The Naked Island
by Russell Braddon
Book Description: Russell Braddon wrote The Naked Island in
1950. By 1968 it had been reprinted eleven times and sold one million copies
in Britain alone. As the author states, 'It was written to tell the world
what sort of people the Japanese can be. It was written to explain what
they did in the war and what they might well do again.'
There are numerous books on the war in the East but this is one of
the greatest. Often hilarious, even amidst the horror, this is the story
of what the Japanese did to those they captured. It is written in prose
all the more effective for its dry understatement and sharp observation
by a man who never lost his will to live even in the most terrible circumstances.
Braddon's story is however not that simply of a prisoner of war. In his
comments on the equally brutal Japanese treatment of native workers and
indeed any who were not Japanese, he reveals the hollow reality of the
'Greater Asian co-prosperity sphere' promised by the Japanese, and attempts
to understand how one group of human beings could behave in such a way
towards another and the inhuman ideology and fanaticism which drove the
Japanese on.
Even today the subject of Japanese war guilt is never far from the headlines
and it was only last year that a deal on compensation was arrived at for
surviving POWs.
Paperback from Birlinn Ltd
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