Writing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire

Abstract

Aaron W Moore explores war diaries written by Japanese service men to demonstrate how the war diaries operated as a tool of self-descipline of an agent of the state and empire during WWII, challenging the study of self and diary from soldely the public/private devide. By showing how the diaries worked to self-descipline and movilize soliders for total war, he... Aaron stipluates that 'the ""discovery" of the wartime self, which was inscribed in teh diary, created a cognitive dissonance that "transwar" veterans found difficult to ignore. This was, I argue, a conssequence of battlefield self-descipline and the individual's use of language to approxiamte experience in a 'truthful' way. p.246'