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A Diary of Darkness
A Diary of Darkness is one of the most important and compelling documents of wartime Japan. Between 1942 and 1945, the liberal journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (1890-1945) kept at great personal risk a diary of his often subversive social and political observations and his personal struggles. The diary caused a sensation when it was published in Japan in 1948 and is today regarded as a classic. This is the first time it has appeared in English.
Kiyosawa was an American-educated commentator on politics and foreign affairs who became increasingly isolated in Japan as militant nationalists rose to power. He began the diary as notes for a history of the war, but it soon became an "inadvertent autobiography" and a refuge for the bitter criticism of Japanese authoritarianism that he had to repress publicly. It chronicles growing bureaucratic control over everything from the press to people's clothing. Kiyosawa pours scorn on such leaders as Premiers Tojo and Koiso. He laments the rise of hysterical propaganda and relates his own and his friends' struggles to avoid arrest. He writes in gripping detail about increasing poverty, crime, and disorder. He records the sentiments of the local barber as faithfully as those of senior politicians. And all the while he traces the gradual disintegration of Japan's war effort and the looming certainty of defeat.
A Diary of Darkness is a perceptive and courageous account of wartime Japan and a revealing record of the devastation wrought by total war.
Kiyosawa was an American-educated commentator on politics and foreign affairs who became increasingly isolated in Japan as militant nationalists rose to power. He began the diary as notes for a history of the war, but it soon became an "inadvertent autobiography" and a refuge for the bitter criticism of Japanese authoritarianism that he had to repress publicly. It chronicles growing bureaucratic control over everything from the press to people's clothing. Kiyosawa pours scorn on such leaders as Premiers Tojo and Koiso. He laments the rise of hysterical propaganda and relates his own and his friends' struggles to avoid arrest. He writes in gripping detail about increasing poverty, crime, and disorder. He records the sentiments of the local barber as faithfully as those of senior politicians. And all the while he traces the gradual disintegration of Japan's war effort and the looming certainty of defeat.
A Diary of Darkness is a perceptive and courageous account of wartime Japan and a revealing record of the devastation wrought by total war.
391 pages, Hardcover
First published December 7, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 7, 2023
Foreword, by Marius B. Jansen
Translator's Note
Introduction: The Liberal Cornered, by Eugene Soviak
--A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi
Notes
Biographical Guide
Index
Translator's Note
Introduction: The Liberal Cornered, by Eugene Soviak
--A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi
Notes
Biographical Guide
Index
May 10, 2025
A very straight foreward and complex man with beliefs that didnt seem to quite fit the narratives of his time. Kiyoshi was a big critic of his peers, friends, politicians and of the outside world. His carefully documented day to day (somewhat) life before and during the second world war is a remarkable primary source for this period.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 28, 2017
This diary provides unique and important documentation on the Pacific War (as well as the war in Europe, to a certain degree) from a Japanese intellectual enduring it all at the moment; thus is differs from any account written in retrospect. While it is sometimes a slog and sometimes inscrutable, it offers a perspective rarely available. Recommended only for those with proficient knowledge in Japan's role in WWII and the events leading up to it.
December 21, 2019
The editors could have done a lot more to contextualize these entries. I understand that there's probably a lot we won't know based on someone's personal diary, but it did feel like there was not enough done on the editor's part to clarify what Kiyosawa was referring to, and the full social/political climate.
Read
August 12, 2025"The fire burned out one-sixth or one seventh of the capital overnight. The miserable conditions of war are truly beyond words."
April 14 (Sunday) 1945
This is one of the last entries in this Diary of Darkness, in which Kiyosawa Kiyoshi struggles precisely to give shape through words to the horror that his country overtaking his country as well as the horror his country had unleashed upon the world.
Right away, from the very nature of the genre in question, one is not dealing with a work meant to be read. Kiyosawa used it to keep track of daily events with the clear and stated intent of using them as raw material for a later work of historical assessment, sadly, this never came to be as he died before seeing the war he so loathed come to an end. Just a few months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pneumonia aggravated by years of malnutrition- and very likely, intense psychological pressure- claimed his life.
