An intimate history of the lives of ordinary Japanese during World War II that introduces us to housewives in provincial cities struggling to feed their families while supporting the war effort, a conscript from northern Japan who endured the harshest and most abusive training imaginable to learn to fly, Tokyo teenagers mobilized to work in wartime factories, children evacuated from the big cities to a life in the countryside with little food, bullying, and no privacy, farmers pressured to grow more rice and wheat with less fertilizer and fewer hands, and a Kyoto octogenarian whose inability to contribute to the war effort leads him to contemplate suicide.