In the Service of the EmperorJapans war in Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945 continues to be a subject of great interest, yet the wartime Japanese army remains little understood outside Japan. Most published accounts rely on English language works written in the 1950s and 1960s. The Japanese language sources have remained relatively inaccessible to Western scholars in part because of the difficulty of the language, a difficulty that Edward J. Drea, who reads Japanese,