Download or read book Imperial Japan s World War Two 1931 1945 written by Werner Gruhl and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also necessary to assess the United States' and her allies' policies toward Japan, and their reactions to its actions, extending from Manchuria in 1931 to Hiroshima in 1945. Gruhl takes the view that World War II started in 1931 when Japan, crowded and poor in raw materials but with a sense of military invincibility, saw empire as her salvation and invaded China. Japan's imperial regime had volatile ambitions but limited resources, thus encouraging them to unleash a particularly brutal offensive against the peoples of Asia and surrounding ocean islands. Their 1931 to 1945 invasions and policies further added to Asia's pre-war woes, particularly in China, by badly disrupting marginal economies, leading to famines and epidemics. Altogether, the victims of Japan's World War Two aggression took many forms and were massive in number. Gruhl offers a survey and synthesis of the historical literature and documentation, statistical data, as well as personal interviews and first-hand accounts to provide a comprehensive overview analysis. The sequence of diplomatic and military events leading to Pearl Harbor, as well as those leading to the U.S. decision to drop the atom bomb, are explored here as well as Japan's war crimes and postwar revisionist/apologist views regarding them. This book will be of intense interest to Asian specialists, and those concerned with human rights issues in a historical context.

Download or read book Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War written by Peter Wetzler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the country. But, as Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War reveals, Western imagination is often reductive in its explanation of the Japanese Empire and its collapse. In his analysis of the Emperor, Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the Second World War, Peter Wetzler examines the disconnect between nation and state during wartime Japan and in doing so offers a much-needed nuanced and sensitive corrective to existing Western scholarship. Rooted in the perspective of the Japanese, Wetzler makes available to readers vital primary and secondary Japanese archival sources; most notably, this book provides the first English assessment of the recently-released Actual Record of the Showa Emperor. This book is an important advance in English-language studies of the Second World War in Asia, and is thus essential reading for all those wishing to understand this crucial period in Japanese history.

Download or read book A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy written by Paul Dull and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2012-12-12 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost 20 years, more than 200 reels of microfilmed Japanese naval records remained in the custody of the U.S. Naval History Division, virtually untouched. This unique book draws on those sources and others to tell the story of the Pacific War from the viewpoint of the Japanese. Former Marine Corps officer and Asian scholar Paul Dull focuses on the major surface engagements of the war—Coral Sea, Midway, the crucial Solomons campaign, and the last-ditch battles in the Marianas and Philippines. Also included are detailed track charts and a selection of Japanese photographs of major vessels and actions.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan written by Stephen Wynn and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2020-08-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question is, how did a once great nation that built an empire lose it all? From the Meiji Restoration in 1868, restoring Imperial rule under Emperor Meiji, until Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War in 1945, the dream lasted a comparatively short period of time: seventy-seven years from beginning to end. Under Emperor Meiji’s rule, Imperial Japan began a period of rapid industrialization and militarization, leading to its emergence as a world power and the establishment of a colonial empire. Economic and political turmoil in the early 1920s led Japan down the path of militarism, culminating in her conquest of large parts of the Asian and Pacific region. The beginning of this path can be traced back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when Japan’s proposal for racial equality was supported and approved by the other members, but overruled by the American President, Woodrow Wilson. Was this rebuttal by the West, and in particular the United States, the moment that changed the course of history? During the empire's existence, Japan was involved in some sixteen conflicts, resulting in the occupation of numerous countries and islands throughout Asia and the Pacific regions. Thousands were under the emperor's control, not all of whom were treated as they should have been. The book culminates with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally brought about Japan’s surrender and the end of the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Download or read book The Japanese Navy in World War II written by David C. Evans and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986 and lauded by historians and World War II buffs eager for the Japanese viewpoint, this collection of essays makes significant contributions to the field of World War II literature. In it, top-ranking Japanese officers offer their personal perspectives of the Pacific War. This second edition adds five articles to the original twelve to present a full picture of the Japanese navy’s role in the war. Most of these moving accounts were written in the 1950s and retain the immediacy felt by the writers when they participated in the events. They provide valuable information on the strategy, tactics, and operations of the Japanese fleet, as well as insights into the personalities and motives of its leaders. Here, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome comes to grips with allegations that the assault on Pearl Harbor represented strategic folly, political blundering, and tactical stupidity. Captain Mitsuo Fuchida describes how his bombing group unleashed “devils of doom” on Battleship Row, and Mitsuru Yoshida gives an eye-witness account of the sinking of the famous battleship Yamato. The new contributions to the volume discuss operations in the Indian Ocean, the battle of the Philippine Sea, the protection of merchant shipping, submarine warfare, and Japan’s overall naval strategy.

