In This Review

The Pacific War: World War II and the Japanese, 1931-1945
The Pacific War: World War II and the Japanese, 1931-1945
By Saburo Ienaga
Pantheon, 1978, 320 pp
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A scathing indictment of Japanese militarism, written by a well-known Japanese intellectual, designed to inform a younger, prosperity-minded generation about its past. Ienaga is as critical of Japan's allegedly "barbarous" conduct of the war - atrocities on the battlefield and repression at home - as he is of the nationalistic and authoritarian tendencies that led to Pearl Harbor.

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