The Japan Veterans Video Archive Project began a decade ago to record the personal histories of World War II veterans in their own words.
Often candid, and sprinkled with language of the war era that would be considered by many nowadays to be disparaging, the hard-hitting interviews provide a soldier's front-line view of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, the experience of being a prisoner of war in Siberia and many others.
Now, a book has been published in which 24 of the war veterans who participated in the video project agreed to sit down and tell their stories to the editors of “Senso Taiken Kyaraban” (Voices from battlefield experiences), a book that pulls no punches.
“We wanted to show what actually happened in the battlefields,” said Ayako Deguchi, one of the editors of “Senso Taiken Kyaraban.”
The compilers of the book felt the detailed first-person accounts of the horrors of war and its impact would prompt readers to learn more about the history of World War II.
“Once you started stabbing," said a former soldier of the Japanese Imperial Army, who, on the order of his superior, killed Chinese civilians with a bayonet during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), "it was as if pricking tofu bean curd; it went so easily.”
Deguchi, 43, said in 2007 she came up with the idea of publishing a book based on interviews with the Japan Veterans Video Archives Project after she attended a gathering where she met two women involved in the video archives project.
Forty-year-old Junko Nakata and 48-year-old Satoko Tadokoro were eager to come on board, and the three women did all the planning, interviewing, editing and story selection for the book.
They agreed to stick to details of personal histories and not press pacifist thoughts on readers or judge wartime incidents by present-day standards.
A former soldier who struggled with hunger and starvation talked about trying to survive on a remote island by single-mindedly growing meager crops of potatoes and pumpkins.
“Even if you went to the war, you still didn't really know what you were fighting for," he said.
One of the survivors was sent out on a kamikaze raid, but bad weather forced him to return to base unable to carry out his mission. He feels guilt that he survived while his comrades perished.
“No matter how hard a survivor of the special squad may think of those who lost their lives in the mission, he can never, ever, understand the feelings of those who died,” he said.
The Japan Veterans Video Archive Project began collecting testimonies of war veterans in 2004, and has interviewed about 2,500 people.
War veterans tell candid personal histories in new book - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun
