OLD AND NEW JAPAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 13

OLD AND NEW JAPAN

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE, by David H. James; Allen and Unwin, English price, 21/-. "HIS book contains a mass of material about Japan’s earliest warring clans and royal households, events leading up to the war, and the war itself; but its title is misleading. The accepted _historical record of, the clans and eras of the shogunate may be found in more simplified form in the Japanese Year Book; as presented here they become confusing. Mr. James gives us little or nothing about the vigorous political movements which were pursued with determination from the island of Shikoku, and there is little about social changes, which admittedly were slow. One’s faith in the author is shaken by incorrect details such as a list of the early feudal castles, since he seems unawafe that most of those included were destroyed in 1945. He says that Admiral Yamamoto remorsefully crash-dived his aircraft into the wreckage of a convoy destroyed in the Bismarck Sea, whereas the Japanese commander-in-chief was shot down by an American airman over Bougainville. Half-way through the book Mr. James begins to tell his own story, which he does extremely well, if a little bitterly. His version of the sad and sorry fall of Singapore will not please the Australians, but it helps to remove the doubt and indecision which existed throughout that campaign. Had Mr. James confined himself to this personal account of events, as he experienced them in action and as a P.O.W., he would have produced a much more satisfactory book, But his attitude is not sufficiently detached. He is obsessed with personal prejudices, as in his unfair and uninformed references to what he terms the "MacArthur shogunate." Quotations from ‘the Japanese newspaper Mainichi of October, 1937, which prophetically set out the present position, in China and Russia’s attitude and ambitions, supply one of the more interesting passagés from a book evidently designed to meet any public interest created during the sign- :

ing of a peace treaty.

O.A.

G.