2 comments about Nagasaki 1945.

1. I will start this review by establishing my background.
   
   *) I am a follower of history; I obtained a minor in history as an undergraduate and read a great deal of historical material.
   *) I am a firm believer in the thesis that the United States was correct in dropping the two atomic weapons on Japan to end the Second World War. There is no question in my mind that the unleashing of atomic energy against the people of Japan led to fewer casualties than if the Allies had invaded the home islands.
   
   Nevertheless, it is chilling to read this account of the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki. People argue that there were comparable or even greater casualties when the Allies used conventional bombs on Dresden and Tokyo. If you read eyewitness accounts of those attacks, the stories are superficially similar. However, there is something particularly frightening about the accounts of nuclear attacks. The slow, bloody deaths of people due to radiation poisoning, the horrific burns, where in an instant the flesh is flash cooked. The near-total destruction of everything in the blast area, leaving almost nothing for the survivors, which makes their condition hopeless without some form of massive outside aid.
   The author was a Nagasaki doctor who managed to survive the blast. This book is an account of his attempts to care for the survivors, using simple swabs to try to treat severe radiation and heat burns. He also includes short blurbs describing the political situation in Japan at the highest levels during July and the first part of August in 1945. He explains the attempted military coup led by a band of die-hard officers opposed to the surrender. Those officers still wanted to fight on, even against the prospect of additional atomic attacks and in direct opposition to the will of the Japanese Emperor. This is the most convincing evidence that the atomic attacks were the right thing to do.
   Some people believe that nuclear weapons are just more powerful instances of conventional forces. If you read accounts like this one, it is clear that that is not so. Nuclear weapons are enormously different in kind from conventional forces, destroying in ways that should convince everyone that they should never be used in warfare again.



2. There is no better way to understand the pain and suffering caused by the use of nuclear weapons than to read Tatsuichiro Akizuki's eyewitness account of the atomic bomb damage to Nagasaki. Dr. Akizuki not only describes the immediate devistation caused by the nuclear blast that hit Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 but also chronicles his attempts as a physican to deal with the injuries of the people who survived the initial blast. It is a very compelling story.

No comments about Voices From This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts (Palgrave Studies in Oral History).

2 comments about The Kagero Diary: A Woman's Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, No. 19.).

1. The Kagero Diary precedes the most famous of Japanese literary creations the Genji monogatari by a few decades. This is the second full translation of the Kagero Diary, the first was by Edward Seidensticker, and I believe this one to be the superior. Dr. Arntzen begins with a 50 page introduction that informs the reader of both the historical and the literary realam in which the Diary was created, and she gives a basic description of the poetry, religion, and politic of the time, so the reader can easily understand what is taking place. Instead of footnotes the author puts the footnotes parallel to the diary itself making for very easy reference. The Diary itself is a staright forward memoir of Michitsuna's mother telling of her marriage woes. A wonderful book.



2. This book (same as the Gossamer Years tr. Seidensticker) is a series of fairly short passages written by "Michinaga's Mother," describing her life in the last quarter of the 10th c., starting with her marriage to a Fujiwara who would become one of the most powerful lords in the country. She is particularly interested in recording the poems she wrote and those written to reply to them by her husband and others. She also gives a vivid picture of her moral struggle with the Buddhist rejection of human loves and the cultural pleasures she is so deeply involved in.

   I am just getting interested in Heian Japan after reading the Tale of Genji, and the Kagero Diary is a wonderful source of information and understanding. As a memoir it is much more powerful (IMHO) than Murasaki's own diary or Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. You can see and feel the author coming to terms with who she is and the life she has lived as she narrates the events that were most important for her.

   The text of the translation is set on the right-hand pages and the notes on the facing page. The poems are all transcribed so that one can see the words in them, and Arntzen, the translator, comments on the puns, etc. The notes and introduction are in some places personal, describing a modern woman scholar's changing understanding of the author. They are also smart and scholarly. I am not sure whether this translation would be satisfactory all by itself, but with the notes one feels one is getting in touch with the original. Unfortunately, there are many irritating typos.

No comments about Courage Beyond the Blindfold.

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 Turning Pages: Reading And Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan.

3 comments about Beauty in Disarray (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature).

1. Indeed there is an introduction explaining the circumstances of the time, which anyone can skip if they like. The ending at the climatic point which is before the ending we know of the real story is a rather Japanese thing to do, perhaps, and I have read enough Japanese pieces not to mind this style. Within those bounds, this is a detailed and engaging portrait of the erratic, fantastic course of one fairly wild woman's life within an extreme political climate and a time of huge social change. The heroine is anything but perfect, but her story captured me, and in fact greatly changed the direction of a panel I am presenting on Japanese women authors. Enough to make me seek out other works by Setouchi without hesitation.



2. The appeal of Harumi Setouchi is her beautiful prose. It is simply impossible to translate.



3. Setouchi recreates a moment in Japan's Taisho period when radical C20 ideas were being first explored - feminism, socialism, anarchism, free love and all the ususal suspects. Taking the feminist magazine "Seito" as her canvas, Setouchi sketches the incidents, affairs and ideas of its leading members, particularly country girl/coquette Ito Noe. Bizarrely, however, Setouchi writes an introductory chapter which summarises the events of the period she is going to cover, depriving her subsequent story of any suspense or tension. Even more strangely, her story stops before the most interesting incidents she has telegraphed start. Overall, one for dedicated Japanophiles or social historians only.

No comments about A Korean Nationalist Entrepreneur: A Life History of Kim Songsu, 1891-1955 (S U N Y Series in Korean Studies).

No comments about Lost Names: Scenes from a Boyhood in Japanese-Occupied Korea.

5 comments about Lost in Action: A World War II Soldier's Account of Capture on Bataan and Imprisonment by the Japanese.

1. I normally wouldn't pick up a book about war to read. I knew Dick and that it took him decades to get his story the way he wanted. I sensed he was someone who's story i wanted to read. I too, couldn't put it down. This is a story that truely tells the horror of WAR and what "Man's inhumanity towards Man" really is. Dick's book made me a more appreciative American.



2. I just read this 343 paged story of the account of my dad's first cousin's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war, and I will never think the same about the sacrifices made by soldiers as I did before reading this.
   One can also glean insight into the human heart or nature, when it is threatened, or starved, alone and isolated or in a pack or group.
   And for me personally, this story makes me proud of the contribution Bilyeus have made to the United States, not only in wars but many other ways, since the first Billiou (later Bilyeu) landed at what was then called New Amsterdam back in 1661, as Huguenots sailing here from Leyden, Holland, just 41 years after the Pilgrims.



3. Afer I started reading Lost In Action I could not put it down, it is well written and comes very close to my father's accounts of the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, the various camps and Japan. There are many coincidences, that make me wonder if the author knew my Dad?
   I wish the author had included maps, photographs, even the insignia from the Coast Artillery, but I have many of those to refer to. This is not to criticise the verbal descriptions which are very visual.
   I feel that this book was very difficult for the author to write for men like my father had a great difficulty discussing the atrocities and the effects upon their fellow prisoners. I am grateful to the author for his courage and the perseverance that it evidently took to write this book which I hightly recommend.



4. This book is a must for anyone who reads stories of war and the affect it has on the soldiers. I praise the author for the courage he had to write it. I love you grandpa...



5. Although I am the writters son. Based on all the reading I have done over the years. This book comes as close to telling the true story as possible. He had nothing to gain by writing this story. He only wanted to live his life and that he did. Go in peace, Dad!