Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq
Following on my several readings of the use and misuse of history regarding the American Civil war (The Half Has …
Tag Archives: Japan
One Man’s Justice – Akira Yoshimura
The stories we tell about what we know and what we suppose, what we fear and what we love, …
Soldiers Alive – A Novel of the Japanese in China, 1937
For century upon century, from the time of the stories of Gilgamesh (18th BCE), stories of war have been told …
War Resistance in Japan, WWII
Avoidance of conscription in Japan during WWII was the most heinous of crimes: worse than rape, or murder. Those …
An Artist of the Floating World — Kazuo Ishiguro and War Guilt
“The Floating World” (ukiyo) as a Japanese expression has traditionally referred to evening pleasure activities, for men, during a …
The Damned Days of August: 6th and 9th
Today is August 6, 73 years after the first use of a nuclear explosion in a war in human …
The Sea and Poison — Shūsaku Endō, confronting War Crimes
Pride in our ancestors, and countrymen is common in stories we tell each other, of their hard work, sacrifice …
Barefoot Gen, a Japanese Graphic Novel in Ten Volumes: Hiroshima
THE RECENT SURGE OF INTEREST in graphic novels, with roots in the Underground Comix of the 1960s has not …
Black Rain, Two Movies — Hiroshima After the Bomb
The enormous, instantaneous destructive power of atomic weapons is the first, and sometimes the only, image that comes to mind …
The Crazy Iris — Japanese Writers and the Atom Bomb
Not much is more startling to read than a paragraph beginning “At about noon on the day Hiroshima was bombed …
American Empire: Going Across the Waters
Those of us who have spent anytime at all in Hawaii, usually on vacation, enjoying the fine weather, the …
Zone of Emptiness – A Japanese Novel of WWII
Zone of Emptiness by the Japanese novelist Hiroshi Noma, when it was published in 1952 after years of military censorship, …