The Rising Sun; The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by Toland, John - 1970

New York: Random House, 1970. First Edition [stated]. First Printing as printing row starts with 2. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Palacios (Map). xxxv, [1], 954, [2] pages. Endpaper map. Illustrations. Maps. Sources. Notes. Index Some soiling to fore-edge. Some DJ wear and edge tears noted. 1976-2000: All first editions from Random House, AA Knopf, and Pantheon carry the words "first edition" on the copyright page. Random House also defined these as first printings. John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 - January 4, 2004) was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun. He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before completing his first sale, a short story for which The American Magazine paid $165 in 1954. At one point he managed to get an article on dirigibles into LOOK magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. Dirigibles were the subject of his first full-length published book, Ships in the Sky (1957). His most important work may be The Rising Sun, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1971. Based on original and extensive interviews with high-ranking Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles the Empire of Japan from the military rebellion of February 1936 to the end of World War II. It won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the Pacific War from the Japanese point of view, rather than the prevailing American one. Derived from a Kirkus review: This is a military narrative of the war with the U.S., framed by the diplomatic exchanges which failed to prevent war and an account of Japan's 1945 peace attempts as the Americans pressed the decision to use the bomb. The book's two signal features are its empathy for the Japanese military rulers and its manifold, cinematographic detail. The Pacific conflict is rendered with emphasis on the Japanese military ethos: Toland recreated battle talk, the smallest particulars of uniform, the act of hara-kiri; in the fiercely recast fighting scenes, jungle marches, civilian massacres, POW cruelties, no horror is shirked. Toland says all conversations are factual, based on 500-plus interviews of commanders, politicians, enlisted men and prisoners. He thinks that if Prime Minister Konoye had met with FDR in 1941 war might have been avoided: "Both men were gentlemen from honorable families and they could reach an honorable settlement." Indeed, the Emperor himself believed in 1946 that war should have been avoided; "he did everything in his power to do so." Owing to its prodigious detail and graphic narrative, the book will be compared to Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.