japan war

Hardcover. Washington DC, Potomac Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 166 pages. The attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the most perplexing cases in living memory of a weaker power seeming to believe that it could vanquish a clearly superior force. On closer inspection, however, Record finds that Japan did not believe it could win; yet, the Japanese imperial command decided to attack the United States anyway. Conventional explanations that Japan's leaders were criminally stupid, wildly deluded, or just plumb crazy don't fully answer all our questions, Record finds. Instead, he argues, the Japanese were driven by an insatiable appetite for national glory and economic security via the conquest of East Asia. The scope of their ambitions and their fear of economic destruction overwhelmed their knowledge that the likelihood of winning was slim and propelled them into a war they were always going to lose. Clean copy.

Softcover. Philadelphia, Casemate Publishers, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 226 pages, b&w illustrations. With his parting words "I shall return", General Douglas MacArthur sealed the fate of the last American forces on Bataan. Yet one young Army Captain named Russell Volckmann refused to surrender. He disappeared into the jungles of north Luzon where he raised a Filipino army of over 22,000 men. For the next three years he led a guerrilla war against the Japanese, killing over 50,000 enemy soldiers. At the same time he established radio contact with MacArthur?s HQ in Australia and directed Allied forces to key enemy positions. When General Yamashita finally surrendered, he made his initial overtures not to MacArthur, but to Volckmann. This book establishes how Volckmann's leadership was critical to the outcome of the war in the Philippines. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Aperture Foundation, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. A large, beautifully designed photography publication with many full page photographs in black and white and color. Glossy wraps. Don McCullin on Aids in Africa / Japanese Photography in Houston / Baryshnikov on the Light Fantastic / Cold War Relics / John Coffer's Tintypes / Russian Pictorialism

Softcover. Mechanicsburg PA, Stackpole Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 194 pages, b&w illustrations. This is a fascinating account of Australia's M/Z commando unit and the part it played in the Southwest Pacific during World War II. M Unit personnel were secretly landed to set up coast-watching posts and radio stations to monitor Japanese shipping movements and bombing flights. Members of the Z Unit carried out raids in enemy-controlled areas and also attacked targets of opportunity. Many commandos were delivered on their missions by U.S. Navy submarines that sneaked into dangerously shallow waters to put the men ashore. Other operatives were inserted by PT boats, Catalina aircraft, parachute, and snake boats. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1st pbk, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Edward S. Miller contends in this work that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. While researching newly declassified records of the Treasury and Federal Reserve, Miller, a retired chief financial executive of a Fortune 500 resources corporation, uncovered just how much money mattered. Washington experts confidently predicted that the war in China would bankrupt Japan, not knowing that the Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. Once discovered, Japan scrambled to extract the money. But, Miller explains, in July 1941 President Roosevelt invoked a long-forgotten clause of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to freeze Japan's dollars and forbade it to sell its hoard of gold to the U.S. Treasury, the only open gold market after 1939. Roosevelt s temporary gambit to bring Japan to its senses, not its knees, was thwarted, however, by opportunistic bureaucrats. Dean Acheson, his handpicked administrator, slyly maneuvered to deny Japan the dollars needed to buy oil and other resources for war and for economic survival. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Janos Gat Gallery, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, stapled wraps, 30 pages, b&w illustrations. For an exhibition held Feb. 12 - March 23, 2002. The photographs in this catalog were taken from 1944-1945 by Barney Rosset, then a young American Army photographer. Rosset documented the Chinese Army in their pursuit of Japanese troops following the Battle of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi. The Japanese Army was pulling back from the Ichi-Go operation, the largest Japanese land campaign of the war, and Rosset joined Chinese troops at the deepest point of Japanese penetration (Kweiyang). After the war, Rosset became the proprietor of Grove Press, publishing authors often refused due to their controversial subject matter. Laid in are 2 identical postcards featuring the image on the cover of the catalog, Clean, bright copy, scarce.

