Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara (Soho)

When Aki Nakasone and her parents return to Los Angeles after years in an internment camp and an involuntary relocation to Chicago, their hometown feels unwelcoming and unfamiliar. “Ban the Jap” committees prevent them from moving into many areas in the city, Little Tokyo is filled with Black transplants from the South, and Aki feels lucky to find a house in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Many others who have returned from the camps can only find temporary housing in trailers and old army barracks.

She’s also fortunate to land a job in the Japanese Hospital as a nurse’s aid, because California is mulling over propositions that will limit the livelihoods open to Japanese Americans. There are rumors that the state intends to confiscate property owned by Japanese Americans under an act of escheat, and the Ku Klux Klan is a legal entity under California law. 

When one of Aki’s elderly patients turns out to be covered with bruises, she’s surprised to find that the old man is the father of one of her husband’s best friends, who was best man at her wedding. His dismissive reaction to his father’s injuries shocks Aki and when the old man later dies in the hospital from a gunshot wound, her suspicions flare into life when the son is nowhere to be found.

As Aki searches for the missing son, she becomes drawn into the scattered community of  internment camp returnees and the underworld that flourishes in post-war Los Angeles. Police corruption and rampant prejudice impede her efforts to find the dead man’s only relative, plunging her into a perilous and frightening mission. To complicate matters, the man Aki married in a whirlwind wartime romance has come home from the battlefield with memories that trouble his sleep and have turned him into a stranger.

In this sequel to Clark and Division (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Naomi Hirahara once again uses a compelling mystery to bring past history to light. Aki’s husband is one of the “Go for Broke Boys,” a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, part of the 100th Infantry Battalion that fought in Europe while their own families were interned in U.S. camps. In less than two years these two units earned over 4000 Purple Hearts and 4000 Bronze Star medals, only to face discrimination when they returned to the United States. In a heartbreaking portion of Evergreen, a member of the 442nd is unable to marry the woman he loves unless the couple elopes to another state--California’s anti-miscegenation law isn’t repealed until 1948, three years after the war ended.

Hirahara’s deep dive into history and her skill in creating intricate mystery plots are brightened by bursts of descriptions that are original and lovely. “Palm trees swaying against a bleed of pink,” and “windows spilled sun on tile floors” make readers understand why Aki and her family, along with so many other, returned to Los Angeles and fought against steep and daunting odds to make it their home once again. ~Janet Brown

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (Penguin)

I often enjoy revisiting modern classics as well as reading classics I’ve never got around to reading. E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India falls into the latter category for me. I already knew that some of the content would irritate me as the story is set in British India and the Brits were not kind to the native people. 

The book was originally published in 1924 and was adapted into a movie in 1984. I had neither read the book nor watched the film, so the story was very fresh to me. It is set around the 1920s and is based on the experiences of the author. The title is taken from a Walt Whitman poem, A Passage to India, which can be found in his book of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

The story revolves around four main characters —Dr. Aziz, his friend, Mr. Cyril Fielding, an elderly woman named Mrs. Moore and a young and soon to be engaged British woman named Miss Adela Quest. 

Dr. Aziz is a young muslim physician who works at the British Hospital in the fictional city of Chandrapore. His boss and head doctor at the hospital is Major Callendar, a bigoted Brit who is unlikable from the very beginning of the story. 

Dr. Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore at a local mosque. He yells at her, telling her she does not belong here, but after exchanging a few words and clearing up their misunderstanding, this becomes the start of a new friendship. 

Miss Adela Quested is a British school mistress who has come to Chandrapore to meet and talk with Ronnie Heaslop, the British Magistrate in Chandrapore, to see if she really wants to marry him. She is accompanied by Mrs. Moore, Ronnie Heaslop’s mother. The two women say they would like to meet some “real” Indians so Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, arranges a party and invites several Indians. 

However, the party turn outs to be a bit awkward, not only because of the Indians’ lack of self-assurance and their fear of offending the host and other British citizens but is also due to the Brits’ bigotry. It is here that Dr. Aziz meets Mr. Fielding, a middle-aged British man who is the principal of a small government-run college for Indians. 

At the party hosted by Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested say they would like to see more of the “real” India and Dr. Aziz says he would arrange an outing to the nearby Marabar Caves, another ficitional area that was modeled after Barabar Caves in Bihar. He also invites Mr. Fielding and his Hindu friend Nawab Bahadur. 

However, Mr. Fielding and Mr. Bahadur misses the train to the caves, leaving Dr. Aziz in charge with no British officials present to watch over the women. At the caves Mrs. Moore decides to take a rest while Dr. Aziz and Miss Quest continue through some of the other caves. The two become separated and the next time Dr. Aziz sees Miss Quested, she’s climbing down the mountain to meet Miss Derek, who frequently makes use of a car owned by the Hindu Royal Family she works for. 

When Dr. Aziz returns, he is immediately arrested and charged with sexually assaulting Miss Quested in one of the caves. The British police, the Magistrate, all believe that Dr. Aziz is guilty because no Englishwoman would lie or make up a story.

Dr. Aziz’s trial then becomes the focal point of the story. The Brits have already condemned him and for them, the trial is but a farce to prove that the government is also fair to the natives. The verdict all lies with Miss Quested’s testimony. As to the outcome, I would not spoil it for any other readers who may be interested in this novel.

I think many reader would find this story reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which also focuses on the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. The attitudes of white Americans are similar to those of Forster’s British colonizers. The underlying theme is the fragile balance of race relations. One word from a white person is all that’s needed to condemn someone who is not of the same race.

