Entwined Atrocities New Insights into the U.S.–Japan Alliance

"Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka presents here his life work on the grand subjects of Japanese war responsibility, the US-Japan relationship, US and Japanese war crimes and the emperor system. Matching meticulous archival research with personal and political advocacy, he concludes by calling upon Japanese and American civil society to confront the present-day Japanese state and inter-state system as a fundamentally flawed, seven-decade long design of obfuscation, concealment, and manipulation. It is also, he argues, increasingly precarious. Tanaka's radical, wide-ranging thesis deserves to be read." -Gavan McCormack, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University "This fascinating book caps decades of careful thinking about why nominally democratic Japan seems so undemocratic and so trapped in self-destructive foreign policies today. The author zeros in on postwar Japanese and American government collaborations to explain this phenomenon, including joint evasion of responsibility for bombing civilians during World War II, when, ironically, they themselves were bitter enemies. This is a genuinely thought-provoking contribution with many arresting observations based on little-known research about such topics as the emperor's place in the postwar Japanese political system, the 1945 surrender decision, Japan's history of empire, and the politics of nuclear weapons in postwar Japan." -Laura Hein, the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History, Northwestern University, USA