Hardcover. Long Beach CA, Safari Press, reprint, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 294 pages, b&w illustrations. Originally published in 1904, it chronicles a hunting trip to several locations in Alaska, including sheep, bears, moose and more. Captain Radclyffe was an English gentleman-hunter who visited Alaska in 1903. He bagged Dall sheep on the Kenai Peninsula, back then a relatively new destination for sport hunting. He shot excellent brown bear and moose, one a 57-incher on Kussiloff Lake on the Alaska Peninsula. On his final bear hunt, a sow charged him and his native guide abandoned him. He was arrested for game law violations that prematurely ended his hunt for sheep, adding another interesting dimension to this well-written story. The charges against Radclyffe were later dismissed since he had an off-season permit to collect for the British Museum, but the authors partner was not so lucky. Radclyffe writes of how the judge enjoyed rubbing the dismissal into the face of the arresting marshal, and he paints a vivid picture of the interactions of the hunters, guides, and authorities. After all his troubles, he lost most of his trophies because of shipping problems related to the Russo-Japanese War. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st US, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, olive green boards, gilt lettering on spine. Illustrated with B&W plates and maps; Large 8vo 9' - 10' tall; 686 pages; 'Allen's work deals primarily with the human elements of the forgotten war waged between the doomed empires of Great Britain and Japan in Southeast Asia between 1941 and 1945. The author's familiarity with Japanese sources enables him to strike a balance unusual in Western accounts. Allen's Japanese are as much prisoners of their culture as the British are of theirs. They are victims of incompetent command and inadequate logistics. They do not want to die, but their ready acceptance of death lends a special horror to Allen's descriptions of some of the century's most vicious fighting.' Clean bright copy, no dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 228 pages. At the beginning of World War II Cecil Beaton was commissioned by the British government to photograph the home front. He set to work recording both the destruction of the city, and the heroism of Londoners under attack. He conducted a survey of Bomber and Fighter Commands for the RAF, which was published with his own astute commentary. Beaton was an effective propagandist, but his voice, like his photographs, was touchingly elegant. Beaton's wartime work amounted to 7,000 photographs. He traveled through the Western Desert and on to Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and India, where he photographed the final days of the Raj in New Delhi and Calcutta before joining the Burma campaign. He ended the war deep in Chinese territory where he witnessed the Nationalist resistance to the Japanese. This collection of Beaton's masterful WWII photography captures the home front, the Middle East, arms and vehicle manufacturing in Britain, India, the Burma Campaign, and the war in China. It also includes a chronology placing events in Beaton's life alongside developments in photography, journalism, and the arts; war photography; and world events. His original photographs are reproduced large on the page, alongside his diary extracts, allowing for deep scrutiny and appreciation of the images and their artist.

Softcover. Mechanicsburg PA, Stackpole Books, 1st pbk, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 218 pages, b&w illustrations. From their perches on islands such as Buka and Bougainville, coast watchers -- for the most part, Australian civilians -- monitored Japanese shipping and aircraft activity. They played a pivotal role during the battle for Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942, when their intelligence facilitated the interception and destruction of twelve Japanese transports. These reports from the participants themselves provide a fascinating account that will intrigue historians as well as World War II and espionage buffs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Chilton Company, 2nd pr., 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcver in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with $4.95 on the flap. This is the fascinating story of a naval squadron, a study in depth and in action of DesRon-23, of Arleigh Burke's tremendously significant doctrine of faith, and of the mystique which it produced to make this the greatest destroyer squadron in the history of the U. S. Navy. Included are authentic, minute-by-minute details, the scalp-tingling stories of the slashing naval battles of Tassafaronga, Savo Island, Rmpress Augusta Bay, and Cape St. George , battles fought against the Japanese in World War II. ' ... Six pages of maps. Index. Mild wear to dj, clean copy.

