5 comments about Never Surrender: An American Navy Sailors Struggle For Survival in the Deadly Japanese P.O.W. Camps of WW II.

1. This book is a fascinating insider view of the horrors of a Japanese WWII POW camp. Great for WWII buffs and non-buffs alike.



2. This book was excellent. The first-person point-of-view made the action seem like it was happening to me! I have read a lot of WW II books, but I learned a lot from this one.



3. This book blew me away. I literally couldn't put it down. I would give it six stars if I could.



4. Never Surrender is the most intense WW II book I have ever read. The fact that it was written in the first person by an actual survivor of the battles and the POW camps really brought the story home for me. The main character in the true life adventure is also the book's author. Sometimes he is on the periphery of battles and at other times he is right in the middle of it!
   
   I was very surprised by the humor and wit of the POW survivor, Earl Anderson, who wrote the book. Many times, I found myself laughing at a hilarious anecdote told by the writer a moment before I was holding my breath as the writer's life was in danger. The writer uses the interesting technique of telling the story as if it is happening in the present. This brings an immediacy to the story that is not present in other WW II books. I was shocked and fascinated as the story unfolded. The writer's personal experiences reveal truths about the Philippines battles and the Japanese POW camps that I never knew about before. This book is an entertaining adventure story as well as a harrowing tale of survival. I would recommend this book to anyone and not just to those people interested in WW II.



5. This was an amazing story of one man's need to survive. I liked how it dealt with the history of the time as well as what Earl was going through. Well written.

3 comments about The Secret Camera: A Marine's Story: Four Years as a POW.

1. As someone with a deep interest in photography, cameras and World War II, I must say I was most disappointed.
   
   With a title like "The Secret Camera" I expected more about his photographic adventures.
   
   Yet, in a book with close to 250 pages, the camera does not make an appearance until 2/3 of the book had elapsed.
   
   Even then, the photography 'story' seemed incidental.
   
   Of course I sympathize with the author for his ordeal. And, it has strengthened my anti-Japanese resolve. (Until the Japs say sorry for the atrocities of WW2, I refuse to visit that country. Learn their language or eat their food.)
   
   What let me down was the title - The Secret Camera. For me, it cheapened the whole book. I mean, if it had been titled "My exploits as a Japanese prisoner", the book would have been much better, I feel.
   
   For me, I bought the book because I thought it would be largely about his attempts to build the camera, process the film etc. To find out that something promised in the title fills less than 10% of the book is very disappointing.
   
   That said, I think it was brave of the writer to fly in the face of what he had signed and publish the book/pictures.



2. Just a brief update: According to an Associated Press story dated May 12, 2006, the author died on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at the age of 89, apparently after a heart attack. In light of the present controversy surrounding the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere by the U.S., understanding some of the history of how wartime prisoners have been treated in the past is of particular relevance today. From Fukuoko to Abu Graib...



3. Most of us remember December 7th, 1941 as Pearl Harbor Day. To Terence Kirk, it is more memorable as the day that he (and 202 other China Marines) were captured by the Japanese. They were to remain prisoners for 1,355 days, the entire length of time the U.S. was at war with Japan.
   
   American Marines in Japanese prisoner of war camps were 17.5 times more likely to die from the treatment in those camps than they were to die in combat. Mr. Kirk survived. and as of the time of writing this book there were 31 survivors of the 202 China Marines.
   
   Unique to Mr. Kirk, so far as is known he was the only one to have built a camera while in the POW camp and taken pictures. This is his story and some of the pictures.
   
   Mr. Kirk ends this book: 'If not for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , we would have met certain death.' I think he's right.

No comments about To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913-1938 (Women in Translation).

2 comments about Rediscovering Rikyu: And the Beginnings of the Japanese Tea Ceremony (Global Oriental).

1. This is a delightful and scholarly work that examines the history and cultural significance of tea in Japan. It is a book of stories about great tea-masters and focuses on the most famous and influential of them, Rikyu.
   
   Here is a particularly striking story.
   
   One of Rikyu's guest knew that Morning Glories grew on the hedge in tea-master's garden. Wishing to see these flowers opening in the morning sun, he came to the tea party early but was dismayed to find that all of the flowers had been cut down. However, on entering the tea hut he found that Rikyu had placed a single Morning Glory in a simple bamboo vase in the alcove. He was transfixed by the beauty of the solitary flower and by the realization that Rikyu had deliberately shifted the focus away from the massed flowers of the hedgerow to this isolated specimen. Such were the delicate considerations and expression of the tea-master, and such were the considerations of the society within which he lived.
   
   "Rediscovering Rikyu" offers the reader an engaging insight into an unfamiliar world, a world redolent with Zen metaphysics, jealous and feuding warlords, anguish and ritualistic suicide, the aesthetics of preparing tea, and the transformational beauty of the Morning Glory. It is distanced world, and Herbert Plutschow is a knowledgeable and scholarly guide.
   
   But the book is more than history. It examines tea as a way of approaching, attaining, and sustaining liminality within a Japan that was in a period of ongoing conflict. Plutschow carefully and skillfully examines the deep-core symbolism and tranformative possibilities within the delicate art form or tea.
   
   This is a delightful, readable, and interesting book that provides an unexpected and welcome insight not simply into a different culture but into our own cultures and contemporary preoccupations.



2. I love this book! The author has researched and presented the subject well. It has put so much of the Tea Ceremony in perspective for me that I am grateful!