Although the British Empire isn’t as strong as it was and the U.S. did abolish slavery, it hasn’t stopped prejudice against people who are perceived to be different. As cynical as it sounds, until a time when people are really treated equally, prejudice and injustice will continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Written on Water by Eileen Chang (New York Review of Books)

There are some books that wait for the right moment to be opened, bought with good intentions but sit on a shelf, unread, for months. Last winter I brought home a collection of essays, realized I wasn’t in the mood for any of them, and almost forgot about this purchase. When I picked it up recently, I fell into a conversation with a twenty-something who was born over a hundred years ago, a writer whose fiction had always intimidated me but whose essays were pure enjoyment.

Author of Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang admits that her novels are “rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be…I like tragedy and, even better, desolation.” She approaches her characters with an analytical distance that’s scaldingly honest and devoid of tenderness. Although I’ve always been stunned by her talent, I’ve never read her work with pleasure--until I opened Written on Water and was immersed in delight, envy, and agreement. 

Chang had me hooked with her essay,  Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes, where she asserts that ignorance of its subtleties only increases the enjoyment. If the audience isn’t aware of how it should be performed, then it has no niggling criticisms and can simply be delighted by the pageantry and spectacle. As an ignorant and passionate devotee of Chinese opera who has sat on a sidewalk for hours to enjoy outdoor performances of this art-form, thrilling to the “sharp, anxious tattoo of percussion” that punctuate the “kicks and jousts and feints,” I began to love the mind of Eileen Chang. When she went on to say “Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law too…by way of trivial violations of the rules,” I remembered the times I saw this happen in Beijing and embarked upon a silent conversation with Chang as I read. And when she discusses “the chamber pot strategem,” when the soul of a dead man is imprisoned in a chamber pot, I knew this was a plot device that could only be created by people who had intimate knowledge of an outdoor privy (or as we called this in Alaska, an outhouse).

At this point I was ensnared by Chang’s wit, frankness, and her unflinching curiosity. She wrote these pieces before she turned 25, after the publication of her first novel, and they’re filled with the viewpoint of someone who’s still in love with discovery. She describes street scenes with the same relish that she does women’s fashions and confesses that her love of city sounds means “I can’t fall asleep until I hear the sound of trams.” She gives a vivid character sketch of her best friend with an intimacy that she denies her fictional subjects and she brings a poignant dimension to the fall of Hong Kong with the memory of “how we scoured the streets in search of ice cream and lip balm” in the midst of “chaos and destruction.”

The bleakness and distance of Chang’s fiction becomes understandable when she writes about her father, a man surrounded by “clouds of opium smoke.” “When he was lonely,” she says, “he liked me.” In a luxurious setting, Chang’s childhood is Dickensian in its privations, which she recounts in the spirit of “There’s very little to remember so nothing is forgotten.” She’s far too ironic--and much too cerebral-- to lapse into drama.

Chang skillfully reveals her love of China, as she writes about its daily life, its art, its music. “I am Chinese,” she says, “so I know how to appreciate noise and clatter…If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m “homesick even before I leave home.”…” Ten years after these words were published, she left. In 1955, Chang moved to the U.S. and five years later she took U.S. citizenship. She died alone, in Los Angeles, a death that makes Written on Water all the more precious and deeply sad.~Janet Brown

The Ainu and the Bear : The Gift of the Cycle of Life by Ryo Michico, illustrated by Kobayashi Toshiya, translated by Deborah Davidson and Owaki Noriyoshi (R.I.C. Publications)

The R.I.C. Story Chest series is published by R.I.C. Publications, a press that focuses on releasing Japanese picture books in English. The Ainu and the Bear is one of those books. It introduces young people to a story by northern Japan’s indigenous people—the Ainu. 

The Ainu and the Bear was originally published in the Japanese language as Iomante in 2005 by Parol-sha. The English version became available in 2010 and includes a CD which narrates the story. Also on the CD is a song titled Iomante Upopo by Umeko Ando, an Ainu of the Tokashi region in Hokkaido. 

The original title of the book, Iomante, is the name of the “sending” ceremony performed by the Ainu. The sub-title [The Gift of the Cycle of Life] will give the reader an idea of what the story is about. The Ainu believe that “every grain of millet, and every piece of meat and fish, contains the life of another”. As narrated in the story, “We feed on the life of others. We are a part of a cycle of fleshly and spiritual life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life. We all partake in the blessing of the cycle of life”. 

The Ainu believe that the animals they kill and eat are all provided by the Kimun kamuy, mountain gods who take the form of bears when in the human world. They believe that kamuy are gods who live in both the human and non-human things in the human world but their true home is the land of the gods.  This story is told from two perspectives, a newborn bear and an Ainu boy. The climax of the story is the Iomante. 

The Iomante or “bear sending” ceremony is an Ainu tradition in which a bear cub is raised by the village and then killed in a ceremony “to relieve it of its flesh so that it may return to the land of the kamuy”. 

The story opens with the killing of a mother bear and how a newborn bear smells humans for the first time. We then listen to an Ainu boy talking about his father going on a hunt. When the boy’s father returns, he says to his son, “Look what Kimun kamuy has given us” and shows the boy a small bear cub. The boy is a little scared as it’s his first time smelling the scent of a bear. The father tells his son, “But as tiny as she is, she’s still a true Kimun kamuy. She’s an honored guiest who comes to us from the land of the gods”. 

The village celebrates by eating ohaw, a type of stew filled with meat and vegetables. The boy and the people of his village raise the bear cub as if it is a child of their own. The bear grows and becomes quite strong. It can no longer stay in the house and must be raised in a cage. 

