5 comments about Belly of the Beast: A POW's Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hellship, the Oryoku Maru.

1. While Mrs. Pearson crafts an engaging tale and a gut-wrenching tribute to POWs during World War Two, the way this book is packaged tarnishes the story. On the cover is written, "A POW's inspiring true story of faith, courage, and survival aboard the infamous WWII Japanese hell ship Oryoku Maru." A picture of the Oryoku Maru adorns the top of the front cover. In fact, the protagonist spends 10 pages of the narrative onboard the Oryoku Maru, out of a 265-page story.
   
   Furthermore, on the back cover: "On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship Oryoku Maru with more than 1,600 other American captives. Almost 1,300 of them would be dead by journey's end...." Again, this sounds as if 1,300 prisoners perished aboard the Oryoku Maru, but this is not what Mrs. Pearson details inside the book! Included in this figure of 1,300 are deaths in the Philippines, on another Japanese vessel, and in Japan. Horribly misleading.
   
   One final note. Skip pages 200 and 201 of this book which state that during World War Two Emperor Hirohito chose "not to be involved in his government's actions or decisions." For the truth behind Hirohito's role during and leading up to World War Two, read Herbert P. Bix's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan."
   
   This false advertising from Penguin Putnam prevents Mrs. Pearson's book from receiving the 4 stars it deserves. Shame on you, publisher!



2. To start with the title might lead you to believe this is a 'POW's true story" except the POW passed away in 1973 and never wrote this story. It is nothing more than using a mans name to lend some authenticity to the "based upon a true story" concept. The dialogue is completely made up by the author and it reads like a 1950's television show... "Gee fellas... those japs sure are nasty". In my opinion this should be listed as fiction. The author claims in her opening that she did not want to distract the reader with footnotes. I can see why because there wouldn't be any. Overall this 'novel' could have been put together with a dozen or so Wikipedia searches and some overly cheesy dialogue. If you are looking for a true accounts similiar to Night by Elie Weisel this isn't it! Ghost Soldiers and Baa Baa Black Sheep are two that come to mind that give a much better treatment of the subject. If you are only interested in the glossed over Ladies Home Journal version this might do, but barely.



3. the best book i have read so far on this subject.i felt i was living every moment, but so glad i was not. a true testimony to the spirit of human courage and endurance. and a valuable insight to the inhumanities of mankind.



4. I speak from the perspective of someone who has known several Philippine POWs and have read extensively on this subject. This book is so full of inaccuracies it is not worth anyone's time to read it. There are hundreds of better books out there on the subject. Save your money!



5. Author Judith Pearson has written a riveting tale about the improsonment and ultimate mistreatment of American POWs by the Japanese. The story centers around Estel Myers, a young man who joins the Army as a corpsman. After serving a tour in China, Myers was assigned to the Philippines shortly before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese invaded in mid-December, 1941, and Myers was taken prisoner by the Japanese.

   Myers suffered for two years in a Japanese prison camp with very little food or water, but his ultimate punishment was soon to follow. The Americans had turned the tide against the Japanese,and were fighting their way back to re-capture the Philippines. Realizing this, the Japanese began loading their POWs on "Hell Ships"; grossly overloaded freighters; for the long voyage to prison camps in Japan. Myers was loaded aboard the ship Oryuku Maru with approximately 1,600 other POWs. Only about 400 arrived in Japan alive. Myers survived the sinking of the Oryuku Maru as well as transfers from two other Hell Ships before reaching Japan.

   The conditions on the ships were much worse than in the camps. Each man was allotted approximately 1/4 cup of rotten rice per day, along with a tiny amount of water. Men were unable to sit or lay down in the holds of the ships due to the massive overcrowding. Sanitary facilities amounted to a bucket lowered by the Japanese. The death rate was astounding. In the later stages of the voyage, as many as fifty men were dying per day.

   Upon reaching Japan, many of the men were put to work on docks, in coal mines, or building defense shelters. Many died, but some, including Myers, managed to survive to be liberated by the Americans. Myers eventually succumbed years later due to the toll taken on his body by the Japanese.

   This is an eye-opening book. The atrocities committed by the Japanese are unbelievable, and it is a miracle that Myers managed to survive for so long. Read this fine book and live the life of a POW.

No comments about Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (Literary Conversations Series).

1 comments about The Tosa Diary (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature).

