I have found a copy from 1951 on half.com for $12.50 and I
> have ordered it straight away.
It's written as fiction but reads as if it is totally authentic; however, as I
said, I couldn't find out anything about the author so I have no idea
who he was, where he came from, how long he was in the army.
I'm assuming no one else out there knows, as there have been no other
posts.
I guess you know 'Japan at War' by Haruko and Theodore Cook. I just
reread the introduction and was struck again by the description of the
meeting of the veterans of Changi in Tokyo. There seems to be such a
silence on what the Japanese actually did, saw and experienced first
hand in SE Asia - there are many Australian histories and memoirs of
Burma, Thailand, New Guinea etc, which make agonising reading. It
always seems to me one of the great tragedies of a tragic war ("the war
without mercy"): the Japanese could have liberated Asia from
colonialism (well, they did effectively), but for most nations the
liberator was worse than the coloniser, and the lingering results still
colour foreign policy in the region.
(Just celebrated ANZAC day here in Australia, so there's been a lot of
media coverage of war)
Gillian