Download or read book Japan s Imperial Army written by Edward J. Drea and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular impressions of the imperial Japanese army still promote images of suicidal banzai charges and fanatical leaders blindly devoted to their emperor. Edward Drea looks well past those stereotypes to unfold the more complex story of how that army came to power and extended its influence at home and abroad to become one of the world's dominant fighting forces. This first comprehensive English-language history of the Japanese army traces its origins, evolution, and impact as an engine of the country's regional and global ambitions and as a catalyst for the militarization of the Japanese homeland from mid-nineteenth-century incursions through the end of World War II. Demonstrating his mastery of Japanese-language sources, Drea explains how the Japanese style of warfare, burnished by samurai legends, shaped the army, narrowed its options, influenced its decisions, and made it the institution that conquered most of Asia. He also tells how the army's intellectual foundations shifted as it reinvented itself to fulfill the changing imperatives of Japanese society-and how the army in turn decisively shaped the nation's political, social, cultural, and strategic course. Drea recounts how Japan devoted an inordinate amount of its treasury toward modernizing, professionalizing, and training its army-which grew larger, more powerful, and politically more influential with each passing decade. Along the way, it produced an efficient military schooling system, a well-organized active duty and reserve force, a professional officer corps that thought in terms of regional threat, and well-trained soldiers armed with appropriate weapons. Encompassing doctrine, strategy, weaponry, and civil-military relations, Drea's expert study also captures the dominant personalities who shaped the imperial army, from Yamagata Aritomo, an incisive geopolitical strategist, to Anami Korechika, who exhorted the troops to fight to the death during the final days of World War II. Summing up, Drea also suggests that an army that places itself above its nation's interests is doomed to failure.

Download or read book China s Muslims and Japan s Empire written by Kelly A. Hammond and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.

Download or read book Imperial Japan s World War Two written by Werner Gruhl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also necessary to assess the United States' and her allies' policies toward Japan, and their reactions to its actions, extending from Manchuria in 1931 to Hiroshima in 1945. Gruhl takes the view that World War II started in 1931 when Japan, crowded and poor in raw materials but with a sense of military invincibility, saw empire as her salvation and invaded China. Japan's imperial regime had volatile ambitions but limited resources, thus encouraging them to unleash a particularly brutal offensive against the peoples of Asia and surrounding ocean islands. Their 1931 to 1945 invasions and policies further added to Asia's pre-war woes, particularly in China, by badly disrupting marginal economies, leading to famines and epidemics. Altogether, the victims of Japan's World War Two aggression took many forms and were massive in number. Gruhl offers a survey and synthesis of the historical literature and documentation, statistical data, as well as personal interviews and first-hand accounts to provide a comprehensive overview analysis. The sequence of diplomatic and military events leading to Pearl Harbor, as well as those leading to the U.S. decision to drop the atom bomb, are explored here as well as Japan's war crimes and postwar revisionist/apologist views regarding them. This book will be of intense interest to Asian specialists, and those concerned with human rights issues in a historical context.

Download or read book Curse on This Country written by Danny Orbach and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as "cattle to the slaughter." But, in fact, the Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary.In Curse on This Country, Danny Orbach explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of Japanese government control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s—a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. Orbach argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history.Curse on This Country follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the "accidental" invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador’s plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military-political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister "changed colors." Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war.

Download or read book Uniforms and Equipment of the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II written by Mike Hewitt and published by Schiffer Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the major powers of World War II, the uniforms and equipment of the Japanese army have received the least coverage. This new, detailed volume presents the subject with a superb collection of actual vintage items, and rarely seen World War II era photographs. Among the subjects covered are: the Imperial Japanese army uniform series; undergarments; footwear; headwear; personal field equipment; extreme climate uniforms; work and specialty uniforms; soldier's personal items; and firearms. A short chapter examines reproductions.