1. You know, there's always some level of hype about the "latest translation" and all, but this wonderful translation of "The Tosa Diary" by William Porter, originally published in 1912, demonstrates that we are not always so much more clever than those who came before. Porter is carefully faithful to the sense of the original while capturing its tone and mood in English with great talent. And his method of rendering the waka poems scattered throughout the story is inventive and interesting--though sometimes understandably a bit strained; he has taken the original and fashioned it into something that is true both to waka poetics and to the English poetics of his time (before T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and all that jazz), with a rhyming couplet at the end corresponding to the way the last two lines of a waka break off from the first three thereby completing the poem with a flourish. Compare his rendering of a poem by Ariwara Narihira with Helen McCullough's more conservatively literal (though not inferior) rendering, and you'll get a sense of Porter's distinctiveness here:
   
   Porter: "If the cherry trees/Nevermore burst forth in bloom,/'Twould be better far;/For the saddest time of all/Is the spring, when petals fall."
   
   McCullough: "If this were but a world/To which cherry blossoms/Were quite foreign,/Then perhaps in spring/Our hearts would know peace."
   
   As for the story itself, it is a fairly interesting early attempt at prose narrative, though it is pretty uneventful and kind of drags in spots (one almost wishes the much-feared pirates had actually caught up with Tsurayuki's boat). The thing I found most significant about the tale, though, was the manner in which Ki no Tsurayuki here fleshes out in narrative form the principle he elucidates in the first paragraph of his preface to the "Kokinshu" waka anthology, i.e. poetry being the expression of people's emotional reactions to their experiences and sensual perceptions. Here we see that principle in action all along this otherwise rather tedious trip back to the Capital. Certainly, such moments were Tsurayuki's primary focus and interest, not "Pirates of the Inland Sea" per se.
   
   This book also has the original Japanese text on one side with the English translation on the other, so it is really handy for students of Japanese literature.

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 Life Behind Barbed Wire: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai'i Issei.

3 comments about In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, with Nine of Her Best Short Stories.

1. Higuchi Ichiyo lived the classic tragic writer's life-- poverty, a struggle for success, death by tuberculosis at 23. She is considered to be the first professional female writer in Japan. She is an extremely popular literary figure in Japan-- her popularity due to both the quality of her work and her all too short life.
   
   This book contains a critical biography written by the late Robert Lyons Danly. He also translated and anthologized nine of her short stories in the volume. The critical biography is concise and informative, if a little bit on the dry side. The biography is spiced with little bits of her journals.
   
   The selection of stories spans the career of the writer, moving from her most unformed and derivative work to her more mature stories of the floating world. Some of the stories are stunning (particularly "Child's Play"). It is difficult not to wish that Higuchi Ichiy could have survived to a more advanced age and a more developed voice.
   
   Recommended reading for those with an interest in Japanese literature.



2. After celebrating a golden age that was hundreds of years ahead of other civilized nations, women in Japan quickly fell from the cultural vanguard they had enjoyed during the Heian and were silent throughout the succession of bakufu governments that ended with the Meiji restoration in 1868. Ichiyo is widely credited as one of the first female voices to re-emerge after this extended silence. Though her career was cut short by her early death, several of her short stories are still in wide circulation in Japan and elsewhere. The beauty of this book is that it not only includes her own writings but also a rather deftly crafted biography. It has been my experience that non-Japanophiles tend to shy away from Japanese literature for lack of understanding the culture. The inclusion of the biography in this work makes it more approachable for those wishing to delve into the world of Japanese literature without undertaking a study of Japan's history and culture.



3. Deservedly, this 19th century's woman's writings are considered some of the greatest in the world. Robert Danly has done a wonderful job of bringing Ichiyo to us. Out of a different time and world, he has still managed to make her accessible to an English reader.

   The first half of the book is devoted to biographical material about Japan's unique and memorable real-life heroine. The second half presents nine of her short stories in translation. Each story its own literary jewel.

   I've read thousands of books and this is one of my most treasured.

2 comments about When Justice Failed: The Fred Korematsu Story (Stories of America/81131).

1. 1941, four months before Pearl Habor, Curtis Munson was asked by President Roosevelt to secretly investigate whether Japanese Americans posted a threat to the United States. Munson wrote, "There will be no armed uprising of Japanese Americans. For the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or; at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war." A constitutional question of whether law 503 violated the equal protection clause of the constitution, of which, the court has not addressed.
   