This means that the Diary is not readily accessible to most. The translator, in faithfully reproducing its style, kept a certain impressionistic tone that can be a bit of challenge. Which is not to say that this is a vague account, it is anchored by properly cited news and Kiyosawa's scholarly mind is very much at work in the way it keeps track of events and chronology. But his commentary on these can be somewhat loosely constructed with some conclusions seeming a bit odd. No doubt these would have been developed further had Kiyosawa lived to see his project concluded.
But what it loses by not being a finished product, so to speak, it gains in immediacy of report. Late into the Diary, Kiyosawa describes how his Tokyo house was bombed, how he barely escaped and still had to insult America even as he put down the fire, lest "pro-American" sentiment be reported to the authorities. This one event is enough to encapsulate the level of strain under which he lived. The threat, to him, was not just death raining from the sky but the years leading up to it of suspicion and looming threats from within.
Had the Diary come to the attention of the authorities, immediate prison would have followed. This meant torture and in several cases, death, as was the case of people in Kiyosawa's very circle. In fact, his friends strongly urged him to destroy it.
So what leads someone to do something this dangerous? In Kiyosawa's case, the motivation seems to be threefold. Being an historian, he was keenly aware that he was living history. The "Greater East Asia War", as the conflict is mentioned, is a watershed moment in Japan's history and he feels a sense of duty to keep a thorough record of the present, before it becomes muddled, in its passing into the past. This strong sense of needing to tell future generations how it was to see your country brought to cinders, of its own doing, is expressed more than once along with a fear that posterity would find ways of warping historical truth. In this, as in other things, he proved all too prescient.
Alongside this and strongly connected is the effort to identify and analyze the factors that brought this things to this pass so as to avoid the same mistakes. Formalism, in the sense of issuing regulations for their very sake and not deviating from strict decrees from on high even as they become increasingly cumbersome and fly in the face of reality; a stranglehold on education that creates slavish obedience while doing away with actual learning, which inevitably degenerates into faith in "spiritual superiority" that is seen as able to trump overwhelming military might; military men in charge spewing their dangerous clichés all over the newspapers, the radio and whatever means of mass communication, so that mass suicide and "glorious death" become an ideal; the entire life of the nation redirected to serve the war, even as people die of hunger as much as due to enemy fire, all along lulled by a ceaseless barrage of lies.
To these wider concerns, Kiyosawa adds the personal need to vent his frustration at all of the above. More, the utter inability to speak one's mind truthfully makes a target out of him. Several times people seem surprised that he is out and about as opposed to being imprisoned and Kiyosawa himself wonders about this. A rare case of someone who was opposed to the War from word go, having lived and worked in America for years, Kiyosawa found his professional opportunities dwindling. Many times, a police chief visited his house to, officially, ask his opinion on themes connected to the War but almost surely in an attempt to smoke him out. Any "defeatist" talk had dire consequences. Kiyosawa mentions a reporter who was drafted despite being over forty, simply for writing an article in which he states that if the War comes to the homeland, it is very much lost. Tojo himself arranged for this, it seems, which clues one in to what lengths the highest authorities were willing to go whenever they sensed an inkling of non-conformity.
Still, Kiyosawa tries. He creates an association to discuss diplomatic history, gives lectures that he does tone down but through which he tries to give impart some amount of consciousness, and even writes to the Foreign Ministry with suggestions that get ignored. Had they been actually considered, much bloodshed would have been avoided.
Kiyosawa in this strange limbo. He is extremely well connected with the intelligentsia and even on speaking terms with such important people as several times prime minister Konoe. He has connections in universities, and has a part-time professional relation to the above mentioned Ministry. But he has been pushed to the side, as far as wielding influence goes, with regime approved opinion makers having completely superseded him. If anything, this situation, while it is humiliating and makes him feel powerless, is the safest one Kiyosawa could realistically expect. Barring retiring from intellectual labor altogether, which is tempting to him, or joining the war furor, which is absolutely not tempting to him, this is the "best".
