Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945 (Modern War Studies)

Drawing upon diaries and letters written by servicemen and women, kamikaze pilots, evacuated children, and covering ages from teenagers through to adults, the author covers in great detail the story and effect on the Japanese Population as a whole as they all found themselves being mobilised for war work in every conceviable location from the big cities through to provincial towns and also outlying rural communities. Yamashita lets us hear for the first time the rich mix of voices speaking out during the course of the war. Here will be found stories of housewife's struggling to feed their family while supporting the war effort; the eager conscript from snow covered countrysides sent to endure some of the harshest, most abusive form of military training imaginable in order to learn how to fly; the Tokyo teenagers made to work in wartime factories; the children taken from cities to live in the countryside away from their families and with little food and no privacy; the Kyushu farmers pressured to grow ever more rice and wheat with fewer hands and less fertilizer; and the Kyoto octogenarian driven to thoughts of suicide by his inability to contribute to the war. How these ordinary Japanese coped with wartime hardships and dangers, and how their views changed over time as disillusionment, impatience, and sometimes despair set in, is the story that Yamashita’s book brings to the reader. 

A history of life during war, Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 is also a glimpse of a now long vanished world.