Japan was a party to the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, it ignored repeated German demands to harm the 40,000 Jews who found themselves under Japanese occupation during World War Two. This book attempts to answer why they behaved in a relatively humane fashion towards the Jews.

The authors of this 2004 volume consult Chinese and Western archival materials to examine the Chinese War of Resistance against the Japanese in the Shanghai area. They argue that the war in China was a nationalistic endeavour carried out without an effective national leadership. Wartime Chinese activities in Shanghai drew upon social networks rather than ideological positions and these activities cut across lines of military and political divisions. Instead of the stark contrast between heroic resistance and shameful collaboration, wartime experience in the city is more aptly summed up in terms of bloody struggles between those committed to normalcy in everyday life and those determined to bring about its disruption through terrorist violence and economic control. The volume offers an evaluation of the strategic significance of the Shanghai economy in the Pacific War. It also draws attention to the feminisation of urban public discourse against the backdrop of intensified violence. The essays capture the last moments of European settlements in Shanghai under Japanese occupation.

A moving portrait of Africa from Poland's most celebrated foreign correspondent - a masterpiece from a modern master. Famous for being in the wrong places at just the right times, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa in 1957, at the beginning of the end of colonial rule - the "sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant" rebirth of a continent. The Shadow of the Sun sums up the author's experiences ("the record of a 40-year marriage") in this place that became the central obsession of his remarkable career. From the hopeful years of independence through the bloody disintegration of places like Nigeria, Rwanda and Angola, Kapuscinski recounts great social and political changes through the prism of the ordinary African. He examines the rough-and-ready physical world and identifies the true geography of Africa: a little-understood spiritual universe, an African way of being. He looks also at Africa in the wake of two epoch-making changes: the arrival of AIDS and the definitive departure of the white man. Kapuscinski's rare humanity invests his subjects with a grandeur and a dignity unmatched by any other writer on the Third World, and his unique ability to discern the universal in the particular has never been more powerfully displayed than in this work.

Much has been written about World War II on the European front but few have focused on the simultaneous events that occurred in the Pacific. This factual narrative was originally written in 1945 but never published, and is now released in its Second edition to include a recently-discovered Foreward written by Major-General Basilio J. Valdez, Chief of Staff, Philippine Army; Secretary of National Defense and Communications. These words were written by a Filipino patriot who fought alongside U.S. Troops against the Japanese war machine in the battle to win back the Philippine Islands. Dr. Hermandez was a scholar, educator, writer and above all, a believer in the democratic freedom of man. He lived first-hand the events related - from the pre-war period, the expansion of the war to SE Asia, after the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Japanese occupation to the long-awaited liberation. This perspective of the war is unique because it is related by someone who lived, observed and experienced it and survived to write about it...a recounting of the truth of war as he and his countrymen lived it. For today's reader who is unaware of this part of Asian history it provides more insight into the reality of the war in the Philippines and not just what the press, literature and films had presented.

Return to World War II Shanghai in Dan Kalla's thrilling historical novel Rising Sun, Falling Shadow, the sequel to The Far Side of the Sky It's 1943 and the Japanese juggernaut has swallowed Shanghai and the rest of eastern China, snaring droves of American and British along with thousands of "stateless" German Jewish refugees. Despite the hostile environs, newlyweds Dr. Franz Adler and his wife, Sunny, adjust to life running the city's only hospital for refugee Jews. Bowing to Nazi pressure, the Japanese force twenty thousand Jewish refugees, including the Adlers, to relocate to a one-square-kilometer "Shanghai Ghetto." Heat, hunger, and tropical diseases are constant threats. But the ghetto also breeds miraculous resilience. Music, theater, sports, and Jewish culture thrive despite what are at times subhuman conditions. Navigating subversion and espionage, Nazi treachery and ever-worsening conditions while living under the heel of the Japanese military, the Adlers struggle to keep the hospital open and their family safe and united. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.