The Battle for Okinawa

A Japanese Officer's Eyewitness Account of the Last Great Campaign of World War II

By: Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, Frank B. Gibney

Narrated by: Brian Nishii

Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

This critically acclaimed account of the Battle for Okinawa is told through the eyes of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, the senior staff officer of the 32nd Japanese Army. It features segments on the Japanese preparation for battle, the American assault, and a summary of how the battle ended. Following the events that occurred in the life of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, journalist Frank Gibney is able to lay out the importance of the battle and the ways in which both parties fought hard and strategically.

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excellent

Great insight along with an excellent narrator whom pronounces the Japanese language properly. I would recommend

Blessed HEAVEN—An Actual Japanese Person Narrating

Aside from being a native Japanese speaker, Brian Nishii is an excellent all-around narrator. But it's the blessed PRONUNCIATION of all the Japanese names that sends me over the moon—I have heard literally dozens of books about WWII and the pronouncers of Japanese range from Merely Awful to COMPLETELY UNLISTENABLE. And Japanese is one of the easiest languages to pronounce! The downfall is in the Romanization of it; if you don't know how to speak Japanese you will probably look at "sake" and say "SAH-KEE." Or another horror: harakiri as HARRY KARRY.

Yet this is the level of pronouncement of almost 95% of narrators . . . and it's just so simple: with a book about Hirohito, WHY WOULD YOU PUT A NARRATOR WHO CAN'T SPEAK JAPANESE on it? Same goes for books about WWII in the Pacific Theater. There was a book about the battle of Saipan recently that had me gnashing my teeth . . . if they are going to have a white author read these books can't they at least attend a course on pronunciation of Japanese words and names? It's not too much to ask.

Would you ask of a book about De Gaulle for a person who speaks no French whatsoever? Yet most narrators speak Japanese like they're in some cartoon.

As for the story, Yahara was pretty much an idiot ; he states that the cause of the war was the leaders, yet he forgets the primary movers of the Imperial Way faction who made things happen with assassinations and threats to these leaders, not the leaders themselves, except perhaps that spineless parasite Hirohito, who waved them all to battle with his 13-year-old level of intellect, which they all dutifully followed.

So Yahara's only claim to virtuousness is that he survived; nothing else. But Brian Nishii—KAMISAMA ARIGATOU!

SUICIDE WAS THEIR GOD

This work is rampant with excuses for a government who taught their people to commit suicide while their emperor went on to live. The emperor turned out to be a false god of death who encouraged his own people to commit suicide.
Of course the atrocities against the Chinese people are mentioned, and so to, there is no mention of the death camps, nor the slavery of women.

Strange

It was a strange thing to hear.

The Japanese treatment of Okinawan civilians is completely misrepresented and inaccurate. The use of "Comfort Girls" is made to appear as something entirely different from reality. Specifically, it is said they were willing participants. This is unforgivable.

This is a disturbing account of the Japanese military's cult of death. In my view that military is responsible for the slaughter of Japanese as well as American soldiers.

Finally, Japanese brutality, savagery and inhumanity evident in every account I have ever read is omitted from this work altogether. I suppose it is to be expected.