Tales by Japanese Soldiers

"Something that, as a historian, you need to understand and check yourself on is your bias when you’re writing. My granddad and many veterans say that the Japanese were cruel soldiers and did things that were against the unwritten rules of warfare. The reason why I like this book is because it forces you out of the Allied perspective. It’s primary testimony from the mouths of Japanese soldiers themselves, talking about their experience in the war. They weren’t the jungle robot super-soldiers that they were often made out to be, with no heart and no empathy. They also had families. They also felt lost. They also wept when their comrades died. This book humanizes them, and it makes you remember that there was a reason behind the atrocities that the Japanese carried out. It might not be a reason that we would comprehend now or even then, because it’s not our culture. But they believed in it for reasons linked to their own history. For me, as a historian, the book is also quite interesting in how it’s been written, because—if I remember rightly—all the testimony is from oral interviews with soldiers, including from later years as well. So it’s the view of men who’ve had time to reflect. So that was interesting, also because Japan, still today, is not great at talking about its role in the Second World War. It’s quite rare to get books about it using first-person testimony from the soldiers who were there. In Jungle Commandos , I did manage to weave quite a lot of Japanese testimony in. I got my hands on a copy of the 154 Regiment’s official history. I found it online in a bookshop in Japan, and had to use Google Translate to buy it and get it sent over. It is largely a lot of personal accounts of the men who fought against my granddad. I absolutely loved diving into that, and I wish my granddad had been alive so I could have shown him and spoken about him with those accounts. I’d have loved to have known his view on some of the things that they were saying. Yes, she tells him to get up. Again, it humanises the Japanese soldiers. They missed their mums too. It was Tales by Japanese Soldiers that inspired me to bring the Japanese perspective into my book. I hadn’t intended to, but after reading it, I realized it was the natural thing to do."