This is a review by Randy L Harvey of The Japanese Home Front 1937–45 from Osprey Publishing by author Philip Jowett and illustrator Adam Hook with series editors Martin Windrow and Nick Reynolds.
Interesting. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a diorama of the Japanese home front. I have an idea of one that would be 1/48 scale. Using some of the 1/48 Japanese kits along with a 1/50 scale steam locomotive. I will have to look to see if there are any quarter scale Japanese civilian figures out there.
Did the author comment upon or show any information about how many of the civilians would actually have met our troops at the beach, or how many of them it was estimated would have stayed home?
I don’t remember there being any numbers listed of how many were to do what. Pretty much everyone was supposed to be ready to defend their homeland when the invasion they knew was going to happen took place.
Casualty estimates were as differing as the number of people calculating them but they all predicted one thing: carnage the likes of which never seen before. I think it was author Anthony P. Tully (Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway) who I watched the other day recount that a surviving Japanese general officer told Mr. Tully that he was thankful we dropped the bombs, because it saved millions of Japanese from combat and starvation.
I’ve long believed the A-Bombs didn’t cause the Japanese to surrender, they gave the Japanese an excuse to do so.
Cheers,
M
One of the main things that fascinated me that I read in the book was how the Japanese lost site of the overall picture and started taking all able-bodied men from the factories and sent them to fight in a war they knew they had already lost. In doing so they removed skilled critical personnel from the factories which in turn greatly crippled their war production which caused shortages for the military. Quite ironic, take all the skilled able-bodied men out of the factories and send them to fight without proper equipment as the factories were no longer able to produce enough equipment that was needed to fight with as all the skilled able-bodied men had been drafted.
Did Imperial Japan have their version of Rosie the Riveter to pick up the manpower slack in the factories?
Sorta’… If you Google the following there’s a brief article:
Japanese Women and the Japanese War Effort
Photos from the popular Japanese pictorial weekly Shashin Shuho issued by the Japanese Cabinet Bureau of Information during the war, reveal the late war propaganda encouraging women to work in factory positions.
Image is for reference only.
Kinda, they pretty much expected the women and children to try and pick up the slack.