More than 1,000 pages of handwritten letters from 1947 to 1948 by an American woman who witnessed and described in detail the Allied Occupation of Japan have been discovered in Nebraska and recently obtained by The Japan Times.
The letters include details of how U.S. service members spent their daily lives in Kobe, the devastation of the port city and Tokyo, and even a glimpse of the late Emperor Hirohito, who visited Kobe on his first trip across Japan after the war.
The letters, written mostly to her family back in the United States and accompanied by about 250 black-and-white photos taken in Japan, were discovered and transcribed by Ken Alley, who runs a secondhand bookstore in Nebraska.