The Rising Sun: a reading companion
An interactive org chart of Imperial Japan's command and cabinet, plus a campaign atlas for 1936 to 1941. Built to accompany John Toland's history, live on the web.
HTML Python
Reading John Toland’s The Rising Sun, the hard part is not the battles. It is keeping the cast straight: which general held which ministry in which cabinet, and how the army and navy staffs actually related to the civilian government. So I built the reference I wanted to have open next to the book.
Two pieces, both live:
- Imperial Japan: Command and Cabinet, 1936–1941. An org chart of the leadership with portraits, tracing Yamamoto, Ishiwara, Sugiyama, Matsuoka, and the rest through the cabinet turnover of the late thirties.
- A campaign atlas, 1936–1941, mapping the road from Manchuria to Pearl Harbor.
Both are hand-built static HTML with locally vendored maps and portraits, fetched and processed by small Python scripts. No framework, no build step, loads instantly, will still work in twenty years.