Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation by Edgar A. Porter and Ran Ying Porter (review)

This volume, produced by partners Edgar A. Porter, a China specialist, and Ran Ying Porter, a novelist, details the history of Japan's Oita prefecture and its inhabitants during the period of war and subsequent occupation spanning from roughly 1937 to 1952. Despite being a principally rural prefecture in southern Japan, Oita and its people played a number of important roles during this era. These ranged from being directly involved in the build-up to the attack on Pearl Harbour, through forming a key part of the preparations for the final defence of the homeland in the closing weeks of the war, to finally hosting a large number of American troops during the postwar occupation.

The content, based upon forty-three first-hand accounts, presents a range of original and informative perspectives, adding a human dimension to processes and events that are more often covered from a policy or strategic perspective. Some episodes that stand out in the text are the accounts of the lengths some young men took to avoid military service (ch. 5), the range of emotions and reactions experienced at the termination of the war (ch. 14), the interactions between the relatively well-provisioned farmers and impoverished townspeople in the immediate postwar period (ch. 15), and the description of the thought processes of individuals who shifted from Right-wing to Left-wing political beliefs in the aftermath of the war (ch. 16).

The work is highly readable and accessible, suggesting its suitability as a potential core text for an undergraduate class on the Japanese population's experience of war and occupation, alongside the works of Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Shōwa, An Inside History of Hirohito's Japan, London, 1984), Samuel Hideo Yamashita (Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945, Lawrence, 2015) and Haruko T. and Theodore F. Cook (Japan at War, An Oral History, New York, 1992).

However, the style in which the work is presented, while approachable for a general readership (toward whom the work seems to be aimed), is also regrettably one of its weaknesses when assessed as a piece of research. The tone and phrasing of the text occasionally becomes overly emotive, but of more serious concern are the occasional unsupported oversimplifications and claims present in the text which are at odds with some established positions within the scholarship. Notable here are the statements that the invasion of Japan was delayed in order to use atomic bomb (ch. 13), and that the actions of the kamikaze (or tokkōtai) echoed an alleged "traditional" Japanese warrior spirit (ch. 14).

The structure of the work itself also proves a double-edged sword. Rather than presenting the interviews as distinct accounts (as Morris-Suzuki does), they are broken up and woven into a synthesis of secondary works and excerpts from contemporary newspapers. While making the text more readable, this unfortunately also makes the interviewees' accounts harder to locate and cite. The fact that several chapters are also almost exclusively derived from secondary sources also limits the scholarly value of the book as a whole. Regrettably, the narrative presented is also sometimes coloured by questionable assertions present within some of the locally produced secondary works the authors cite. A further structural weakness concerns the numerous lengthy asides and contextual sections the book contains. These include a brief chapter on the decision to end the war (several senior figures involved had Oita links), a series of lengthy passages taken from published memoirs of United States servicemen fighting in Okinawa, and a personal account of a moving encounter between one of the authors and a photograph of a young kamikaze pilot. While providing background information to those unfamiliar with the subject, the necessity of inclusion of some of these asides could be questioned in a work principally aiming to highlight the history of Oita.

In conclusion, this work is successful in achieving its stated central aim of...