The bear becomes increasingly wild and makes the boy scared to get close to her. The father tells him, “She’s starting to get homesick for the land of the kamuy, that’s all”. The boy still doesn’t understand until his father says, “Where her mother is.” The boy realizes the bear is lonely for her mother which is why she is howling. 

The father then reminds the son of when he first brought the bear cub home and how the village feasted on ohaw. The boy thinks back to the huge chunk of meat, the beautiful bear fur. Only now does the boy understand that the meat of the ohaw was the meat of the mother bear. Then the father tells his son that they must send the grown bear back to the land of the kamuy. 

The story is a fascinating look into the rituals and traditions of the Ainu people. The Japanese government abolished the Iomante in 1955. However, the law was rescinded in 2007, “because the Ministry of Environment of Japan announced that animal ceremonies were generally regarded as an exception to the animal rights of Japan in October 2006”. I’m sure the decision was a blow to animal rights activists, but in my opinion, I don’t see the difference between raising a bear cub for food as being any different from raising cattle for beef or raising pigs for pork. 

The moral of the story is about having respect for the animals whose lives are taken, so that we can eat and be nourished by them. It is my belief that governments should respect indigenous people as the indigenous people respect animals and life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm (Milkweed Editions)

With ten rooms of books and over 3,500 sections, Powell’s City of Books has filled a city block in Portland, Oregon for the past fifty-three years, and  claims to be the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It certainly is one of the most enticing, with its shelves filled with surprises and its cavernous rooms somehow managing to feel cozy. A trip to Powell’s is always a treasure hunt and it’s impossible to stick to a book budget when browsing in that place. 

On a recent expedition, I made it to only two sections--Travel Literature and Asian History--and left with a book bag that strained at its seams. Among my purchases was a book whose title had always intrigued me but that I’d never read, Coming Home Crazy by Bill Holm. 

Anyone who has lived anywhere in Asia, with the possible exception of Singapore, is going to come back to the West feeling a wild disorientation that verges on insanity. Holm cites The Crackup, where Scott Fitzgerald said he knew he was crazy when he couldn’t look at two opposing ideas at the same time. China, Holm says, has the opposite effect, as a place that makes it impossible to ever “see again singly.” People who return from the Middle Kingdom come home with a “bifurcated consciousness.” The antithesis to “every idea in your life and culture looks as sane and reasonable as the idea itself--” and sometimes even more so.

Although this beginning hints at a work of comparisons and contrasts, what follows is a collection of essays that follow a strange sort of alphabetical order, with a scrambled sense of time. After living with a language that can’t be alphabetized, Holm is delighted to point out the random nature of the A to Z classification. By beginning with an essay on AIDS and ending with a piece that explains the Chinese custom of zou houmen, (“going through the back door” to get a desired result), he creates a crazy quilt of unrelated patchwork pieces.

The only way to read this book is to ignore the alphabet. Holm offers suggestions that might give his readers a narrative thread but his choices are as idiosyncratic as his structure. After floundering in attempts to find a beginning, middle, and end, readers may find themselves wishing that Holms had simply published the journals that these pieces seemed to have emerged from.

Nevertheless, within the chaotic tumble of anecdotes and impressions there’s some very good writing and a Picassoesque portrait of what one city in China, Xi’an, felt like to a displaced Midwesterner from 1986-1987. 

As a “waiguoren,” a Western foreigner, Holm was an object of curiosity, one that was inexplicable and fascinating. Reluctant to learn Chinese because it would strip him of his adult authority and take him back into childhood, he salutes his Chinese students in their study of English because they “exhibit a kind of courage” that he lacks himself. Swiftly he falls in love with the idea of teaching people who value books and are delighted to encounter English literature--”Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats…It was all candy, all delight.”

Holm is less than delighted with the frugal and Spartan comforts of his life in China but  he finds an essential dimension in how the people find “celebration in their daily lives.” The ritual of making dumplings is one he explains step-by-step, from buying pork and vegetables in the market, to chopping, stuffing, and shaping in the company of friends in a home kitchen. Eating them is “a mountain, a dinner party, close to gluttony” and a sacrament of pure pleasure.

Pleasure is the hallmark of Holm’s essays. According to him, Nixon wasn’t the one who opened China to the West. Walt Disney did. Sunday evening was when people clustered around TV sets to watch Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and the gang cavort in an hour of cartoons.

And under a government of rigid control with a bloody history that would re-erupt on June 4 in 1989, Chinese people, Holm claims, are “anarchically free” so long as they avoid actions that are overt. The small regulations of daily living are freely and happily ignored in a society that he sees as operatic, “the Asian Italy.”

It would be interesting to go to Xi’an in 2024, decades after Holm spent his year there, to see how many of his observations still ring true. Carried as an anti-guidebook, his collection of impressions and opinions could launch explorations that may prompt surprise, delight, and a whole new attack of “coming home crazy.”~Janet Brown

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

In 1988, Salman Rushdie became a symbol. His fifth novel, The Satanic Verses, enraged the Muslim world and led the Ayatolla Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, to call for his assassination. 

A fatwah was issued, a legal decree that is irrevocable. It guarantees that as long as Rushdie draws breath, he can be murdered with impunity, under Shia Islamic law.  It also guaranteed that to millions of people, Rushdie was a target while to millions more he was an icon of free speech. 

A target? An icon? When Rushdie decided to live without fear and with pleasure, then he was derided as a “party animal.” It took him almost thirty years to find a place where he could be happy and escape the different narratives that tried to put him in an assortment of pigeonholes. He was, he said, “famous not so much for my books as for the mishaps of my life.”

