Japanese War Diary
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Japanese War Diary
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1939
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- does his first impulse is to write the medical journals about it. As for heart disease, it is not generally the cause of pains in the left chest. They are more likely to be produced by muscular spasms, rheumatic twinges, pleurisy, and aches associated with influenza and the common cold. They are often acute and stabbing, but brief, and not connected with previous efforts. Pains associated with genuine heart disease are almost always precipitated by effort, physical or emotional. They are not likely to be stabbing or piercing, but distinctly dull, deepseated, and often vice-like, lasting for a variable time and diminishing gradually. - Archib!;ild Erskin, condensed from Evening Express, Liverpool. 8apanese War r:JJ,·ary THE stock picture of the Japanese soldier in China is a uniformed fanatic who is taught from birth that dying for his Emperor automatically gives him a ticket into the Shinto heaven. At home, his relatives are pictured as accepting with happy little Japanese smile1 the news of his death at the front. That war morale among the Children of the Rising Sun may not be quite that bright is strongly hinted in a Japanese war diary, not yet published in English, called Wheat and Soldiers, written by Sergeant Ashibei Hino. In it Japanese readers got their first realistic, human picture of fighting in China-a day-to-day account of thirst, hunger homesickness; of no heroes, but plain men fighting desperately for their lives. And between the lines was something that looked suspiciously like anti-war sentiment: "We feel," wrote Hino, "that the enemy soldiers who we are killing look so much like us that we could be neighbors." When his company narrowly missed annihilation, he confessed: "I was seized with violent rage that precious life could be damaged so easily . . . We soldiers are not only sons of men, but also husbands and fathers. We are human beings . . . This is not the first time for me to have this sort of feeling. '1t is one of the most commonplace thoughts on the field of battle." Six months after publication Wheat and Soldiers had become Japans' most spectacular best-seller (almost 5,000,000 copies) .-Time. APRIL, 1939 41