Images of the fiercely loyal, patriotic Japanese citizen during the World War II are challenged in a new book that examines the diaries of eight ordinary people living in wartime Japan.

In Samuel Yamashita's new book, "Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese," a very different picture of the Japanese emerges — that of a people demoralized and resisting government policy.

At a book-signing and lecture yesterday at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i in Mo'ili'ili, Yamashita, professor of history at Pomona College, said what he found when translating the decades-old diaries were "not the things I expected to find."

One of those things was the reaction of a 9-year-old schoolgirl to the United States' use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She wrote: "Watch out you terrible Americans, I will someday seek revenge." But in later diary entries, she never again mentioned revenge.

For the first time in English, Yamashita presents the perspective of the ordinary person through the translation of diaries by a navy kamikaze pilot, a dispirited soldier on Okinawa, an elderly Kyoto businessman, a Tokyo housewife, a young working woman in Tokyo, a teenage girl mobilized for war work, and two school children evacuated to the countryside.

Bernice Kisako Hirai, instructor of Japanese and koto at the University of Hawai'i, said Yamashita's presentation challenged most of what she thought she knew.

"He offers a dimension that is rarely talked about," said Hirai, who attended Yamashita's speech. "We have a very slanted view of history, but he speaks from the standpoint of ordinary people like you and me," she said.

Yamashita said the first misconception that is challenged in the diaries is the "mythology that Japan was a nation led unwillingly to war by military leaders."

Instead, Yamashita said, the diaries suggest wide support by the ordinary Japanese citizen at the beginning of the war.

"Total war requires the support of the entire population," Yamashita said.

But it didn't take long before that total support began to wane, he said.

Japan had failed to transition to a war economy, and just a few years after the country entered the war in 1937, Japan began to suffer economically.

By 1940, the Japanese government had drafted about 1 million "boys and men" into military service, said Yamashita.

"Almost every family had a father, an uncle, a son in the war," he said.

Villages throughout Japan began to suffer from a lack of food, especially staples — rice, shoyu, miso. Food, or the lack thereof, is mentioned most often in the diaries, said Yamashita.

But "nothing had more of an impact on the home front than the Allied bombings of Japanese cities," said Yamashita.

Fire bombings, as they were referred to by the Japanese, levelled residential districts. Nearly 50 percent of Tokyo and other cities "were reduced to ash."

One of the diary writers, Aiko Takahashi, wife of a Tokyo doctor, wrote of waning support for the war.

It was common during the beginnings of the war for people to line the streets to "see off" Japanese soldiers. But that all ended, wrote Takahashi.

"Processions have become rather pathetic affairs," she wrote.

Takahashi began to feel for Japanese soldiers as some feel for Iraq war soldiers, Yamashita said.

"Young men are getting sent off to die," writes Takahashi.

Bombings became so frequent that many Japanese were numb to the sight of American aircraft.

"I just kept sewing," wrote 26-year-old Hisako Yoshizawa in her diary as she saw American planes in the sky.

Yamashita said he hopes his book sheds light on a subject most Americans know little about.

"I, like you, was led to believe the Japanese were fiercely loyal," Yamashita said.

He said he hopes the diaries will prompt readers to examine their feelings about the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, and perhaps draw parallels to experiences of more than 50 years ago.

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.