Unique study of one aspect of war in Japanese society, the group of veterans named 'stragglers'
The first book on this subject
Shows how the return of stragglers affected Japan's 'collective memory' of the war
'Sometimes the best presents come in little packages. And so it is with Beatrice Trefalt's Japanese Army Stragglers, which uses a small story to get at the much larger question of the ways in which Japanese have thought about the Asia-Pacific War and postwar society since 1945.' - Japanese Studies
Introduction 1. The Shared Past: Mobilisation for War 2. Creating Stragglers: Demobilisation, 1945-1950 3. 'Five Years on Mice and Potatoes': Exotic stragglers, 1950-1952 4. 'Living Spirits of the War Dead', 1954-56 5. 'But They Are Not Gorillas', 1959-1960 6. The Past in the Present: Yokoi Shoichi Returns from Guam, 1972 7. 'In the Jungle, the War was still Going on': Kozuka Kinshichi, Onoda Hiro and the last of Lubang, 1972-1974 8. 'Nakamura Teruo: The Last Straggler and the Issue of Imperialism Conclusion