Hoyt demonstrates both his flair for dramatic battle accounts and his penetrating eye for personal and political motivation. He offers a thorough and engaging portrait of Admiral Yamamoto and, from that vantage point, provides a revealing new view of the events of World War II."Yamamoto" details his life from his youth in Nagaoka and his early military successes, to the dynamic leader's orchestration of the infamous sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, his subsequent naval victories, and his eventual assassination by American fighter planes in the Solomon Islands at the order of President Roosevelt himself.

    . . . I'll tell you the real story--I swear I will.--from Little One by Toge SankichiThree Japanese authors of note--Hara Tamiki, Ota Yoko, and Toge Sankichi--survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima only to shoulder an appalling burden: bearing witness to ultimate horror. Between 1945 and 1952, in prose and in poetry, they published the premier first-person accounts of the atomic holocaust. Forty-five years have passed since August 6, 1945, yet this volume contains the first complete English translation of Hara's Summer Flowers, the first English translation of Ota's City of Corpses, and a new translation of Toge's Poems of the Atomic Bomb. No reader will emerge unchanged from reading these works. Different from each other in their politics, their writing, and their styles of life and death, Hara, Ota, and Toge were alike in feeling compelled to set down in writing what they experienced. Within forty-eight hours of August 6, before fleeing the city for shelter in the hills west of Hiroshima, Hara jotted down this note: Miraculously unhurt; must be Heaven's will that I survive and report what happened. Ota recorded her own remarks to her half-sister as they walked down a street littered with corpses: I'm looking with two sets of eyesthe eyes of a human being and the eyes of a writer. And the memorable words of Toge quoted above come from a poem addressed to a child whose father was killed in the South Pacific and whose mother died on August 6th--who would tell of that day? The works of these three authors convey as much of the real story as can be put into words.

    Working before and during World War II, these writers sought to create an underground literature in opposition to the traditional flavour favoured by the militaristic government. Depicting unflattering realities rather than the exemplary ideals, the author focused on Japan's hustlers, bunglers and misfits. Yet underlying the tales, his sympathy for the characters he portrays is sensed.

    

    This peaceful meeting gave rise to the 1918 race riots, a series of mass demonstrations and armed clashes that spread rapidly throughout the country on a scale unprecedented in modern Japanese history. In this penetrating study, Michael Lewis questions standard historical interpretations of the riots. What political significance did the riots have in the communities where they occurred? How and why did protest change from region to region or when carried out by different groups? How did officials, community leaders, and businessmen cope with the unrest? What effects did the riots have on national and local political relations and economic ties among these various groups? Lewis argues that the 1918 protests defy a single typology--urban and rural protests had different causes, patterns, forms of mediation, and resolutions. In 1918 Meiji leaders had been struggling for fifty years to create a new citizenry, unified ideologically and consistently supportive of national goals. The disunity revealed by the riots does not suggest that Japan had become polarized between the people and the state; rather, in the wake of the riots, new forms of social policy and public political involvement became possible. In analyzing the changing traditions of Japanese popular protest in the transition from a rural to an industrial economy, Rioters and Citizens suggests that the diversity of Japanese protests necessitates a rethinking of the stereotypical images of prewar Japanese society as blandly uniform and rigidly controlled by government ideology. It further suggests that in Japan, as in Europe, the action of the unenfranchised crowd came to influence the course of political and social change. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.