Resumen de Samuel H. Yamashita..Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940‐1945, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2015, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780700624621: Collaboration and Resistance in a Time of Total War .
At just 189 pages of text, one might think that Samuel Yamashita’s new monograph on a subject so large –the daily life of citizens in wartime Japan– would be too ambitious, but Yamashita has succeeded in packing in quite a lot of detail in a readable format. Shifting between individual diaries and the larger narrative of WWII, Yamashita admirably makes the home front experience understandable to a contemporary audience. Yamashita cautions us not to believe that we learn about past experience through diaries, but a narrative of the past;
nevertheless, the records left behind start a dialog with us in the present, which can push our discourse on war, society, and subjectivity into new grounds. As Yamashita points out in his fine introduction, the diaries of supposed «apes, vermin, and lunatics» were studiously avoided by Americans for decades, which is why their impact on our understanding of war experience should not be underestimated.
