Islands of Blood 1: Bookends

World War Two ended on August 15, 1945, but Japan's Empire began 80 years earlier with the Meiji Restoration

This is not a story with a happy ending. There was nothing happy about any part of the war in the Pacific. There were 36 million casualties in that one theater of the Second World War alone. That’s almost 40% of the total casualties of that war.

The majority of the casualties were civilians, which mirrored Europe in the scale of the destruction and suff…