Sacred War: Inside the Japanese Experience, 19371945

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The first effort to reconstruct the history of the Pacific War exclusively from internal Japanese sources, from the renowned historians

sets a new standard for understanding the events that forever transformed America, Japan, and the world.

Celebrated historians Theodore F. and Haruko Taya Cook, whose oral history of the Pacific war was called one of the essential books about World War II (Philadelphia Inquirer), now offer a shattering new history of Japans long war in the Pacific, told exclusively from the perspective of the Japanese. Sacred War draws on a rich trove of documents, much of it first-person and almost all of it previously inaccessible to Western scholars. Based on painstaking research, here is World War II through the eyes of the Japanese themselves: ordinary people on the home front, soldiers on the front lines, and the military and political leadership who drove Japan to near-annihilation by 1945.

Sacred War reveals both the internal logic of an authoritarian society bent on victory at all costsincluding, in the final twelve months of the war, over one million civilian deathsas well as heart-rending accounts of the unfolding conflict, from the disease-ridden beaches on Guadalcanal to the burnt-out streets of Hiroshima, following the nuclear attacks by the United States that brought the war to its devastating end.

Author Bio

Theodore F. Cook is a professor emeritus of history and former director of the Asian studies program at William Paterson University. The co-author with Haruko Taya Cook of Japan at War and Sacred War (The New Press), he lives in New York City.
The late Haruko Taya Cook was a professor emerita in history at Marymount College of Fordham University and the co-author (with Theodore F. Cook) of Japan at War and Sacred War (The New Press).