His resentment against this opinion makers is very interesting. Everyone knows about Goebbels but putting a name to the people who built the myth of "a hundred million heroes" is not as easy. It takes doing research and this input from an actual witness is priceless. His main target is Tokutomi Sohou (1863-1957), a figure that the appendix informs me, was a "cultural critic, idealogue, and journalist" who became "increasingly an avid exponent of aggressive nationalism" as well "the intellectual darling of the military ultranationalist extremists", since the Manchurian Incident (1931).
If Tokutomi is a symptom more than actual cause, Kioyawa insisting on his taking responsibility for having pushed the country into a war it could not possibly win is a wider expression of the lack of holding anyone accountable for their deeds. Had Kiyosawa been alive to see postwar Japan, he would have seen some of his fears all too horribly confirmed.
Japan's misery and wartime hopelessness are the focus but Kiyosawa is very much aware of the crimes his country has committed abroad. Cannibalism is mentioned, in what may be one of the earliest attestations, mistreatment of POW is a recurring theme, the lynching of Filipinos, the bloodlust in China and even the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923): this wide scope is all the more impressive when we consider that Kiyosawa was in Honshu and thus had to be able to read between the lines and be plugged into the truth behind the "glory" to reach this insight.
In fact, Kiyosawa's ability to know who is who and what is going on where is truly impressive. Unfortunately, it makes the Diary more opaque than it need be. Kiyosawa is in touch with so many people, and touches upon such an array of politicians, scholars, military people, world leaders, professors, journalists, writers, as well as friends of his who overlap with some of the above mentioned categories, that not even the 10 page Appendix manages to refer everyone.
Even someone with prior knowledge of the period is bound to be somewhat at a loss.
On top of this, Kiyosawa also drops historical events that have since become less known, without any explanation. This makes perfect sense for a Diary and the translation does expound on some but it is assumed that the reader will immediately be able to bring to mind "the Manchurian Incident".
All of this makes the Diary a fascinating but probably not widely appealing work. Kiyosawa's vision for a free Japan is truly touching as much as it is heartrending that he never got to see it. Free speech, in particular, is a priority that he sees as vital to the nation's progress. Paired with an education that fosters critical thinking, it is the means of creating a new Japan, the creators of which are the target audience for whom Kiyosawa is putting his life on the line to reach.
It makes me wonder what he would have thought of a Portuguese woman reading his Diary, 80 years afterward. Kiyosawa had such an interest in world affairs and believed strongly that a country is the strongest the more connected with others it is, that he might have appreciated it.
There is probably a hard limit to what comfort one can draw from historical example. But as so many of us are looking at our world in baffled horror, borderline paralyzed by dread, something like Kiyosawa's Diary is the kind of voice that carries through, across the decades. Because his is not just the voice of calm reason but the kind of justified anger that comes from realizing things are very, very, very wrong. This is a legacy one can have common cause with.
And yes, Tojo was a complete and utter idiot.
April 14 (Sunday) 1945
This is one of the last entries in this Diary of Darkness, in which Kiyosawa Kiyoshi struggles precisely to give shape through words to the horror that his country overtaking his country as well as the horror his country had unleashed upon the world.
Right away, from the very nature of the genre in question, one is not dealing with a work meant to be read. Kiyosawa used it to keep track of daily events with the clear and stated intent of using them as raw material for a later work of historical assessment, sadly, this never came to be as he died before seeing the war he so loathed come to an end. Just a few months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pneumonia aggravated by years of malnutrition- and very likely, intense psychological pressure- claimed his life.
