Books in Brief

Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military, by Robert B. Edgerton (Norton, 384 pp., $29.95)

THIS book is a useful addition to the growing literature on a neglected aspect of twentieth-century history. The Imperial Japanese Army eventually came so to dominate Japan’s society and state that the army’s values and goals became the country’s values and goals. This much is familiar; less well known is how the Japanese Army changed in the process. The strength of Edgerton’s book lies in his well-illustrated narrative chronicling this change. Virtually forgotten today, in the wake of such horrors as the Bataan Death March, is the fact that the Japanese were once lauded (e.g., during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I) for their respect for the “rules of war”-particularly their humane treatment of prisoners. Edgerton documents how the insidious combination of unchecked power and racist ideology-and the Japanese of the Thirties and Forties were animated by a racism that rivaled the Aryan Superman fantasies of Nazi Germany-dissolved internal constraints and transformed the Japanese Army into a vehicle for crimes against humanity on a scale that pales only in comparison with the Holocaust.

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Michael King

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Milt Beauchesne

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Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military, by Robert B. Edgerton (Norton, 384 pp., $29.95)

THIS book is a useful addition to the growing literature on a neglected aspect of twentieth-century history. The Imperial Japanese Army eventually came so to dominate Japan’s society and state that the army’s values and goals became the country’s values and goals. This much is familiar; less well known is how the Japanese Army changed in the process. The strength of Edgerton’s book lies in his well-illustrated narrative chronicling this change. Virtually forgotten today, in the wake of such horrors as the Bataan Death March, is the fact that the Japanese were once lauded (e.g., during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I) for their respect for the “rules of war”-particularly their humane treatment of prisoners. Edgerton documents how the insidious combination of unchecked power and racist ideology-and the Japanese of the Thirties and Forties were animated by a racism that rivaled the Aryan Superman fantasies of Nazi Germany-dissolved internal constraints and transformed the Japanese Army into a vehicle for crimes against humanity on a scale that pales only in comparison with the Holocaust.