Abstract:
Following Japan's full-scale expansion into Asia from late 1941, many ordinary Japanese men were drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army or Navy and were sent to the battleground as Imperial Japanese soldiers. Although educated and indoctrinated to
be loyal soldiers of the Japanese empire, no amount of education would be able to prepare them for the experiences that lay ahead.
This thesis focuses on Japanese soldiers' experiences in the isolated Solomon Islands
during the Pacific War. By examining war diaries, memoirs and military accounts
mainly produced after the war, this thesis demonstrates how Japanese soldiers responded to the increasingly difficult circumstances in which they found themselves during the Pacific War. The historical and social context is presented to help explain the
Imperial military culture which, with its rigid hierarchies and reliance on the bushidou tradition, placed enormous pressure on those making the transition from civilian to military life. The thesis argues that unlike (Western) stereotyped images of Japanese soldiers as extreme, violent, suicidal, and inclined to death before dishonour, the soldiers examined are beset by doubts, psychological and physical ailments, starvation, an increasingly distant relationship with Tokyo, and frictions with local populations. As their situation worsened, so too did their discipline and loyalty waver. The humanity of
the soldiers emerged in contradistinction to the impartiality and unswerving loyalty of
imperial subjects created by the Japanese emperor system. In this sense, the soldiers
were exposed as fallible, confused and sometimes tragic human beings.
It was this very humanity that neither the West, with its extreme propaganda about the
'Yellow Peril,' nor the Japanese state, in its desire to create disciplined and loyal
subjects, could reveal at the time. Only retrospectively can such interpretations emerge.