This means that the Diary is not readily accessible to most. The translator, in faithfully reproducing its style, kept a certain impressionistic tone that can be a bit of challenge. Which is not to say that this is a vague account, it is anchored by properly cited news and Kiyosawa's scholarly mind is very much at work in the way it keeps track of events and chronology. But his commentary on these can be somewhat loosely constructed with some conclusions seeming a bit odd. No doubt these would have been developed further had Kiyosawa lived to see his project concluded.
But what it loses by not being a finished product, so to speak, it gains in immediacy of report. Late into the Diary, Kiyosawa describes how his Tokyo house was bombed, how he barely escaped and still had to insult America even as he put down the fire, lest "pro-American" sentiment be reported to the authorities. This one event is enough to encapsulate the level of strain under which he lived. The threat, to him, was not just death raining from the sky but the years leading up to it of suspicion and looming threats from within.
Had the Diary come to the attention of the authorities, immediate prison would have followed. This meant torture and in several cases, death, as was the case of people in Kiyosawa's very circle. In fact, his friends strongly urged him to destroy it.
So what leads someone to do something this dangerous? In Kiyosawa's case, the motivation seems to be threefold. Being an historian, he was keenly aware that he was living history. The "Greater East Asia War", as the conflict is mentioned, is a watershed moment in Japan's history and he feels a sense of duty to keep a thorough record of the present, before it becomes muddled, in its passing into the past. This strong sense of needing to tell future generations how it was to see your country brought to cinders, of its own doing, is expressed more than once along with a fear that posterity would find ways of warping historical truth. In this, as in other things, he proved all too prescient.
Alongside this and strongly connected is the effort to identify and analyze the factors that brought this things to this pass so as to avoid the same mistakes. Formalism, in the sense of issuing regulations for their very sake and not deviating from strict decrees from on high even as they become increasingly cumbersome and fly in the face of reality; a stranglehold on education that creates slavish obedience while doing away with actual learning, which inevitably degenerates into faith in "spiritual superiority" that is seen as able to trump overwhelming military might; military men in charge spewing their dangerous clichés all over the newspapers, the radio and whatever means of mass communication, so that mass suicide and "glorious death" become an ideal; the entire life of the nation redirected to serve the war, even as people die of hunger as much as due to enemy fire, all along lulled by a ceaseless barrage of lies.
To these wider concerns, Kiyosawa adds the personal need to vent his frustration at all of the above. More, the utter inability to speak one's mind truthfully makes a target out of him. Several times people seem surprised that he is out and about as opposed to being imprisoned and Kiyosawa himself wonders about this. A rare case of someone who was opposed to the War from word go, having lived and worked in America for years, Kiyosawa found his professional opportunities dwindling. Many times, a police chief visited his house to, officially, ask his opinion on themes connected to the War but almost surely in an attempt to smoke him out. Any "defeatist" talk had dire consequences. Kiyosawa mentions a reporter who was drafted despite being over forty, simply for writing an article in which he states that if the War comes to the homeland, it is very much lost. Tojo himself arranged for this, it seems, which clues one in to what lengths the highest authorities were willing to go whenever they sensed an inkling of non-conformity.
Still, Kiyosawa tries. He creates an association to discuss diplomatic history, gives lectures that he does tone down but through which he tries to give impart some amount of consciousness, and even writes to the Foreign Ministry with suggestions that get ignored. Had they been actually considered, much bloodshed would have been avoided.
Kiyosawa in this strange limbo. He is extremely well connected with the intelligentsia and even on speaking terms with such important people as several times prime minister Konoe. He has connections in universities, and has a part-time professional relation to the above mentioned Ministry. But he has been pushed to the side, as far as wielding influence goes, with regime approved opinion makers having completely superseded him. If anything, this situation, while it is humiliating and makes him feel powerless, is the safest one Kiyosawa could realistically expect. Barring retiring from intellectual labor altogether, which is tempting to him, or joining the war furor, which is absolutely not tempting to him, this is the "best".
