Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire by William Aaron Moore (review)

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 has long been terra incognita for historians in Europe and the United States. Despite its scale and importance, this conflict usually receives only passing mention in largely Eurocentric general histories of World War II, while even the more balanced treatments of World War II depict the war in China as a prelude to, and then sideshow of, the larger war after it expanded into Southeast Asia and the Pacific in 1941. Similarly, the wartime experiences of individual soldiers in the conflict in Asia and the Pacific, especially Japanese and Chinese, have received little scholarly attention. This lacuna is especially baffling given the exceptional level of brutality that characterized the conflict: not only did both sides perpetrate widespread atrocities during the war in the Pacific, but during eight years of conquest and occupation, the level of destruction of human life and property that the Imperial Japanese Army inflicted on China was only exceeded by the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Although this begs examination of the role of soldiers as individuals participating in acts of mass violence, historians of the war in Asia and the Pacific have been relatively silent on the matter. Therefore, while the understanding of this question relating to the war on the Eastern Front has been enriched by the Goldhagen versus Browning debate, for example, the trite and superficial explanations for Imperial Japanese Army atrocities in China (indoctrination into the so-called warrior code of bushidō, brutalization of soldiers by superiors during training and on the battlefield, regimentation of Japanese society, etc.) persist when it comes to Asia and the Pacific. In this context, then, Aaron William Moore’s Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire comes as a welcome corrective. Not does Moore contribute to the body of recent works on the Sino-Japanese War by Rana Mitter, Edward Drea and Mark Peattie, and Diana Lary, but he also sheds muchneeded light on the ways in which individual soldiers processed their traumatic battlefield experiences by examining over two hundred diaries and other personal accounts of Japanese, Chinese, and American combatants.

In the first half of the book, Moore begins by tracing the evolution of military diary writing in Japan and China from its origins as official war diaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to personal diary writing during the brutal Central China campaign of 1937–1938, which culminated in the infamous Rape of Nanjing. As Moore explains, focusing on diary writing, which he refers to as an act of “self-discipline,” “illuminate[s] how the struggle between the individual and large organizations, such as the state, occurred” (12). This struggle, however, did not produce a winner and loser. Rather, individual soldiers constructed an identity for themselves based on a mixture public discourse (the mass media) filtered through their personal experiences and perceptions on the battlefield. While this constructed identity may have helped Chinese and Japanese soldiers make sense of what they were experiencing on the battlefield, it also allowed them to distance themselves from increasingly traumatic wartime conditions. For some Chinese diary writers, for example, the trauma of fighting a losing war on behalf of a corrupt and unpopular government was sublimated to a sense of self-sacrifice for a larger historical cause. Japanese diary writers treated increasing numbers of atrocities committed against Chinese soldiers and civilians in various ways. Some recorded massacres using language as neutral as possible, others seemed to revel in the carnage, while others still “might sympathetically describe their enemies, even as they killed them” (124).

The second half of the book, which expands in scope to include the war in the Pacific and the postwar period, is less compelling due largely to Moore’s decision to add American diarists to his study. This is not to say that Moore’s conclusion, namely that the American diarists experienced the same sort of self-shaping of identity as their Chinese...