Samuel Yamashita has been collecting and translating Japanese wartime diaries and letters for more than ten years. This collection of diaries gives readers a powerful, firsthand look at the effects of the Pacific War on eight ordinary Japanese. Immediate, vivid, and at times surprisingly frank, the diaries chronicle the last years of the war and its aftermath as experienced by a navy kamikaze pilot, an army straggler on Okinawa, an elderly Kyoto businessman, a Tokyo housewife, a young working woman in Tokyo, a teenager girl mobilised for war work, and two schoolchildren evacuated to the country's side. Samuel Yamashita's introduction provides a useful overview of the historiography on wartime Japan and offers valuable insights into the important, everyday issues that concerned the Japanese during a different and disastrously difficult time. With glossary, bibliography and index.