Customer Reviews

Eyewitness to History: The First Americans in Postwar Asia

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These are rare first-person accounts from Japan and Asia immediately after World War II - eyewitness reports by the first young Americans to set foot in that ruined region at a critical juncture in time when people were struggling to make sense of the past and piece together a new life.

The authors were U.S. servicemen, trained (and several raised) in the language and culture of their assignments. Their letters to one another are perceptive, provacative, sympathetic to the losing side, and frank - sometimes brutally frank. They record the dramatic events of the times: the fate of the Nazis and the Japanese military in Asia, the return of POW's to their defeated country, and the forging of a new role for the Japanese Emperor. And they reveal how the young, intelligent writers themselves became involved.

Reissued half a century after the war, this revised edition includes an updated forward by Otis Cary and a new afterword by Donald Keene - both now recognized authorities in the field of Japanese studies - reflecting on the intervening years and reassessing some of the assumptions made in the original edition.

Few other books on postwar Asia are as moving or interesting as this work, which speaks to us in the voices of those who were actually there and lived through those turbulent years.

--- form book's dustjacket

I would like to add a confirmation here, as this is a very valuable book. In it are many scenes and experiences with relevance to the present, as well as in the longer term.

What is most impressive as I re-read it these days is the unusual clarity and point of view from each of these young men writing, officers inserted into complex duties in Japan, after the Pacific war.

Yes, there was something different about those times, and it shows here, as a form of moral clarity; also purpose. This capacity for personal insight reaches into the confused situations of culture and aftermath of a war, and each time pulls out both the valuable, and that which must for their present remain in question.

It is a very fine approach, and engages considerable personal warmth.

A further intrigue is in the writing included of Nisei, second generation Japanese-Americans, who as the same kinds of language and intelligence officers were on the same team.

Both their own commentary, and the special conversations they relate as coming due to their Asian appearance, are filled with substance which should be very enlightening in the conversations rampant today, about globality and individual culture.

Truly valuable voices from a recent past, highly recommended.