   Fred criminal case was reversed. The suprement court case, Korematsu verses the United States was not reversed. The fourteenth amendment test was not applied to the Korematsu necessary to protect fundamental rights.



2. This is a moving account of World War II and the struggles that surrounded the people involved. Your child will learn respect for Fred and the risks that he took to safeguard his fellow man. I used this book as research for my own historical novel and found it to be immensely useful.

5 comments about Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei.

1. I agree with the reviewers who found the book repetitive, a little boring and more about his family than Japanese culture. While he attempts to provide many insights I fear that most of them are dated now 16 years later. Also the author makes such a big deal about seeing the hometown of his grandfather and when he finally gets there after 300 pages there is absolutely no payoff.



2. I appreciate Mura's contribution to Asian American literature and his courage to reveal himself, which is very atypical for Asian/Asian American men. His struggles with his racial identity and journey to find connections with his grand parents' homeland were fascinating. Being a person of Japanese ancestory, I believe Asian/Asian American men can personally relate to Mura's story. I also recommend his other book,"Where the Body Meets Memory", which reveals further on his issues and helps to complement this book.



3. An overwraught and overwritten diary about how hard it is to be David Mura, wealthy American of Japanese descent. Hello? Hard lives are lived on the West Bank, in drought-striken East Africa and in Northern Ireland. This self-indulgent work trivializes real suffering.



4. I can't comment with any authority on this book regarding its literary merit. However, I can say that, having lived life as a sansei just as David Mura has, I found this book a compelling read -- a book whose feeling and emotion was/is quite consistent with mine. This is so even though for the most part we seem to have lived very different kinds of lives. Our principal commonality appears to be that a stay in Japan during young adulthood played a pivotal role in helping us learn something about ourselves. Trivial and obvious? Perhaps. Anti-white and/or anti-American (as has been stated by other readers here)? I don't think so.



5. I am a Japan-born Japanese who lives in Boston for over 10 years and it is my strong pursuit to learn cultural encountering points between East and West especially, to name, Japan and US. The book caught my eyes immediately when I first saw it in a bookstore since I thought I can read about this Japanese American who know more about US than Japan although he must have been exposed to a some level of Japanese-ism over the course of his upbringing. My expectation from the book was to see the complex mosaic of his feeling toward Japan and its culture now that he lives in the country Japan. Unfortunately, it was not what I retrieved from the book since he was rather in a rare subculture of Japan and read little about his interaction with Japanese as cultural encountering. However, it was certainly a personal memoir of an expat who lives in a foreign country but knows the intricacy of Japan. This will not be a book for those who want to read his statements of Japan. But it will certainly be an interesting reading if you want to read the life of this expat who can describe his personal experience in more Japanese familiar terms.

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.

2 comments about My Mother is a Tractor: A Life in Rural Japan.

1. A friend reccomended this book to me before I begin a study abroad in Japan. I had read alot of "memoir of Japan" type of books and was prepared for something similar to "36 Views of Mt. Fuji" or "Learning to Bow". I quickly learned that Klar prefers to push copious amounts of information all into one fun book. I was taken aback at the lack of organization at first. Klar will launch into a brief, but detailed, talk of perverts in Japan and immediately jump into a Memorial Peach Park opening ceremony. However, the book has a ridiculous amount of (semi) useful information and still remains a memoir of sorts. The book will have you laughing out loud and enjoying Klar's writing style.



2. Before I went to Japan to study in October of 2004, I visited the internet and discovered Nicholas Klar's webpage. He told some really entertaining stories about his times in the JET program (or programme). I was not going to be a JET, but I really wanted to discoved some the "people" side of the Japanese. So I read all I could of his adventures and essays online. Then I emailed him. He was kind enough to reply. In fact, when I inquired about buying his future book he nearly fell all over himself with enthusiasm. This was probably the starving author coming out in him. In any case, I was impressed that he would remember me a year later when the book was published and I was also impressed that the book is a fun read.
   I think Nicholas's JET kids were fortunate to have him in their schools. His book does indeed show the Japanese to be both quirky and fun, which many people might find unexpected. He can tell a story that brings a tear to the eye, as well as one that brings a chuckle to anyone, familiar with Japan or not.
   Buy the book and have a good read.