Among the various motives for writing war memoirs of ex-soldiers the publications by the National Institute for Defense Studies in 1966–72 are extremely important. Some tried to rewrite a personal history in the context of an official history of war. Others tried to correct an official history of war from the viewpoint of soldiers on the battlefields. Many of soldiers died during looting food, illness and starvation without fighting far from being “heroes.” Under such circumstances, there were those who paid attention to the human nature exposed on the battlefields rather than the war itself.
In this article, I will take up three ex-soldiers (Akiyoshi Fujioka, Makoto Ikeda, and Yoshinori Sato) who experienced the battlefield on the Philippine front, and follow their lives after the war through tries of rewriting war memoirs.
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