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. It is also, he argues, increasingly precarious. 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.

“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.

It should appeal to many readers-historians (both modern American and Japanese history specialists), constitutional scholars, students, peace and anti-nuclear activists, intellectuals as well as general readers. This book also explores how Japanese people could potentially create a truly powerful cultural memory of war, utilizing various forms of artwork including Japan’s traditional performing art, Noh. official war memories were crafted to justify their respective wartime performances, exposing the flaws and failing of present-day democracy in Japan and the U.S. Further, no one has analyzed the fundamental contradiction in Japan’s peace constitution between the concealment of Hirohito’s war crimes and the responsibility of the U.S. justification of the crime of indiscriminate bombings and its relationship to Japan’s political exploitation of the atomic bombing to cover up Hirohito’s war responsibility. Yet, no one has written about the fire and atomic bombings in the context of the U.S. Numerous books on the topic of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been published hitherto.

Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka