WP Magazine
By Christine Diehl

The Untold Stories of World War II:  Historian Ted Cook Gives Voice to the Japanese War Experience

The morning of August 6, 1945, 15-year-old Yamaoka Michiko was on her way to work as an operator on the Japanese telephone exchange in Hiroshima, eight hundred meters from the hypocenter where the atomic bomb exploded.

“There was no sound. I felt something strong. It was terribly intense. I felt colors. It wasn’t heat. You can’t really say it was yellow, and it wasn’t blue…They say temperatures of seven thousand centigrade hit me…I remember my body floating in the air…My clothes were burnt and so was my skin…There were people, barely breathing, trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape,” she recalls.  “The scene I saw was a living hell.”

“I spent the next year bedridden. All my hair fell out. Keloids covered my face, my neck. One eye was hanging down. I was unable to control my drooling because my lip had been burned off…People threw stones at me and called me Monster,” says Michiko, who lost the hearing in her left ear and subsequently endured thirty-seven operations to repair her damaged body.

Yamaoka Michiko’s recollections of the Japanese experience during World War II are among nearly eighty personal stories chronicled in Japan at War: An Oral History, coauthored by Theodore F. Cook, a professor of history in William Paterson’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and his wife, Haruko Taya Cook, a professor of Japanese literature at Marymount College, who survived the war in Japan as a child.  Published in 1992, the book, which was acclaimed by the New York Times, remains a path-breaking work on a topic few historians in the world have sought to document.

“One of the things I’ve been trying to do in my career is put the Japanese military into military history, not as a tangential thing, but as part of it,” says Cook, an internationally recognized expert on Japanese war history, who joined the University faculty in 1988. “That means you can’t tell the story of the Second World War without including the Japanese side, yet it’s still done all the time.” 

The recipient of a Fulbright Senior Research Award, Cook is spending much of 2006 at Australia’s University of New South Wales in Canberra and the Australian Defence Force Academy, delving into a wealth of primary materials related to the Japanese in World War II. Over the years he also has received support for his research from such major foundations as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, The Mellon Foreign Area Fellowship Program, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Japan Foundation.  

At William Paterson, Cook’s students also benefit from his research, which drives him in his teaching. “I constantly have questions about Japan, and searching for answers to those questions ignites my enthusiasm to share that information with my students...I’m always recharging my batteries and rethinking Japan—what I know about the country and its context.”

Some of Cook’s latest research findings will appear in his next major book, entitled Emperor’s War; People’s War, which is under contract with Viking Press and scheduled for publication next year. “Though not an oral history, the new book also will look at the war from the Japanese side, but show the contradiction between what the Japanese decision-makers said they were doing, what the people thought [the government was] doing, and what was actually happening,” he explains.   

“I now have in my possession documents proving that from 1937-38 on, the Japanese knew they didn’t have the manpower to fight the war in China. And after 1944, the Japanese high command knew they couldn’t win the war, yet they continued fighting for more than eighteen months. Almost all the civilian casualties in Japan occurred in the last year of the war,” Cook continues.  “So why didn’t they stop? Because they couldn’t stop. War is a very dangerous avocation. People become enamored of it and can’t break away.” 

Ultimately claiming more than three million Japanese lives, the devastating toll of World War II on that country is vividly depicted in Japan at War. In compiling material for the book, Cook and his wife collectively interviewed more than three hundred soldiers, sailors, workers, farm wives, artists, factory girls, and school children, among others, meeting their subjects in remote areas of Japan including rice fields, deserted railroad stations, and park benches. Some survivors even invited them into shrine-like rooms in homes where they had long honored their dead in privacy.   

“Writing the book was a very emotional experience--a real rollercoaster,” says Cook, who speaks and writes fluently in Japanese. “One of the things that surprised us most was how many people kept their stories locked inside, and how once unlocked, it all came pouring out. You’d go for a two-hour interview and end up talking for ten hours and stay over, or come back the next day. We were a little shaken, but at the same time, we knew we had captured people’s lives, and were able to get people who would never have talked otherwise to tell their stories.”   

Although the Japanese annually mark August 15 as a national day commemorating the end of the war, Cook notes that war memories largely are kept private in Japan. No collective consciousness of the war exists, and unlike in the United States, no national war memorial is available to visit. “There is not even a nationally recognized name for the conflict,” he says.  