Then, six years later,  soon before his twenty-first novel was released, he went to speak at the Chautauqua Institution. An idyllic spot in rural New York, this is a place that, for 150 years, has dedicated itself to ideas, thoughts, and discussion that would foster the growth of a civil society. It’s a sanctuary that has never seen violence. So when a man burst out of the audience as Rushdie began to speak, nobody moved in the minute or two that it took the assailant to reach the stage. Until he pulled out a knife and began to stab, 27 seconds passed before someone realized this was not performance art.

In under half a minute, Rushdie is almost mortally wounded in an attack that would change his life once again, trying to pin him to a fate that was prompted by somebody else’s actions. He’s 75 years old. It will  take him six weeks to leave his hospital bed and far longer than that to undergo agonizing therapy. “You’re lucky,” a doctor told him, “that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

But the flawed attack puts Rushdie in “a one-eyed, one-handed world.” The simple act of tooth-brushing becomes an ordeal and before his left hand is mobile again, a therapist has to chip away at a thick layer of dried blood. His right eye is gone forever. The knife had reached the optic nerve.

But even when he was comatose, Rushdie’s creativity was brilliantly alive. Unconscious, he envisioned palaces whose building blocks were the alphabet and when he finally opened his surviving eye, he saw golden letters floating between his bed and the people who stood beside it. From the very beginning of this, he knew that although “the knife had severed me…language was my knife.” 

Unable to return home for security reasons once he’s released from the hospital, he still has his “home in literature and the imagination.” He claims his story and reclaims his life. He writes Knife.

Reading this book is a humbling and inspiring experience. Rushdie’s language is playful and discursive, thoughtful and creative. Being given an entrance to his mind and trying to keep up with him is dizzying and sometimes vexing, and his story, told without a softening filter, is often harrowing. But it never lapses into self-pity. A man who was brutally forced out of the life he had created takes full possession of where he has been put by someone who attacked him as a symbol that was “disingenuous.” In his mid-seventies, Rushdie seizes his “second chance” at being alive without clinging to “ an irretrievably lost past.” In his old age, this ageless artist continues to “sing the truth and name the liars.” ~Janet Brown

Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki (Ode Books)

There are only a few legendary bookstores in the world--Foyles of London, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and San Francisco’s City Lights, Booksellers and Publishers. Foyles is famous for having thirty miles of books, Shakespeare and Company for being a magnet for 20th Century literary giants--Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein. City Lights was co-founded by one of the most famous Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and then became well-known for publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, when nobody else dared to put it into print.

Its luster has been quietly enhanced over the past fifty years by a man who is famous only to writers, publishers, and other booksellers. Paul Yamazaki has shaped and sharpened the collection of books that fill the shelves at City Light since 1970, only now being revealed in a book of his own. Appropriately, this is a series of conversations with other booksellers, in a book that has been published by another bookstore, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op.

Yamazaki came to San Francisco in 1967, walking the streets of Haight-Ashbury in a pair of wing-tip shoes, dressed in a London Fog jacket and brown slacks. He arrived to go to college at his parents’ insistence and the college he chose was a hotbed of dissent, San Francisco State. Not an academically-minded student and admittedly “more conservative than my parents,” this former high school football player immersed himself in the politics of the time, becoming a member of the Asian American Political Alliance. Thrown in jail for “inciting a riot,” a young poet who worked at City Lights convinced Ferlinghetti to get Yamazaki an early prison release by hiring him to work at the bookstore. He’s been there ever since.

“Yamazaki, you work in a bookstore--this bookstore?” his high school English teacher demanded when he encountered his former “memorably bad” student in the aisles of City Lights. Yamazaki doesn’t say what his job was by that time but he went from packing boxes of books to selecting the 30,000 titles that are placed on the bookstore’s shelves. He was instrumental in the decision to go from a store that sold only paperbacks to one that included new release hardcovers, a decision that saved the store from closing its doors forever. It’s now celebrating its 70th anniversary.

“We average 1.3 copies per title,” Yamazaki says, on shelves so tightly packed that booksellers have to move a small library in order to make room for a new volume. And shelving is not a casual activity--Yamazaki wants the shelves to create “a shimmering conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another.” 

His goal is to fill the store with books that offer “possibility and resistance,” and the joy that comes with “happiness through knowledge.” “We’ve never been looking for comfort,” he says, “Curiosity is a fundamental tool of a bookseller.” 

“At a great store, you can look through twelve well-selected serendipitous linear inches to find a universe.” In City Lights, a bookstore that’s on the site of a former church and a topless barber shop, Paul Yamazaki has shaped a multitude of challenging, joyful universes. ~Janet Brown

Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, illustrated by Tatsuya Morino (Kodansha)

Ghost stories have been around for a long time. They are told around campfires or at slumber parties. A number of movies have featured a wide array of ghosts as well. Ghost stories are not always horror stories as some may believe. In Japan, ghost stories and other stories of the supernatural are called kaidan. They became popular with the 1904 publication of Lafcadio Hearn’s book Kwaidan which is a play on the words “kowai” (which means scary )and “dan” (which means “stories”).. 

Many books in English have translated the term “yokai” from demon to ghost to specter. However, none of these translations are true to the meaning of the Japanese term. For Japanese, “yokai” are “yokai”. The kanji is written as 妖怪 which more closely translates to “other worldly”. 

In this book, the term yokai refers to “mythical, supernatural creatures that have populated generations of Japanese fairy tales and folk stories”. They are the things that “go bump in the night, the faces behind inexplicable phenomena, the personalities that fate often deals us”.

