"The Man Who Came Back Alive" Author: [Japanese] Oguma Eiji Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press

Introduction
"The Man Who Came Back Alive" is the first book to record the history of life in Japan before and after World War II from the perspective of ordinary people.
The protagonist of the book, Kenji Okuma (the author's father), was born in 1925. He was drafted and sent to Northeast China at the age of 19. He was later detained in a prisoner-of-war camp by the Soviet Union and worked in the harsh Siberia for three years. After returning to Japan alive, Kenji contracted tuberculosis, which was considered a terminal illness at the time, while constantly changing jobs. From the age of 25 to 30, the most lost time of his life was spent alone in a sanatorium. Kenji, who lost half of his lung, returned to society at the "advanced age" of 30. Fortunately, he caught up with the wave of rapid economic growth in Japan and was able to climb from the "lower class" to the "lower middle class". After becoming a senior citizen, he even became a plaintiff together with Wu Xionggen, a "former Korean Japanese soldier" in Yanbian, China, and filed a post-war lawsuit against the Japanese government for compensation. The author records the life trajectory of his father as an ordinary Japanese soldier with a plain narrative and a broad perspective, while integrating the economic, policy, and legal conditions of the same period to form a "living history of the 20th century."
About the Author
Eiji Okuma
Born in Tokyo in 1962, he received his PhD in International Social Science from the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at the University of Tokyo. He is currently a professor at the Department of Policy Studies at Keio University, specializing in historical sociology and related social sciences. In 1996, he won the Suntory Prize for his book The Origin of the Myth of a Single Nation: A Genealogy of Self-Portraits of the Japanese. In 2003, he won the Mainichi Publishing Cultural Prize and the Jiro Daibutsu Forum Prize for his book Democracy and Patriotism: Nacionalism and Publicity in Postwar Japan. In 2013, he won the Chuokoronsha New Book Award for his book How Society Changed. His latest book, "The Man Who Came Back Alive: An Ordinary Japanese Soldier's Life History of World War II and Postwar", won the 2015 Shinchosha Hideo Kobayashi Award. Other important works include "1968: The Background of the Wakazawa Rebellion and the Rebellion (Part 1/2)", "Citizens' Arms: The Regulation of the Gun Wars of the United States of America", and "Kutaro Shimizu: The Trajectory of Intellectuals after the War". The documentary "People in Front of the Prime Minister's Residence" directed by him on the 311 Fukushima nuclear disaster was released in 2015.