In the introduction to Japan at War, the authors write, “This formless narrative of defeat—of soldiers overwhelmed in battle, or girls escaping a Tokyo air raid, of a student nurse’s living nightmare in Okinawa, or a desperate mother’s flight for her life in Manchuria—is how [the Japanese] tend to see their war—at least in the instant they are recalling it. The country so often portrayed in the West as a fanatical, suicidal nation, united in purpose by the Emperor, looks more like a collection of confused, terrorized, and desperate individuals beaten down by overwhelming force.” 

Cook cites the case of Tominaga Shozo, an enlisted Japanese army officer profiled in the book, who recalls being forced to behead a man. “For his final test as a platoon leader, he’s ordered to kill a Chinese prisoner. He doesn’t have the courage to say no. He’s an innocent until then and is terrified of his own men…So he kills a man with a sword and he regrets it for the rest of his life,” says Cook. “The Japanese soldiers who committed atrocities—some of them went through so much. They’re guilty and innocent, guilty and victims both.” 

Delving into such stories is part of the appeal history holds for Cook. “History is the ultimate humanities course,” he says.  “Everything about humanity is in there—the good, the bad, and the ugly. They say past is prologue, and I don’t know if that’s true at all. Past is past. And I’m not sure you can even believe the illusion that you can fully understand what happened. But I can try. As a historian my responsibility is to find out, as closely as I can, what did happen.”

Cook’s fascination with World War II is not surprising, since the war loomed large in his family history. His father, Theodore F. Cook, Sr., was a captain in the U.S. Army who spent the majority of the war in the Pacific surveying islands for the air corps. His mother, Jeane Fallen, was a Navy flight nurse who volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked.  

“My mother was on the first plane into Okinawa and the second or third into Iwo Jima, so she played a real role in the war, taking care of Marines who were barely alive,” says Cook, whose parents met in Hawaii and married after the war, each having lost a brother in battle. “My mother told war stories, though my father never did. World War II took a lot of people’s lives away; it was always there in the background.”  

Born in Newcastle, Pennsylvania in 1947, Cook took his first airplane flight at six weeks of age. His father worked for an airline that later merged with Pan Am, and settled the family in London, where they lived until Cook was six years old.  

“I’ve always had a penchant for world history. In my early childhood, my father was always flying and every few months we’d go off someplace, so I had a sense that there was a big world out there,” he reflects. 

Cook’s family returned to the United States in 1953, living for several years on Long Island and later in Winchester, Massachusetts. During his childhood, Cook’s interest in history flourished.  “My father worked for years in New York City, so as a child, I used to take the train into the city and meet him at Grand Central Station. The Museum of Natural History was like heaven,” he says.  

In 1965, Cook enrolled at Trinity College, a liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut. While writing his senior thesis on the French in Indochina during World War II, he became curious about Japan’s views on the war. “I couldn’t find anything about the Japanese Army in Indochina, or for that matter, anything about the Japanese Army at all. I thought, ‘who are these Japanese?’ It seemed so important. The United States fought a war with these people, a major war. And what did we know about them? And why did we have the war?” 

After graduating from Trinity in 1969, Cook considered law school, but ultimately enrolled at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, pursuing a master’s degree in far eastern studies. “It was a test to find out if I really wanted to study Japanese history,” he says.  “But the most important thing that happened in London was that I met my wife.”  

Haruko Taya was studying English literature in London. The two became friends and in 1970, after Cook obtained his M.A., they traveled together to Japan on a student plane via the old Soviet Union.  Finally visiting the country he had chosen to study, Cook’s fascination with Japan further solidified. “I found myself very comfortable there, despite the fact that my Japanese language skills were terrible,” he says.   

Faced with the choice of remaining in England to study at Oxford or accepting an offer at Princeton University, he chose Princeton, deciding to focus his studies on Japanese military history. He quickly realized he needed a better grasp of the Japanese language to conduct his research, and returned to Japan on a fellowship after just one semester.

Cook studied the language formally at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo, and also spent time each day practicing his conversational skills.  “I found that the Japanese were incredibly open to listening to me,” he recalls. While in Japan, Cook and Haruko Taya married in 1971.  

After eighteen months of concentrated language study, Cook returned to Princeton to finish his required courses. With support from various grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, Cook went back to Japan in [year?] to begin field research for a dissertation on the Japanese army officer corps. “It was a classic dissertation that got totally out of control,” he says with a smile. 

Cook began examining records at the archives of the Imperial Officers Association and the War History Office in Japan. “The people working in these offices were mostly veterans. After seeing me studying documents five days a week for about eight months, they eventually started talking with me about their experiences. I asked them questions about why they became an officer. Many of them had never before talked about their careers,” he says. Cook’s contacts there also arranged interviews with other high-ranking military officers. 

