Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945 remains 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 due to the difficulty of the language, a difficulty the author, who reads Japanese fluently, surmounts.