Haunting voices from a dark, disgraceful past, which afford a stunning and revelatory panorama of Japan's WW II experience. Counting its aggressions in Manchuria and China, Japan (whose death toll exceeded three million) was in constant battle from 1931 through V-J Day. Cook and her husband (History/William Paterson College) spent nearly four years gathering reminiscences from dozens of ostensibly ordinary people who survived the lengthy conflict variously called the Pacific, Greater East Asia, or 15-Year War. Adding just enough background and big-picture perspectives to give coherence to first-person narratives, the authors largely allow their sources to speak for themselves. Among those willing to tell their typically grim stories are combat veterans of campaigns from Nanking to Okinawa; builders of the infamous Burma railway;, unrepentant officers; technicians who participated in barbarous medical experiments on POWs; journalists whose dispatches extolling "victories of the spirit" owed more to the military regime's police powers than to reality; cabaret dancers; diplomats; and home-front victims of America's incendiary as well as atom-bomb assaults. Also represented are troops who served with brutal occupation forces; the widow of a kamikaze pilot; conscripts trained as human torpedoes; Koreans dragooned into rear-area labor battalions; and those convicted of war crimes. About the only significant groups not included in the wide-ranging canvas are the industrialists who supplied an overmatched imperial war machine and members of resistance groups. Like its Axis partner, Japan tolerated no dissent and was able to command consensus support from an unquestioningly obedient populace that, notwithstanding the disclosures at hand, still appears capable of collective denial when it comes to assuming even regional responsibility for the horrors of a global conflagration. Oral history of a compellingly high order.

【美】田榖治子（Taya Haruko Cook）

福特漢姆大學瑪麗濛特學院的曆史係教授，美國馬裏蘭大學曆史博士，從事曆史研究三十餘年，研究領域為日本文學、戰爭經曆與口述史、日本女性史等。本書為其與丈夫的代錶作，在寫作過程中，作者采訪瞭不下數百人，曆經諸多波摺纔打開受訪者內心塵封已久的戰爭記憶。通過本書，作者希望日本能夠早日公開麵對和反思“二戰”，開誠布公地討論“二戰”相關話題，纔能夠阻止戰爭的死灰復燃。

【美】西奧多•F.庫剋（Theodore F. Cook）

美國普林斯頓大學日本曆史學博士，威廉·帕特森大學日本曆史係教授，曾任美國海軍部長顧問，以及美國海軍戰爭學院、澳大利亞國防軍學院客座教授。古根海姆奬學金及其他多項奬項的獲得者、富布萊特高級研究員。