cover image Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military

Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military

Robert B. Edgerton. W. W. Norton & Company, $39.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04085-2

Promising a concise overview of modern Japan's military development, the usually first-rate Edgerton (Like Lions They Fought) here offers little more than a pastiche compiled from Western secondary accounts. After a long discussion of the 1860 Anglo-French intervention in China, the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, he concludes that the Japanese were brave and skillful soldiers who treated captured enemies well, and who on the whole were less brutal than were Western forces. Neither observation is particularly original, and much of the discussion, here and elsewhere, takes anecdotes too much at face value. In the book's second half, Edgerton concentrates on Japanese atrocities during the China and Pacific wars. However, he does little more than demonstrate that some Japanese at all levels were opposed to and appalled by the behavior of others, and offers little of substance about the nature of Japan's armed forces, their internal dynamic, their motivation or anything else that might provide context. Edgerton's assertion that Eisenhower was opposed to the atomic bombing of Japan takes no account of Barton Bernstein's exposure of that myth in a 1987 journal article (Journal of Strategic Studies) that does not appear in the bibliography. Similar omissions and/or errors abound. The final chapter, ""From Chivalry to Brutality,"" does no more than repeat cliches about Japan as a rigidly controlled society that came too late to the imperial feast. (July)