A magisterial work of political, social, and military history, Sacred War sets a new standard for understanding the events that forever transformed America, Japan, and the world.

Celebrated historians Theodore F. and Haruko Taya Cook, whose oral history of the Pacific war was called “one of the essential books about World War II” (Philadelphia Inquirer), now offer a shattering new history of Japan’s long war in the Pacific, told exclusively from the perspective of the Japanese. Sacred War draws on a rich trove of documents, much of it first-person and almost all of it previously inaccessible to Western scholars. Based on painstaking research, here is World War II through the eyes of the Japanese themselves: ordinary people on the home front, soldiers on the front lines, and the military and political leadership who drove Japan to near annihilation by 1945.

Sacred War reveals both the internal logic of an authoritarian society bent on victory at all costs—including, in the final twelve months of the war, over one million civilian deaths—as well as heartrending accounts of the unfolding conflict, from the disease-ridden beaches on Guadalcanal to the burnt-out streets of Hiroshima, following the nuclear attacks by the United States that brought the war to its devastating end.