More than seventy-five years after its end, World War II continues to be a fertile topic for both scholarly research and popular history. Entire podcasts are devoted to World War II, and television documentaries are too numerous to mention.
Peter Wetzler, a senior research fellow at the Ostasieninstitut (East Asia Institute), has a more focused brief in Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: the final stages of the Asia-Pacific War, from mid-1942 to mid-1945. Wetzler has a long-standing interest in imperial Japan and the military, first recounted in Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan.1 In his latest book, he introduces a framework to differentiate between nation and state in order to demonstrate the catastrophic results of the Shōwa emperor and military leaders’ conviction of their own racial superiority. The book aims to more clearly explain the course of the war and...