Download or read book The Japanese Empire written by S. C. M. Paine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, analytical survey of the rise and fall of Imperial Japan in the context of its grand strategy to transform itself into a great power.

Download or read book The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II written by Akihiko Yoshida and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published in 1995, this book was hailed as an absolutely indispensable contribution to the history of the Pacific War. Drawing heavily from Japanese sources and American wartime intercepts of secret Japanese radio messages, a noted American naval historian and a Japanese mariner painstakingly recorded and evaluated a diverse array of material about Japan's submarines in World War II. The study begins with the development of the first Japanese 103-ton Holland-type submergible craft in 1905 and continues through the 1945 surrender of the largest submarine in the world at the time, the 5300-ton I-400 class that carried three airplanes. Submarine weapons, equipment, personnel, and shore support systems are discussed first in the context of Japanese naval preparations for war and later during the war. Both successes and missed opportunities are analyzed in operations ranging from the California coast through the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the coast of German-occupied France. Appendixes include lists of Japanese submarine losses and the biographies of key Japanese submarine officers. Rare illustrations and specifically commissioned operational maps enhance the text.

Download or read book Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation written by Edgar A. Porter and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an unforgettably honest account of the effects of World War II and the ensuing American occupation in Japan's Oita prefecture, from the perspective of the Japanese citizens who experienced it. Through harrowing firsthand accounts from more than forty Japanese men and women who lived in the region, we get a strikingly detailed picture of the dreadful experiences of wartime life in Japan. The interviewees are wide-ranging and include students, housewives, nurses, teachers, journalists, soldiers, sailors, Kamikaze pilots, and munitions factory workers. And their collective stories range from early, spirited support for the war on to more reflective later views in the wake of the devastating losses of friends and family members to air raids, and finally into periods of hunger and fear of the American occupiers. Detailed archival materials buttress the personal accounts, and the result is an unprecedented picture of the war as felt in a single region of Japan.

Download or read book Certain Victory written by David C. Earhart and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2008 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employs hundreds of images and written records from Japanese periodicals during World War II to trace the nation's transformation from a colorful, cosmopolitan empire in 1937 to a bleak total war society facing imminent destruction in 1945. This volume offers a representation of the official Japanese narrative of the war in contemporary terms.

Download or read book Economies under Occupation written by Marcel Boldorf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nazi Germany and Japan occupied huge areas at least for some period during World War II, and those territories became integral parts of their war economies. The book focuses on the policies of World War II aggressors in occupied countries. The unbalanced economic and financial relations were defined by administrative control, the implementation of institutions and a variety of military exploitation strategies. Plundering, looting and requisitions were frequent aggressive acts, but beyond these interventions by force, specific institutions were created to gain control over the occupied economies as a whole. An appropriate institutional setting was also crucial to give incentives to the companies in the occupied countries to produce munitions for the aggressors. The book explains the main fields of war exploitation (organisation and control, war financing and workforce recruitment). It substantiates these aspects in case studies of occupied countries and gives examples of the business policy of multinational companies under war conditions. The book also provides an account of differences and similarities of the two occupation systems. Economies under Occupation will interest researchers specialising in the history of economic thought as well as in economic theory and philosophy. It will also engage readers concerned with regional European and Japanese studies and imperial histories.

Download or read book Bodies of Memory written by Yoshikuni Igarashi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

Download or read book The Imperial Japanese Army written by Bill Yenne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-20 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German offensives which crushed Poland in 1939 and swallowed most of Western Europe in less than two months in 1940 have been well documented and heavily studied, however, the overall picture of the remarkable Japanese offensive land campaign in 1941–42 has received less attention. In this fascinating new book, Bill Yenne documents the years when the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) was conducting its equally unstoppable ground campaign in the Far East, and unlike other books on this subject, he studies the campaign from the Japanese point of view. He reveals how the IJA were able to conquer huge swathes of Southeast Asia in a little over eight weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Using first-hand accounts from Japanese sources, Yenne reveals the tactics and mindset of the IJA during their offensive, detailing the capturing of Manila, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies. Exploring the infrastructure and technical challenges of waging war across such a huge area, Yenne delves into the hardships that faced individual Japanese soldiers in theatre and explains how the Japanese were able to remain undefeated and establish the aura of invincibility that marked their campaign between 1941–42.