In a shift from his conclusions in ''The Rising Sun, '' Mr. He entered a long-running historical debate about the Roosevelt administration's culpability at the start of the Pacific war with '' ''Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath'' (Doubleday, 1982). This technique served him well in perhaps the most popular of his histories, ''Adolf Hitler'' (Doubleday, 1976), an anecdotal portrait that several reviewers called the most comprehensive biography of Hitler up until that time. For ''Rising Sun'' his subjects ranged from Japanese generals and admirals to housewives who had survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Toland typically sought to do as many interviews as possible, sometimes hundreds. Reviewing ''The Rising Sun'' (Random House) for The New York Times, Walter Clemons called it a ''big, absorbing and finally very moving history of the Pacific war, told primarily from the Japanese viewpoint.'' The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Tamiko Toland. John Toland, a best-selling historian whose book ''The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945'' won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, died on Sunday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut.
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