The authors have done extensive research into the history of yokai. One of their references they often use and has the most comprehensive illustrations of yokai are from Sekien Toriyama’s Gazu Hyakki Yakko, translated into English as The Illustrated Demons’ Night Parade which he drew in 1776. 

Another major reference the authors used was Tono Monogatari (Tales of Tono) which was written by Kunio Yanagita. It is a collection of folktales and yokai stories from the Tohoku region of Japan that was originally published in 1912 and remains in print today. 

In the 1960s, it was the comic series Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki that sparked another fad in all things yokai. The manga would be adapted into a popular and successful anime series as well. 

In Yokai Attack! the reader is not only introduced to a number of different types of yokai but also is given information on what to do in case you encounter one. The Japanese yokai have been around for centuries. They can be seen “in museums worldwide on scrolls, screens, woodblock prints, and other traditional forms of Japanese art”. 

The authors remind readers that this book is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of yokai and is not a scholarly work. It is a collection of conventional wisdom concerning the yokai. It is about what the average Japanese already knows about them. it’s more of an introduction to yokai culture for the novice. 

The authors group the yokai into five specific categories—Ferocious Fiends, “the sorts of creatures you wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley (or a bright one, for that matter). Gruesome Gourmets feature yokai with “peculiar eating habits. Annoying Neightbors are the types of yokai you hope never move in next door. The Sexy and Slimy are yokai that enchant their prey. Finally there are The Wimps which are rather self-explanatory, the kind of yokai who are more afraid of you than you are of them. 

The book includes full color illustrations of all the yokai featured. The authors also provide the names of yokai in English, their gender, height, weight, and distinctive personalities. And as the authors state at the beginning of the book, “So forget Godzilla. Forge the giant beasties karate-chopped into oblivion by endless incarnations of Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and the Power Rangers. Forget the Pocket Monsters. Forget Sadako from The Ring and that creepy all-white kid from The Grudge. Forget everything you know about Japanese tales of terror”. 

“If you want to survive an encounter with a member of Japan’s most fearsome and fascinating bunch of monsters, you’ve got some reading to do”. ~Ernie Hoyt

Foreigners Who Loved Japan by Makoto Naito and Ken Naito (Kodansha)

I am a foreigner who loves Japan. I’ve made it my adopted home for the last thirty years and plan to live here until my days are over. So when I came across a book titled Foreigners Who Loved Japan, I knew I had to read it. I was under the assumption that I would be familiar with all the individuals whose stories are told. Imagine my surprise when I knew less than half of the twenty foreign nationals featured. 

The twenty individuals featured in this book not only loved Japan but they also contributed to the country in some way. Japan has a long history of being a “closed” country and every Japanese student learns about the first foreigner who was granted access to the country and given permission to spread his message of Christianity.

The first person to be featured is the Portuguese Jesuit priest Francisco Xavier. He reached the shores of Kagoshima in present day Kyushu in 1549. He was taken to see Shimazu Takahisa, lord of Kagoshima. When Xavier showed Takahisa a picture of Mary holding the baby Jesus, “Takahisa was struck by its holy aura and fell to his knee in a display of reverence”. Takahisa would give Xavier permission to build a church and spread the Gospel of God. Xavier is still honored as the man who brought the Christian God to the country. 

Luis Frois was another Christian missionary and was also one of the first of the Portuguese Jesuit priests to come to Japan. He is known for writing reports about Japan and penned the book The History of Japan in 1585. He would gain the trust of one of Japan’s most famous bushi (samurai warriors), Oda Nobunaga, a man known for being one of the unifiers of Japan at the end of the Sengoku or Warring States era.

It wasn’t just Portuguese Jesuit priests who fell in love with what was still a mysterious country. Englishman William Adams joined a Dutch trading fleet traveling to the Far East but there was trouble at sea and after drifting in the ocean, they reached the shores at Usuki in Bungo which is now present-day Oita Prefecture. Adams would become an advisor to Japan’s first Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Novelist James Clavell’s main protagonist in Shogun, William Blackthorne, is based on William Adams who would later marry a Japanese wife and take the name Miura Anjin. He would also teach the Japanese to be better shipbuilders.

One of the most popular foreigners who really loved Japan and that almost every Japanese citizen knows is Lafcadio Hearn who is also known as Koizumi Yakumo. He wrote a number of books and essays on Japan. He is mostly responsible for introducing Japanese horror to English-speaking readers with his book Kaidan, also known as Kwaidan. 

Other prominent foreigners who loved Japan who are featured in this book are Phiipp Franz von Siebold who taught the latest medical techniques to the Japanese, American James Curtis Hepburn who created the Hepburn system that romanized the Japanese language, and Henry James Black, Japan’s first foreign performer who took the stage name Kairakutei. 

Not all of the featured foreigners remained in Japan but their contributions to Japanese society remains. Their stories and why they came to Japan and fell in love with it will also make you want to visit this country and see firsthand what they experienced. 

I’m making a minor contribution to the Japanese by teaching Japanese students English at an English Conversation School. Perhaps one day I will also be featured in a book such as this. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins, photographs by Michael Freeman (Tuttle)

What we think is delicious and what we recoil from as disgusting is determined by our geography, history, and sheer good luck. Nothing points that out like one of the first photographs in the opening pages of Strange Foods. If you think the image of a baby calf on a plate, still in fetal form, is revolting, ask yourself how is that more quelling than a dish made with veal? Would you rather eat a calf that isn’t yet alive or one that’s knocked on the head when it’s a living, breathing, cute little baby? What’s the difference?

