The Osaka Division: A Division of Peddlers

This novel is adapted from the author's "The Osaka Division's Rebel" and focuses mainly on events on foreign battlefields. ---

On the smoke-choked battlefields of the Pacific, while countless soldiers bleed and die for the “glory of the empire,” Kwantung Army quartermaster Sasaki looks at the war through a merchant’s eyes and sees its other true nature: the most chaotic and irresistible speculative feast in human history.

Volume One: Speculation in the South Seas (1942–1944)

From using jazz to break American morale on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines to trading gasoline for jade beside Bangkok’s royal palace; from secretly bartering quinine and Rolex watches with seventy thousand prisoners of war to striking a shadowy “roads for jade” deal with the Chinese Expeditionary Force on the Burma Road, Sasaki’s troops never truly charge into battle. Instead, one illicit deal after another builds an invisible “South Seas trading company” in the gaps between the front lines. War is the stage, but he is the puppeteer behind the scenes.

Volume Two: Delusions at War’s End (1945)

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima has barely faded when he assembles a radio and learns of the surrender before anyone else, trading blood plasma and first-aid kits for gold. After the Emperor’s surrender broadcast, he turns the “shame of defeat” into a business opportunity, organizing soldiers to sell “May your military fortunes endure” embroidered underwear to the occupying American troops and making lighters from bomb fragments... Amid the empire’s final, frantic revelry as it collapses, he stakes everything on one last gamble: filling an entire transport ship with Southeast Asian antiques and quietly sailing for the heart of postwar Japan’s black market.

This is not a story about war, but a legend about building a commercial empire atop the ruins of war.