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In august 1950, a notable but now forgotten work appeared on the American market: Hanama Tasaki's antiwar novel Long the Imperial Way. The story focuses on the intense emotional and physical struggles of a young Japanese soldier, Takeo Yamamoto, who serves in China during the late 1930s. Takeo's life in the Imperial Army is one of great suffering and brutality. Not only does he endure harsh military discipline from his superiors, but he also must participate in the large-scale violence inflicted upon the Chinese in both northern and southern provinces. The text traces in bildungsroman fashion Takeo's developing moral conscience as he sporadically embraces, but then rejects, the empire's expansionist aims and the perpetual warfare promised for its soldiers and civilians. This conversion narrative proved insightful to mainstream American reviewers who hailed Long the Imperial Way as one of the first major works of fiction emerging from postwar Japan. The New York Times listed the novel as one of the top 275 books from the ten thousand titles published that year. A Chicago Daily Tribune critic went further by including it on his Ten Books of the Year list; another columnist followed suit in the Saturday Review of Literature. Reader's Digest distributed the text as part of its Condensed Books series. Several enthusiasts even compared Long the Imperial Way to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948).1
Hanama Tasaki (1913-1996), a Hawai'i-born Japanese American, based Long the Imperial Way on some of his own experiences. The son of Issei laborers, he spent most of his youth in Maui, enrolled briefly at Oberlin College and then at the University of Hawai'i, and also worked in California for a year alongside Japanese American farmers. But something else occupied his attention. Roused by Japan's rising power and influence in East Asia, and angered by haole prejudice in Hawai'i, he traveled to his ancestral land in 1936 to enlist in the Imperial Army, which stationed him in China.2 He later became a reporter for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and the Domei News Agency, followed by combat tours in the South Pacific during World War II. Afterward, the veteran became a livestock farmer and a refuse hauler in...