His resentment against this opinion makers is very interesting. Everyone knows about Goebbels but putting a name to the people who built the myth of "a hundred million heroes" is not as easy. It takes doing research and this input from an actual witness is priceless. His main target is Tokutomi Sohou (1863-1957), a figure that the appendix informs me, was a "cultural critic, idealogue, and journalist" who became "increasingly an avid exponent of aggressive nationalism" as well "the intellectual darling of the military ultranationalist extremists", since the Manchurian Incident (1931).
If Tokutomi is a symptom more than actual cause, Kioyawa insisting on his taking responsibility for having pushed the country into a war it could not possibly win is a wider expression of the lack of holding anyone accountable for their deeds. Had Kiyosawa been alive to see postwar Japan, he would have seen some of his fears all too horribly confirmed.
Japan's misery and wartime hopelessness are the focus but Kiyosawa is very much aware of the crimes his country has committed abroad. Cannibalism is mentioned, in what may be one of the earliest attestations, mistreatment of POW is a recurring theme, the lynching of Filipinos, the bloodlust in China and even the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923): this wide scope is all the more impressive when we consider that Kiyosawa was in Honshu and thus had to be able to read between the lines and be plugged into the truth behind the "glory" to reach this insight.
In fact, Kiyosawa's ability to know who is who and what is going on where is truly impressive. Unfortunately, it makes the Diary more opaque than it need be. Kiyosawa is in touch with so many people, and touches upon such an array of politicians, scholars, military people, world leaders, professors, journalists, writers, as well as friends of his who overlap with some of the above mentioned categories, that not even the 10 page Appendix manages to refer everyone.
Even someone with prior knowledge of the period is bound to be somewhat at a loss.
On top of this, Kiyosawa also drops historical events that have since become less known, without any explanation. This makes perfect sense for a Diary and the translation does expound on some but it is assumed that the reader will immediately be able to bring to mind "the Manchurian Incident".
All of this makes the Diary a fascinating but probably not widely appealing work. Kiyosawa's vision for a free Japan is truly touching as much as it is heartrending that he never got to see it. Free speech, in particular, is a priority that he sees as vital to the nation's progress. Paired with an education that fosters critical thinking, it is the means of creating a new Japan, the creators of which are the target audience for whom Kiyosawa is putting his life on the line to reach.
It makes me wonder what he would have thought of a Portuguese woman reading his Diary, 80 years afterward. Kiyosawa had such an interest in world affairs and believed strongly that a country is the strongest the more connected with others it is, that he might have appreciated it.
There is probably a hard limit to what comfort one can draw from historical example. But as so many of us are looking at our world in baffled horror, borderline paralyzed by dread, something like Kiyosawa's Diary is the kind of voice that carries through, across the decades. Because his is not just the voice of calm reason but the kind of justified anger that comes from realizing things are very, very, very wrong. This is a legacy one can have common cause with.
And yes, Tojo was a complete and utter idiot.
December 3, 2025
It's always fascinating reading someone else's account of daily life and getting the occasional window into the past and their perspective on it. I do wish the editors could've put a few more notes for historical context, and that they would've put what notes they did make as footnotes on each page so I didn't have to flip to the back of the book mid-sentence. But, the diary itself was really interesting as a unique perspective on WWII & the Pacific War.
There was biting commentary on current leadership & media, which I appreciated, but also shockingly honest and to-the-point observations on things closer to heart like job prospects, barber shop rumors, and worrying about his collection of books when an air raid came. It was an amazing read and really helped bring a more personal view to my understanding of WWII - history's not always just about statistics and analysis!
There was biting commentary on current leadership & media, which I appreciated, but also shockingly honest and to-the-point observations on things closer to heart like job prospects, barber shop rumors, and worrying about his collection of books when an air raid came. It was an amazing read and really helped bring a more personal view to my understanding of WWII - history's not always just about statistics and analysis!
December 23, 2025
The author offers his insights on the events during WWII.
Highly perceptive and intelligent work.
The author made a great contribution to historical events.
Excellent book
Highly perceptive and intelligent work.
The author made a great contribution to historical events.
Excellent book
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