Edgar Porter and Ran Ying Porter have performed an admirable service by authoring Japanese Reflections on World War II and the American Occupation. This book represents a timely contribution to the historical record. As the authors themselves recognize, memories of events in the 1930s and 1940s “will soon fade away as age takes its toll”. The forty-three interviews conducted by the Porters and their team of collaborators represent a crucial intervention. This fading away is not just due to the age of those interviewed. It is also due to what the Porters see as the growing threat of the “erasure of history” as more and more Japanese ignore this era altogether. As the authors point out, this “erasure of history” is sometimes quite literal. Oita City's recently published official local historical timeline shows a lacuna between 1934 and 1945. As the authors prove, however, Oita Prefecture, located on the eastern coast of Kyushu, played a particularly important role during this eventful decade. The significance of Oita Prefecture during this era allows this book, which is at its core a local study, to be both deep and broad at the same time.

The initial spark for the book came from Ran Ying's experiences as a volunteer for the Beppu Foreign Tourist Information Office. Fellow volunteers shared with her their memories of the war and occupation. Ran Ying recounted these stories to her husband Edgar Porter, a professor at the College of Asia Pacific Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and the project took shape. The authors employed an oral history methodology as outlined by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, which emphasizes coming to a “chosen topic without a hypothesis or preconceived notions”. In their desire to “let people tell their own stories, with little overlay of hidden agenda”, the authors mostly succeed. While the conclusion features a call for Japan to confront its past bravely, the authors steer clear of polemics. This lack of polemics is perhaps both a strength and a weakness. Opportunities to tie their findings into broader historiographical debates are often squandered. The authors range outside of their local Oita archival material and oral interviews to provide broader context and string together the narrative. The bibliography, however, suggests a rather haphazard approach and a lack of depth in terms of secondary sources. In a book that so often speaks of the cultural assumptions and misunderstandings that ratcheted up the hatred between Japanese and non-Japanese people, the omission of the work of John Dower is an unfortunate oversight.

The authors describe Oita as being “awash in Japanese military activities”. This little rural corner of Japan featured the primary preparation site for the attack on Pearl Harbor (Saiki Naval Base), the staging ground for the war's last kamikaze attack, and eventually a home for U.S. Occupation forces at Camp Chickamauga. Remarkably, three of the six members of the Supreme Leadership Council at the end of the war hailed from Oita Prefecture along with the two men (General Yoshijiro Umezu and Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu) who signed the instrument of surrender on board the USS Missouri.

These remarkable features of Oita are placed alongside accounts of the ordinary lives of its residents. The book reveals how the residents of Oita became increasingly engulfed by war. During Japan's war in China, military indoctrination prepared children to die for the Emperor while government censorship mixed with a sort of unquestioning confidence in victory made the war seem quite distant. One finds glimpses of what could have been a very different history had the Japanese Empire survived. Shunsaku Nanri recalled moving back to Beppu in 1944 from Shanghai, where thousands of Japanese citizens had moved in the wake of Japanese occupation. Japan experienced two separate invasions at the end of the Second World War: the return en masse of Japanese soldiers and civilians and the American Occupation. After 1941, the daily lives of residents in Oita changed dramatically as the war expanded into the Pacific. American bombers eventually made regular life impossible, and the authors focus on the desperate living conditions on the ground. During the Occupation, Oita became the home of Camp Chickamauga. The authors show how the dire need for American support often tempered fear of American soldiers. A sense of trust and understanding eventually grew with the assistance of things like bubble gum and baseball. Far less pleasant is the examination of the “comfort stations”, or government-supported brothels established by the Japanese to serve American soldiers. Over 100 legal brothels employing between 800 and 1,000 prostitutes eventually operated in Beppu. These girls volunteered, but conditions were so dire that few felt they had many other options. American patronage was so rampant that 70% of the soldiers in one division had at least one STD at one point. The Japanese felt compelled to establish these “comfort stations” out of fear that American soldiers would rape Japanese women without such an outlet. Depressing on its merits, readers will still likely feel the need for greater context here. The incorporation of a few comparisons to the Allied occupation of Germany, where the racial and cultural fault lines were far different, would have given many of the authors' observations more weight.

The book contains a few errata, some more important than others. These include the listing of the battleship Yamato as a “super aircraft carrier”, a description of a Grumman “fighter jet” strafing the Japanese countryside, and the title of Chapter 15 entitled “Hungary, Confused, and Afraid”. Still, this is a deeply moving read with too many captivating accounts to relay here. The book had an emotional impact on the authors themselves. Both prove willing to share their connections to their work. The authors should be congratulated for recognizing a valuable story and taking the time to record it for posterity. This book would make an excellent source for an upper-division course on Modern Japan or a specialist looking for material on civilian life during this era.