That question is posed again and again throughout this provocative book and Jerry Hopkins is the right man to pose it. When his youngest child was born at home, Hopkins refrigerated the expelled placenta, later turning it into a paté for guests at the christening party. Nobody died.

“No one is sure what the first humans ate,” Hopkins says, but it’s a sure thing that they wouldn’t have turned down the dish made of little pink baby mole rats that’s eaten in modern India. Probably the French during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris wouldn’t have spurned that either back in 1871, when people flocked to stalls that sold dog and cat meat. Starvation breeds exotic tastes.

Horse meat has been a staple throughout human history, with U.S entrepreneurs in our present day buying wild horses to slaughter and sending their meat to Europe and Japan. Thirty years ago, Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market had a stall selling steaks, roasts, and ground meat that came from mustangs in Montana.

Cows or horses? Both are livestock but only one is commonly raised for food. However in Mexico, when Columbus first showed up, the only domestic livestock raised for human consumption were turkeys and dogs. In the northeast of Thailand, in a distant province where life is rough, dog meat is a staple and, Hopkins reports, in the civilized modern city of Guangzhou dogs and cats wait to be bought, killed, and butchered on the spot—along with deer, pigeons, rabbits, and guinea pigs—”a take-away zoo.”

When mad cow disease emerged in Europe, suddenly kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra appeared on supermarket meat counters as “exotic meat.” Beefalo was a popular meat during a period of soaring U.S beef prices and in Alaska, consumers happily chow down on reindeer sausage, swallowing Rudolph and his colleagues without a qualm. Still, the thought of elephant meat on the menus of African restaurants makes many a Westerner turn pallid.

In the 1970s, muktuk was sold as a snack at an Alaskan state fair. Bits of the skin and blubber from a beluga whale, it was chewy and flavorless, clearly an acquired taste and to the Inuit of Alaska, almost sacramental.

The Arctic offers little in the way of food and whale hunting is still one of the chief means of subsistence. This isn’t necessarily true of Japan, a highly developed country that consumes large amounts of whale meat. It’s indubitably more healthy than more conventional options. “Richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol.” Whales are rapidly increasing in number around the world, Hopkins reports, and opposition to whaling is decreasing. Who knows? If we can order shark steak in fine dining establishments, will whale be on the menu soon?

Hopkins made his home in Thailand where he lived until his death in 2018. Michael Freeman has spent most of his career in Southeast Asia. The two of them have encountered—and eaten— insects, silk worm larvae, bats, scorpions, and partially-formed chicken embryos still in the shell. They are proponents of a truth that prevails in their book: Anything can be delicious if it meets a kitchen with a clever cook. To back this up, recipes appear in almost every chapter to challenge the squeamish and entice gastronomic adventurers. Rootworm Beetle Dip, anyone? (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat that than the classic Scottish meal made from sheep’s stomach and lungs—haggis? No, thanks!)—Janet Brown

Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition by Osamu Dazai, translated by Makiko Itoh (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai whose real name is Shuji Tsushima is a Japanese writer who was born in Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture. His most well known work is 人間失格 (Ningen Shikaku) which was later translated into English with the title No Longer Human. 

His novel, The Setting Sun, was first serialized in a literary magazine titled Shincho between July and October of 1947. The original title was 斜陽 (Shayo) and was published in book form in later that year. 

Now in 2024 Tuttle has published Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun : The Manga Edition, retold and illustrated by Cocco Kashiwaya, a manga artist who debuted in 1990 in Booquet Comics, a sister comic to the Shojo Manga (Girls Comic) Margaret. It was translated into English by Makiko Itoh. 

The story begins at the end of World War 2. An aristocratic family now find themselves impoverished and are forced to sell their home in order to survive.  Kazuko, a young divorced woman who lives with her mother is told by her uncle that since Japan has surrendered, their life of luxury is no longer possible. 

Kazuko’s father died ten years earlier and it was her Uncle Wada who has been supporting them since the war ended. He tells the two women that they have no choice but to sell the house and move to the countryside. Kazuko’s younger brother, who was an aspiring writer, was sent off to war and has not been heard from since. 

The night before the two are going to move to Izu, Kazuko’s mother is trying to sleep but keeps murmuring, “Because Kazuko is here. I’m going to Izu. Because of Kazuko… Because Kazuko…Because Kazuko is here with me”. 

But then Kazuko hears her mother say, “And what if…Kazuko wasn’t here. I’d prefer to die!”. Her mother is having a complete mental meltdown, shouting, “I WISH I COULD DIE!”. Kazuko’s mother has always been a pillar of strength so Kazuko is shocked to see her mother in this state of hysteria. 

Even when Kazuko’s father died, when Kazuko got married and then divorced, when Kazuko came home with a baby in her belly, when the baby was stillborn, when Kazuko was taken ill, and when her younger brother did bad things, during the ten years after her husband’s, Kazuko’s mother has stayed the same as she has always been—easy-going and gentle. 

That night Kazuko thinks how, as children, she and her brother were spoiled. She had not realized what a great life she had. She thinks, “Oh, to have no money! What a horrible, irredeemable hell this is”. 

The next day, her mother acts if nothing happened and they move to Izu without incident. However, due to Kazuko’s carelessness, she almost burns down the house. After that, she is determined to become a rugged country woman.

Then one day, her younger brother appears. He goes back to his old ways, drinking and hanging out with his mentor, Uehara, a writer he admires who also has love for the bottle and women. Kazuko had met him before while she was still married.

