It's a chore, although it looks like there is a Criterion edition, but "The Human Condition" for one Japanese perspective as to the war's effect on an individual. I mean, what are you going to do with 9 and a half hours, anyway, watch two college baseball games?
The British film critic David Shipman described the trilogy in his 1983 book, The Story of Cinema, as "unequivocally the greatest film ever made."[12] In his review for The New York Times in 2008, A. O. Scott declared, "Kobayashi's monumental film can clarify and enrich your understanding of what it is to be alive."[13] Critic Philip Kemp, in his essay written for The Criterion Collection's release of the trilogy, argues that while "the film suffers from its sheer magnitude [and] from the almost unrelieved somberness of its prevailing mood ... The Human Condition stands as an achievement of extraordinary power and emotional resonance: at once a celebration of the resilience of the individual conscience and a purging of forced complicity in guilt (of a nation and, as the title implies, of the whole human race)."[6]