Something that I've been really getting into recently is reading about WWII in the Pacific from the point of view of the Japanese sailors and commanders involved. This is one which tends to get neglected in western studies of the war, initially because Who Cares About Them (1/9)

...and later because many primary source materials were destroyed either to avoid incrimination in war crimes or just in the general chaos of the surrender and occupation. Most western military historians don't read Japanese, and Japanese works on the same topic are often (2/9)

...pushing questionable revisionist theories, or at least trying to disguise some of the worse aspects of the Imperial regime. So it's only this century that western writers have really started to engage with the Imperial Japanese Navy's command, culture and social history (3/9)

Jonathan Parshall's Battle of Midway is one of the first to do this, and by looking at Japanese military doctrine and commanders, it makes a lot more sense of what happened than the standard American narrative https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Japanese-ebook-dp-B005NIQ8SM/dp/B005NIQ8SM/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= (4/9)

But as well as looking at things at commander level, it's fascinating to look at the social structure on the ships, and how the IJN - like the rest of Imperial Japan - both despised and copied aspects of its western rivals, especially the Royal Navy and US Navy (5/9)

Although discipline in the IJN was often brutal compared to western navies of the same era, it also borrowed some of their morale-boosting touches, right down to assuaging the crew's nostalgia and homesickness by creating music groups to play popular songs to (6/9)

...remind them of home and the loved ones who they were fighting for. Ironically, these often included popular UK and US songs, particularly those that reached Japan before the declaration of war in 1941, with their lyrics changed to reflect Japanese culture and themes (7/9)

One of the songs that was best loved by the men of the IJN was a tear-jerking adaptation of a ballad originally written in England, reminding them of the traditional foods that they were missing from home whilst they lived off unappetising military rations (8/9)

Nothing warmed the heards of the enlisted men of the Imperial Japanese Navy more than a rousing chorus of Whale Meat Again (9/9)

Everything up to #6 in this thread is genuine, incidentally