After her mother dies, Kazuko finds herself thinking more and more about Uehara and how much she loves him and how she wants to have his baby even though she knows he’s an alcoholic. She is determined to live her life for love even if it means breaking with traditional conventions. She thinks of herself as a revolutionary—a revolutionary for love. But…will she find true happiness?

Most of Osamu Dazai’s novels are semi-autobiographical and they can be very bleak and depressing. In this story, Kazuko’s character was based on a woman named after the writer and poet Shizuka Ota whom Dazai had an affair with while he was still married. Kazuko’s actions may seem mild by today’s standards but if you keep in mind the time-frame of when the story took place, Kazuko may be considered a true revolutionary. ~Ernie Hoyt

Getting Closer to Japan : Getting Along with the Japanese by Kate Elwood (ASK Co., Ltd.)

As of January 13 next year (2025), I will have been living in Japan for thirty years. Although my mother is Japanese and I lived in Tokyo during my elementary school years (although that was at a family annex for military families called Grant Heights), I might have found Kate Elwood’s Getting Along with the Japanese an excellent reference for living and working in Japan before my move. 

According to the publisher, the Getting Closer to Japan series is a series of books for those who:

• would like to get accustomed to the life in Japan quickly

• feel communicating with the Japanese is difficult

• want to learn the Japanese way of thinking

• want to enjoy life in Japan

There are five books in the series. In addition to Getting Along with the Japanese, other titles in the series include Living in Japan by Andy D. Para, Working in Japan by Bruce Rutledge, Japanese Industry by William Carter, and Japanese Culture by Naoki Takei.

All the books give useful information one needs to know if they plan to have an extended stay in Japan. The books are written by business people sharing their own experiences of the trouble that may come with living, working, and understanding Japanese people and Japanese culture. At the end of each chapter are useful words and phrases related to the subject being discussed. 

Getting Along with the Japanese is broken down into three sections. The first section is Twelve Key Words Useful in Understanding the Japanese. It focuses on words such as gaijin (outsider / foreigner), wa (group harmony), tatemae and honne (surface feelings vs real feelings), gaman (endurance) and tells how these words are related to business culture. 

The first chapter is an example of what it’s like to be a gaijin in a Japanese company. Steve Wilson started working in Japan three years ago. He enjoys his job and has a good relationship with his co-workers. However, it’s been three years and Steve wonders why his colleagues seem to keep him at a distance. He notices that Japanese employees who joined the company after him seem to blend in quickly and become more relaxed in a short span of time. 

Even non-business people may find this a little hard to understand. Even if they were born and raised in Japan but have foreign parents, they will always be treated like gaijin. It doesn’t matter how long you have been living in Japan. If you are a foreigner, or like me, have one foreign parent, you will still be treated like a gaijin. 

The second section focuses on direct contact with Japanese people. Nancy Evans met a Japanese client who said to her in English, “My name is Hori”. So, throughout the evening, she called the man Hori, only to find out that Hori was the man’s family name. It is rare and may even be considered rude to call someone by their first name. It would be more proper to add the honorific suffix -san after the family name. So Ms Evans should have called Hori, Hori-san. 

The final section deals with life events such as weddings and funerals. If you’ve never been to a Japanese wedding or a Japanese funeral, there are many things you need to know before you attend such an event. Getting Along with the Japanese will help you answer questions you may have without having to rely on anyone else. 

As a longtime resident of Japan, I always enjoy reading other people’s experiences of living and working in Japan and what kinds of situations they find confusing, amusing, or even irritating. It’s also interesting to read about the types of culture shock they may have had as well. 

If you plan on working and living in Japan, or if you are just interested in Japanese culture, the Getting Closer to Japan series may be the series for you. ~Ernie Hoyt

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)

When two little girls disappear after playing on a deserted stretch of beach one summer’s day, the small city of Zavoyko on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is besieged with tinges of fear. Children are confined to their homes while young women are flooded with memories of an older girl who vanished years before and was never seen again. A woman who claims she saw the two children entering a black car driven by a man on the afternoon of their disappearance has no details that could help the local police in the search for the girls and her story is disregarded. Eleven months later the mother of the two missing children meets the mother of the lost teenager and is given a clue that might let her know what became of all three girls.

A novel with the basic plot of a conventional mystery becomes far more than that. Zavoyko is a divided community, with white residents, the “real Russians,” on one side and indigenous people, grouped together as “natives,” on the other. And yet the city is small enough that the lives within it intertwine and intermingle when they are brought together by tragedies. When Marina, the mother of the little girls, finally meets Alla, the mother of the teenager, their racial differences are transcended by their shared pain.

In chapters that function almost as linked short stories, Julia Phillips gives voice to eleven different women, white and native, who live in Zavoyko. All of them are displaced.

The indigenous women have lost their identities, with five separate tribes stripped of their cultures by the former Soviet Union who homogenized then as a monolithic group. Living far from the communities that had nurtured them, they’ve come to Zavoyko for an education and for jobs. When the little girls go missing, they watch the search that takes place, angered that the vanished teenager was ignored and quickly forgotten. The little girls are Russian, the teenager is indigenous, and the different reactions to the two disappearances point out the supremacy of one group over the other. This is “a deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.”

The Russians came to Zavoya when the Kamchatka Peninsula was an integral part of the Soviet Union’s military system, “so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter.” Military funding made this outpost a comfortable place to live but when the Soviet rule disintegrated, “Kamchatka went down with it.” Now they live in a region surrounded on three sides by water, linked to the mainland only by roads made from dirt and ice, a spot where 32 degrees is considered warm.

