the gifts of higher civilization. All, it appears, were victims of "imperial fascism," a "Japanized" version of the same authoritarian nationalism operational in Europe that expected the mobilization of citizen soldiers in support of expansionist impulses. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Lee Arne Makela, emeritus, Cleveland State University