Product Description

From the award-winning Producer of "The Nazis a Warning from History", Laurence Rees turns his gaze to the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in World War II. In his incisive but accessible study, Laurence confronts one of the most dramatic and important historical questions of the twentieth century why did Japanese soldiers behave as they did? The Japanese treatment of allied prisoners in the Second World War is infamous. Yet, during the First World War, they fought on the Allied side and treated captured German soldiers with civility. "Horror in the East" examines how this drastic change could have come about. Japan first turned to the West in the early 20th century, appearing to adopt Western values. But, with a rapidly increasing population and inadequate resources, those values proved difficult to support. One solution, favoured by many in the Japanese army and navy, was to build an empire. They encouraged the concept of the Emperoro as an all-powerful, 'living god' and believed they were only ultimately answerable to him. Elected Japanese politicians found it almost impossible to control them. On the 60th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 2001, this book probes the Japanese belief in their own racial superiority and the mentality that led them to contemplate suicide when they failed. Newly discovered archive together with specially shot film and interviews with Japanese eye witnesses including perpetrators makes this into a compelling portrait of war. From the teams interviews with Japanese eye witnesses, shocking stories of cannabalism, vivisection, rape, prostitution, starvation and slaughter are uncovered. Laurence goes back to the Japanese wars against the Chinese to discover why the Japanese took on the militarily superior Americans and why they thought they would win. Chapter breakdown: The China Solution; Dealing with the West; Prisoners of the Japanese; Lurching Towards Defeat; EndGame; and The firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100456 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
You wouldn't necessarily want to live inside the head of Laurence Rees, author of Horror in the East, but you could well argue that its should be compulsory for everyone to spend at least a few hours in his company. Beginning with the brutality of the conflict between Japan and China in the 1930s and ending with the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Horror in the East is a compelling account of the atrocities of war and, as with his sister volume The Nazis: A Warning from History, Rees has searched long and hard to find vivid and, at times mind-numbing, eyewitness accounts of man's inhumanity to man--not least from the recruits who were forced to kill restrained Chinese prisoners in bayonet practice.

For many popular historians, incidents such as the Rape of Nanking are simply labelled evil, thereby relieving them of the responsibility of thinking about what happened and trying to understand what motivates people to behave in such a way. Rees is too intelligent and fair-minded an historian for this; instead he explores how the Japanese army changed from a culture where prisoners of war were treated with civility and respect during the First World War to one where cruelty and barbarism ruled. Rees lays the blame squarely on the conformity demanded by the Emperor Hirohito and stresses that the Japanese army were often as brutal to their own as they were to their enemies. He also makes the point that revisionists tend to airbrush history to suit their own ends. Far more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than died in either of the nuclear attacks, but the stain of Tokyo has long since been submerged under the more emotive mushroom clouds.

At the time Rees wrote Horror in the East, these attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among the most powerful images of war in the world's history; already they have been superseded by the footage of the September 11, 2001 strikes on the World Trade Center in New York City. At times like these, when the need for objectivity and fair mindedness is at a premium, historians, such as Rees, are like gold dust. --John Crace

Customer Reviews

must read for everyone interested in the Pacific War
Rees succeeds brilliantly in analysing and explaining why Japanese soldiers behaved as they did from the very beginning when they occupied China and committed war crimes on a scale that rivals those of the Nazis or, more recently for example those committed in Rwanda. He gives the reader a detailed insight into Japanese mentality, the social structure (to some extent still unchanged) and tries to get behind who was really in command in Japan at that time: the Japanese Officers or Hirohito. If you read "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang (which I also recommend), by reading this book, you will know why it could happen. Highly recommended.

A must read for everyone interested in the Pacific War
This book has been long overdue and to my knowledge it is the first attempt at really explaining what drove Japanese soldiers to behaviour that, on occasions, made other war crimes look like the acts of "boy scouts". No account of WWII, the Pacific War, or of war crimes committed during WWII is complete without Rees' analysis of what drove soldiers and what made them tick during these times. He also draws some stunning paralles between the behaviour witnessed among German and Russian troops on the European Eastern Front and the Japanese in Asia. Read it!

Final part of a masterly trilogy
Without hype, and disgracefully neglected by the literary editors of the British press, Laurence Rees has been quietly producing a masterly study of the Second World War in a trilogy of books which accompany his three award-winning television series.

Horror in the East is a fitting culmination to the work begun in The Nazis - a Warning from History and War of the Century. With passion, but without losing the vital objectivity that is his trademark, both as a writer and as a producer, Rees not only tells us what the Japanese did in their wars in the East, but attempts to answer the question why. His conclusion is startling: that the crimes committed by the Japanese, the Nazis and the Russians, were a product of a "situational ethic" - that is, that young men were conditioned by their societies to behave in an inhumane way, and were able to cast aside moral restraint. In other words, they were no 'worse', intrinsically, than you and I.

I would very much like to see Rees develop this thesis and apply it to the allies: terror bombing in Germany and Japan for example - was this also only possible because of similar conditions prevailing in Britain and the US at that time?

As the world drifts into fresh horrors, books such as this one, and writers such as Rees, have never been more important.