David Bergamini was born in Japan and fled to China after war was declared. He spent his high school years in a prisoner of war camp in the Philippines. After the war he attended Dartmouth College, graduating Summa Cum Laude. Following his graduation from Dartmouth, he joined the staff of Look Magazine. While vacationing at the Hakone hot springs in Japan in 1965 he was befriended by several former high ranking Kempeitei (secret police) officers who wished to unburden themselves regarding many of Japan's most terrible actions during the war. Thus began Bergamini's exposure to a remarkable array of hitherto secret and previously undocumented information on the Imperial Court, the secret police, the Kokuryukai (Black Dragon Society) and the high command as well as new information on the role of Hirohito and the Imperial Court in Japan's aggression against China and ultimately the rest of Asia. Running counter to official "sanitized" accounts, Bergamini's meticulously documented history has received a mixed reception in both Japan and the West. It remains, however, as the only account of Japan's interwar and wartime expansion which has not been censored, subject to historical revisionism, and is informed by insider accounts of Japanese fascism.