After returning briefly to California where his wife was teaching, Cook received a letter from the Japanese Navy expressing interest in his work. “I quickly put together an application to the Japan Foundation, and instead of finishing my dissertation, I was soon back in Japan interviewing people. I realized that unless I continued to follow this track, these people would die and I would lose the opportunity.”  

He adds, “The Naval officers were very interesting men—not the nicest people in the world, but I got along with them. This was a hard-core group of military officers on the losing side of the war. I also became very interested in the enlisted man, the common solder. Each of their stories is where the real war happened.” 

In the early 1980s, Cook nearly strayed from his career path when he took a job as a military analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC. “I needed a job and a place to write my dissertation,” he explains. “It was a tremendous job, so exciting and interesting that it was tempting [to stay]. But I’d already invested so much in Japan.” 

Cook left the CIA and completed his dissertation, “The Japanese Officer Corps: The Making of a Military Elite, 1872-1945,” achieving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1987.  

He spent a year teaching at the University of California at San Diego and in 1988 joined William Paterson, where he has remained, reaching the rank of full professor in 1999.  He and his wife live on New York’s Upper West Side. 

During Cook’s tenure at the University, he has created a number of courses including War and Society, the U.S. and the Pacific, the Twentieth Century, and Imagining War (taught jointly with the Department of English).  Next year he plans to teach a [new?] class entitled Japanese History Through Film.  

A founding member of the University’s Asian studies committee, Cook also was instrumental in developing the Asian studies program, which has evolved into an interdisciplinary major that integrates the study of language along with Asian history, culture, economics, politics, and other significant issues, increasing students’ knowledge and understanding of this vital region.  

As a professor, Cook enjoys sharing his passion for history with his students. “The reason I love history is that history is everything. There is nothing that is not included in my subject. For example, in war history you study weaponry, which is all about physics, technology. It’s about tactics and thought, fear and psychology. All of these issues are critical to the discipline,” he states. “History has allowed me to study art, music, literature, as primary sources.” 

He also strives to encourage his students to pursue their interests without pushing them in a particular direction. “I was so moved by my own role models during my academic career, who gave me advice but never told me what to do. I believe a professor should listen, give advice, and then let students do what they are capable of doing—to grab onto what interests them, and pursue it in the context of the bigger picture.” 

After more than three decades, Cook’s interest in his own subject remains strong, and he is in constant pursuit of new ways to enrich his extensive knowledge of Japanese war history. His current Fulbright award to conduct research in Australia this year provides an opportunity to do just that. As a vital base in the Southwest Pacific during World War II, Australia is valuable, he explains, because it holds captured primary Japanese-language materials from the war in their original form—actual documents and diaries—not just translations or copies.    

“This is important because in the Second World War, most of the materials captured in the field were given to the intelligence services, where they were immediately translated and used for intelligence summary, with all the hot passages circled. But the hot passages may or may not have been correctly translated,” he says.  

At the Australian War Memorial, Cook plans to explore unique records of Japanese efforts at re-education and reorientation in post-war prisoner-of-war camps in the Southwest Pacific. He also will visit other major research centers, including the National Archives, the National Library of Australia, and Australian National University, among others.  

In addition, he hopes to interview some of the many World War II veterans in Australia. “As a student of the Second World War who has focused principally on the war as experienced by the Japanese, I’m hoping to deepen my knowledge by looking at how the Australians understood the nature of the war while it was being fought and how they came to terms with their own experience with their Japanese enemy,” he states. “I hope to learn from Australian veterans and their memories many things that have not become part of the ‘war story’ in Japan or the United States.”  

In the future, one of Cook’s other ambitions is to launch an institute on the study of war and society at William Paterson, which would help students understand the institutional and cultural dimensions of war in the past, while providing valuable insights for the present and future.   

“War involves all facets of human society, and causes tremendous grief and suffering.  It’s important to look at how we do this and why we do this. Because of the practical side of the war we’re fighting today, it’s critical to study how human beings reacted to situations before, and how different people’s values and ideas can be exploited,” he says. 

“When you examine what the Japanese went through in the Second World War, you see what happens to a people at war—the decision-making that occurs and the consequences. I agree that Pearl Harbor was completely immoral, but how does it justify the Tokyo fire bombings, 125,000 people killed in one night? And that was targeted on civilians. It was a city; it was [like] Chattanooga, Tennessee,” he continues.

“Of course, the winning side always has the trump card. For the Americans, it was worth it. For the Japanese, none of it was worth it.”