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The vast majority of Japanese people experienced the Asia-Pacific War on the home front. Here is my article on that experience in The Routledge History of the Second World War (2022, edited by Paul R. Bartrop).
Philip Seaton, “Japanese Society at War: History and Memory”.
One of the main narratives from the home front is air raids. Japan Air Raids is an extensive bilingual, online archive on the topic.
Online materials used in the chapter
Showakan (National Showa Memorial Museum), a museum near Yasukuni Shrine that presents life on the home front during the war.
Koizumi Kishio’s 1940 Annotations on “100 Views of Great Tokyo in the Shōwa Era”, MIT Visualizing Cultures.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire”.
Frederick S. Litten, “Starving the Elephants: The Slaughter of Animals in Wartime Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo”.
The work of Kenneth J. Ruoff is particularly useful on tourism during the war years. His book Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary is highly recommended. The following article is open access:
Kenneth Ruoff, “Japanese tourism to Mukden, Nanjing, and Qufu, 1938-1943”.
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