The Rising Sun
by John Toland
Summary
John Toland spent years tracking down and interviewing Japanese officers, diplomats, and civilians who had survived the Second World War, and The Rising Sun uses their firsthand testimony to tell the story of the Japanese Empire's rise and defeat largely from the Japanese side, a perspective American readers of the period had rarely encountered in such detail. The 954 page history opens with the February 1936 military rebellion in Tokyo and follows events from there through the invasions of China and Southeast Asia, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the eventual surrender in 1945, covering roughly a decade of Japanese military and political decision making from the inside rather than as a story observed from Washington or London.
Toland's access to surviving Japanese participants lets him reconstruct internal debates within the Japanese government and military that Western historians writing only from American and European sources could not have recovered. He renders commanders and diplomats as people arguing, miscalculating, and sometimes recognizing disaster coming without being able to stop it, an approach that complicates the simpler wartime image of a uniformly fanatical enemy, replacing it with officials divided among themselves and often unable to control the momentum their own earlier decisions had set going.
The book runs long, matching its subject's full sweep from the mid 1930s through the atomic bombings and surrender, and it suits a reader who wants the Pacific War understood from inside Tokyo's decision making rather than only from Washington's. Toland writes with a narrative historian's instinct for pace even across an enormous cast of officials and events, keeping the story moving despite its length and complexity, and the sheer number of firsthand interviews behind it gives ordinary soldiers and officials, not only famous commanders, a genuine voice in how the history gets told.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rising Sun appeared in 1970, and it won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, recognition for a research method, extensive original interviews with Japanese survivors of the war, that few American historians of the period had attempted at this scale. Toland came to history relatively late after years of unsuccessful work as a playwright and short story writer, publishing his first book in 1957.
The Rising Sun cemented Toland's reputation as a major narrative historian of the Second World War, though he later noted its financial rewards were modest compared with his 1976 biography of Adolf Hitler, which became a much larger commercial success. His willingness to seek out Japanese perspectives directly, rather than relying solely on translated documents or secondhand accounts, remains what distinguishes the book from other Pacific War histories of its era.