Softcover. Beijing, Foreign Languages Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 231 pages. A profile of a doctor who came to China's liberated area with his Canadian-American medical team at the height of the anti-Japanese war in 1938. He eventually was killed in the conflict. Written in 1946 from the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd pr., 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 209 pages. Many b&w photos, some color. The author and S. Oughterson and Shields Warren, as part of the United States Atomic Bomb Causality Commission, were sent immediately (September 1945) to survey Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan after the bombing and surrender of Japan to study the devastation and the subsequent irradiation sickness.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Hardcover. Essay by Carlo McCormick. Cosplay involves people dressing up and living part of their lives as characters in video games, Japanese graphic novels, and animated films. This phenomenon, long popular in Japan, has also become widespread in America. Winged sprites, samurai warriors, mad scientists, human feline hybrids, 144 pages. 75 color images. Striking full page color images of real people living out their fantasies in public. Clean copy. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. New York, Penguin Publishing Group, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 206 pages. Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography's most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and '50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come. When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read "stroke," but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of "everything," from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep. Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith's stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith's life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith's Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer's potent legacy and the subjects around him. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2003, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, 278 pages, very clean and tight copy.The Great Fire was the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..."The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.

Hardcover. London, Fourth Estate, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 362 pages, SIGNED BY AW on title page. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 346 pages, b&w photographs. This book shows how Henry Robinson Luce used his famous magazines to advance his interventionist agenda in Cold War China, Korea, Japan, and above all, Vietnam. This is the first balanced work on Luce and his influence, using hitherto undiscovered or inaccessible sources. Luce saw the American Century as the heir to the fading British Empire; he failed to see the hubris and cultural blindness that would lead to disaster in Vietnam - a disaster for which his magazines paved the way. Remainder mark on top edge. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 237 pages. Endpaper maps. Day-by-day eye witness account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the seven weeks that followed. Dr. Hachiya, himself wounded in the blast, was director of a major Hiroshima hospital. Translated and edited by Warner Wells, M.D. One of the best first hand accounts; much on the the gradual "discovery" of radiation sickness. The dust jacket's rear panel has photo of the author's surviving family. Bookplate opposite half-title page, otherwise clean.

Softcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 144 pages. In the tradition of the great photographic populists Alfred Eisenstaedt and Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol used his camera to record the human, intimate moments in the grand sweep of history. Bristol's American view included the best and the worst of this century, from poignant images of the urban poor and migrant farm workers during the Depression to the battle scenes of World War II and compelling portraits of post-war Japan and Southeast Asia. This volume presents over one hundred twenty exquisitely reproduced duotone images by Bristol, ranging from his early San Francisco photographs to his last work, taken in Southeast Asia. Combining aesthetic purity with human interest, Horace Bristol's pioneering photography is imbued with an accuracy, strength of composition, and humility that is as striking today as it was groundbreaking in its time.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 410 pages with index. Contains selected translations from Taiheiyo senso e no michi: kaisen gaiko shi. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean. The first volume in Morley's 4 volume set "Japan's Road to the Pacific War".

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, reprint, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 306 pages. Records of 62 conferences held in Tokyo between March and December of 1941 provide direct access to the thinking and planning of Japan's highest leaders as they prepared for war. Indexed, with 12-page appendix. First published in 1967, no dust jacket. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust jacket, 162 pages. Japan's economy enjoyed unprecedented technological growth in the decades after World War II. At first stereotyped as an exported of shoddy goods, Japan enjoyed a worldwide reputation as an efficient manufacturer of high-quality products. This comprehensive analysis of Japanese management treats four related but distinct subject matters: the economic, social, cultural, and political environment pertinent to Japan's industrial and managerial system; the ideologies and background to the Japanese business elite structure and the relationship between government and business; and managerial practices (organizational structure, personnel practices, decision making). The book first describes the postwar technological environment in and outside Japan. It identifies the Schumpeterian characteristics of economic development and the particular set of relationships that Japan had with the United States and with developing nations in Asia that provided it with the incentive and the necessary mechanisms to advance technologically. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.