As a young historian researching prewar popular political movements in the early 1970s, Yoshimi Yoshiaki (b. 1946) became increasingly struck—and troubled—by the systematic inattention to popular experiences of the war period, along with the virtually universal silence on questions of popular war responsibility. Imbued with the progressive convictions of a scholarly generation that came of age amid the political struggles of the late 1960s, he was dissatisfied with the near-universal academic focus on elites and abstract social structures that rendered the story of the Japanese experience of the war “a history without people.” After many years of research, stops and starts, the end result was Grassroots Fascism: a radically different vantage on the wartime experience from the “bottom-up” and a bold attempt to break out of the constricted confines of “history in the passive voice.”