There are a number of reasons for keeping diaries -- to preserve time, to account for it, to validate it -- and there are a number of ways to read the resultant record. The editor of this interesting collection of Japanese wartime journals mentions several.
They can be read as history, or as the subjective expression of the writer, or as a means through which they shaped their lives as they lived them. Wartime diaries are, in part, an ordered answer to the chaos that engulfed the diarist.
All of the eight people from whose diaries excerpts are here translated went through catastrophic experiences. By the end of the conflict (Aug. 15, 1945) well over 2 million Japanese, both combatants and civilians, had perished. Among Japan's colonial subjects and those living in areas controlled by Japan, it is more like 20 million.
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