The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 Volume Two: 2 - Softcover

Toland, John

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9784871879187: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 Volume Two: 2

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4871879186 ISBN 13: 9784871879187

Publisher: Ishi Press, 2011

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This monumental narrative history, told primarily from the Japanese viewpoint, traces the dramatic fortunes of modern Japan from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atom bomb. In his Foreword to The Rising Sun, John Toland calls it a "factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened - muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of contradiction and paradox." It was total war involving all Japanese, and their final slogan, taken literally, was "One Hundred Million Die Together." Here for the first time is the full, far-ranging story of the war in the Pacific-military, political and diplomatic. The Rising Sun not only reveals an enigmatic and aggressive people fighting for survival as a modern nation, but refutes many basic assumptions and misconceptions about the motivations of those in power as well as their conduct of the war. Why did Pearl Harbor occur and was it even inevitable? Must Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull share the blame for starting the war? What happened to the Japanese at Midway, on Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - or during the controversial Battle for Leyte Gulf? What were Japan's leaders - men such as Tojo, Yamamota and Prince Konoye - really like? Was the Emperor a puppet, warmonger or neither? How was Truman's decision to use the atom bomb made and how extensive was the horror at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What transpired at the secret debates which raged over the beginning of the war - and during the palace revolt in August 1945, which attempted to thwart surrender? And finally, what inspired the violent actions of those who actually fought the war - from generals to privates - and who here have been willing to describe their mistakes, and speak of the unspeakable: cowardice, murder. cannibalism, surrender, and even desertion? The product of years of research - hundreds of interviews as well as the author's access to recently assembled official records and private memoirs and diaries - The Rising Sun recaptures a catastrophic conflict which not only revolutionized the Japanese way of life but marked the beginning of an ideological and racial contest for all of Asia. To research this book, John Toland and his wife, who is Japanese, spent fifteen months traveling through the Far East – Japan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines, Guam, Saipan, Singapore, Malaya and Thailand. Included among the almost five hundred people interviewed were the Emperor's chief adviser, the Privy Seal Marquis Koichi Kido, top military leaders, members of Tojo's cabinet, hundreds of military personnel of every rank, as well as more than fifty survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The author also interviewed numerous Americans, from President Truman and Admiral Nimitz to scores of prisoners of war.

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Review:

"'Unbelievably rich... Readable and exciting' Newsweek 'The most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific War' Chicago Sunday Times"

About the Author:

John Willard Toland was born on June 29, 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His wife was Japanese and she traveled around Japan with him conducting interviews for this book. John Toland died on January 4, 2004 in Danbury Connecticut. He was an American author and historian. He is best known for his bestselling biography of Adolf Hitler[2] and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II history of Japan, The Rising Sun. Toland was a graduate of Williams College, and he also attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before successfully completing his first sale, a short story he sold to The American Magazine in 1954 for $165. At one point he managed to publish an article on dirigibles in Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. Dirigibles were also the subject of his first full published book, entitled Ships in the Sky and published in 1957. Perhaps his most important work, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, is The Rising Sun. Based on original and extensive interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles Imperial Japan from the military rebellion of February 1936 to the end of World War II. The book won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese point of view, rather than from an American perspective. The stories of the battles for the stepping stones to Japan, the islands in the Pacific which had come under Japanese domination, are told from the perspective of the commander sitting in his cave rather than from that of the heroic forces engaged in the assault. Most of these commanders committed suicide at the conclusion of the battle, but Toland was able to reconstruct their viewpoint from letters to their wives and from reports they sent to Tokyo. Toland tried to write history as a straightforward narrative, with minimal analysis or judgment. One exception to his general approach is his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath about the Pearl Harbor attack and the investigations of it, in which he wrote about evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance of plans to attack the naval base but remained silent. The book was widely criticized at the time. Since the original publication, Toland added new evidence and rebutted early critics.

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