Ashihei Hino was a Japanese writer, whose works included depictions of military life during World War II. He was born in Wakamatsu and in 1937 he received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for one of his novels, Fun'nyōtan . At that moment he was a soldier for the Japanese army in China.
He then got promoted to the information corps and published numerous works about the daily lives of Japanese soldiers. It is for his war novels that he became famous during the war. His book Mugi to Heitai sold over a million copies.
