The Rising Sun


The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945, by John Toland, was published by Random House in 1970 and won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was republished by Random House in 2003.
A chronicle of the World War II rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the Japanese perspective, it is in the author's words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."