   It is good to see an objective view, questioning histories coming from sources which rely on information from the Iemoto schools themselves. In the development of most Iemoto systems a loosely based and often fictious history is created, what the Chinese called "Leaning on the Ancients." However, these histories don't usually withstand the test of time and academic scrutiny. This is one of those wonderful books that sheds light on the subject, and allows us to see something of the real history.

No comments about A Fire Is Burning It Is in Me: The Life and Writings of Michiyo Fukaya.

No comments about Captured on Corregidor: Diary of an American P.O.W. in World War II.

1 comments about In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Dipolomat Who Risked his Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews From the Holocaust.

1. This book was fascinating, and should be required reading in all History classes.

No comments about Kato Shidzue: A Japanese Feminist (Library of World Biography Series) (Library of World Biography).

1 comments about Back Roads To Far Towns: Basho's Travel Journal (Companions for the Journey).

1. (Please see William J. Higginson's excellent review of the earlier, Echo Press edition of this book.) I have Ueno Yozo's scholarly edition of Oku No Hosomichi which I've been going over, section by section, with a real scholar of Edo Japanese. My little knowledge of Japanese allows me to understand the differences between modern Japanese and the original, and yes, there's a density, a quickness, and a terseness, in the original that Cid Corman's translation faithfully captures in English. I give a great deal of credit for this to Cid's co-translator, Kamaike Susumu, and to Cid's love for just these qualities in poetry, which he learned from such earlier masters as Ezra Pound, and of course from his great teacher William Carlos Williams, and was on the road to perfecting for himself when he did this project and published it (in 1961) in Origin magazine. Cid's style was a good "fit" for this project--in other words, as the Japanese put it--Cid had "en" or destiny when he undertook this translation with Kamaike-san, for the plain truth is, Cid Corman did not know Japanese. Even after all of his many years of living in Japan, he was not able to speak, read or write it. Cid was absolutely honest about this, however, and you'll see that he shares top billing with Kamaike-san on the title page. Startled? Well, I'd argue that the top English translation of this Japanese classic being produced by a non-Japanese reader, writer, and speaker, is not quite as startling as Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage being hailed by Civil War veterans as being the most accurate rendition of their experience of war in print. Scholars argue that Crane's psychological dynamic allowed him to present the "truth" of conflict. I'd argue that the same sort of dynamic--albeit stylistic--was at work with Cid and Basho. On this point, I differ from Higginson.

4 comments about Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment.

1. "Topaz Moon" is a slim little book that is filled with a selection of the interment imagery of Chiura Obata. The imagery is both in his writings and in his art. And both make lasting impressions.
   
   The images range from simple line drawing to watercolors executed while a victim of Executive Order 9066 in which all West Coast Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in interment camps. It is amazing what he was able to accomplish in the face of circumstances beyond his control. Obata's work is excellent.
   
   "Topaz Moon", "Obata's Yosemite" and "Nature Art With Chiura Obata" are the only three books currently in print about the remarkable artist and human being that was Chiura Obata. The three books present different facets of his life and all are worth reading and seeing. Highly recommended.



2. This is a wonderful book. I bought it for the artwork which is fresh, inventive, and very skillful but the social history is equally engrossing. The text is clearly written and generous with quotes.

   At 8.25" square it's smaller than your average coffee table book, but the pages are rich with intelligence, beauty and invention.




3. Most of the artwork are done in black ink on white paper. It makes for a stark and bleak testament to the difficulties faced and endured by the internees. The book is a great teaching tool for children and adults, not only to learn about the internment, but to study the artwork.



4. Topaz Moon is a testament to the power of art, not simply as a mechanism for creating beauty, but also as a method of documenting history. Faced with the social disruption and indignity of relocation and internment in WWII, Professor Chiura Obata of the University of California at Berkeley chose to use his considerable artistic gifts to create what amounts to a visual diary of his internment experience. Seemingly hundreds of drawings, pen and ink paintings and watercolors (too many to count) document Professor Obata and his families experiences from the start of the war, through relocation to Tanforan, internment at Topaz, and beyond, in stark terms, quiet dignity and haunting beauty.

   Unlike photography which can only memorialize the actual events of a moment, painting and sketching allows the artist to document his or her own emotional reaction to those events. Dorothea Lange, herself an admirer of Professor Obata, took photographs of the Tanforan relocation center, including Professor Obata's art classes, some of which are reproduced in Topaz Moon. However, compared to Professor Obata's own first hand sketches of the internment process, Lange's photos appear emotionless. This is because Professor Obata infuses his documentary sketches, which are remeniscent of Van Gogh's figural drawings, with the powerful emotional reactions he felt in witnessing scenes in which he too was a victim.

   But Topaz Moon is a text which is more about creating community than casting blame. Kimi Kodani Hill, Professor Obata's granddaughter, has framed her grandfather's art with an insightful, succinct and compelling history of Professor Obata's life and the events of the time. The anectdotes relayed by Ms. Hill emphasize the support, assistance and sympathy given to the Obata's by their many freinds outside of the camps. I was struck by the fact the President of U.C. Berkeley, Robert Gordon Sproul, who himself was vocally opposed to the internment, personally rescued Professor Obata's life's work of art and stored that art in his official U.C. residence for the duration of the war.

   While Topaz Moon is more than an art book, the art itself is more than merely documentary. Professor Obata's finished paintings and sumi-e works represent some of the best American artwork of the 20th Century. Works such as Moonlight Over Topaz (commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt while Professor Obata was still interred), Hospital Topaz, and Silent Moonlight at Tanforan Relocation Center would stand out in any museum. In their own way, these images are every bit as beautiful as his earlier Yosemite woodblock prints.

   I highly recommend this book.