The division is sharply revealed when Alla, one of the Even tribe, confronts the Russian, Marina, about the police search for the two little girls while her daughter was given scant attention. “You must have paid them, I think…They didn’t listen to me.” Yet when Marina is given a shred of information that may conclude her search, it’s given to her by a man who is Even.

There are no easy answers to the questions that pervade Disappearing Earth. There is no conclusively happy ending. But Phillips, in her debut novel, has depicted a haunting and compelling narrative of bleakness, beauty, and the powerful strength that comes from telling a story.~Janet Brown

Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books)

Ocean Yoon ought to be on the fast track to stardom. She can outrun any other space pilot in the solar system, she’s a graduate of the world’s best flight program, and she’s Korean. 

Korea rules the solar system with its space agency, the Alliance, and Seoul is a glittering metropolis filled with galactic hotshots. Ocean would be one of them except for two fatal obstacles. She was sent to a boarding school on Neptune where she grew up without the cultural influences that would make her truly Korean and she’s developed a mind of her own that doesn’t submit well to authority. Early in her space career she made a decision that’s branded her as a liability on any spaceship. Nobody wants the woman with the grisly nickname, Headshot, who never misses her target—except for a captain with a shaky code of ethics and a ship that needs Ocean’s unmatched speed and skill.

Captain Song pretends that she “could put this ship on auto-pilot and it would do the job,” but when things get rough, she turns to the woman whom she tries to ignore. She has to rely on Ocean, who has gained the respect of the crew in a way that Song has not. Even the newest recruit, a man from a planet where the inhabitants learn to become Masters of the Death Arts, is fascinated by Ocean from the moment he joins the crew. 

When Ocean’s best friend Teo, the son of a man who has made his fortune by devastating the environments of other planets, shows up in an escape pod, wounded and unconscious, mutiny begins to simmer beneath the surface of Song’s crew. It bubbles over when the most notorious raider in space comes aboard and places a wedge between Song and her crew. Phoenix wants Teo’s money and Ocean’s skills and he’s smart enough to exploit the situation to get what he wants.

Elaine U. Cho is adept at creating a multifaceted plot that takes a new twist on every page but her ability to bring life to her characters through smart and snappy dialogue is what powers this novel into new territory. Ocean’s Godori soars far beyond conventional science fiction. Its roots are in the Saturday morning serials that once made radio stations popular, when dialogue and cliffhangers ruled the airwaves. Cho has resurrected that form and made it her own, ending her debut novel with a teasing conversation that sets the stage for the next episode.

“A thief, a hacker, an accountant, and now a pilot. My ultimate party is almost complete.” Because Cho has provided a multitude of characters who almost threaten to topple Ocean’s Godori, Phoenix has quite a few candidates who might complete his party. The question is will Cho be able to sustain this wild pace and devious plot in a follow-up novel? What she’s done in this one sets a high bar. She’s written a space fantasy that will ensnare even those readers who despise science fiction.~Janet Brown

The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat (Blackstone Publishing)

Imagine being born into a family of time travelers and having that gift become yours when you’re still a child. Tommy and Eva are lucky. Unlike their parents, they aren’t made aware of this talent alone, with parents who have no idea that this ability exists outside of storybooks. Joshua and Lily had learned to use their unusual travel skills in secret, until they met each other and slowly divulged their shared truth. When they discover their own children can whisk themselves back in time, they’re delighted and eager to make this a family affair.

Each of them have their own territories. Joshua returns to his childhood home in the Kowloon Walled City. Lily finds herself in England while Tommy is limited to London before 1950. Eva is pulled into the lives of her distant relatives, both dead and living. All of them would agree that time travel carries “a loss waiting to happen.” When that loss comes, their family dissolves forever, leaving Tommy and Eva to carry the weight of their gift alone and unguided.

A scientist and a mathematician, Joshua is reluctant to accept the limitations of time travel that constrain him and his family. Although they can explore the 20th Century from its very beginning, a boundary line separates them from other eras. When he and Lily have fleeting moments in 1899, he embarks upon The Experiment that will fully take them into the 19th Century.

Tommy and Eva wait for their parents on the day of The Experiment, reassuring themselves that an hour’s delay is nothing to fret over. When days have passed and they are still alone, they call Lily’s mother.

Their grandmother never acknowledges the probable death of her daughter and son-in-law, just as she has never welcomed the idea of time travel. To her the vanished parents are simply “gone” and the reason for this is one that she refuses to think about. She forbids her grandchildren to follow the example set by Lily and Joshua and when they do, it becomes a clandestine and shameful activity.

Eva uses her gifts to find a home with the relatives she meets on her secretive excursions into time. Tommy learns his talent carries a way to break hearts, especially his own. Steeped in darkness, he loses his ability to love.

Pim Wangtechawat chose her cumbersome title from the name of a song once made famous by a Hong Kong singer, Teresa Teng. This choice has little to do with her novel, other than a fleeting cameo appearance in the final chapter. Sadly, its amorphous quality is reflected in Wangtechawat’s writing. She frequently lapses into pages of sentences she’s broken into spacing that’s usually found only in poetry. However any poetic touches found here are based in cliches: “soft, golden light,” “a maze of twinkling lights,” “a cold, hardened look in her eyes.”

The Moon Represents My Heart is based on a promising idea that quickly becomes scattered and shapeless. It’s slated to become a series on Netflix, where visual details will supplant the hackneyed images and what seems vague may be sharpened into an intriguing mystery. For now, its story has dissolved as completely as the vanished parents, making it as irksome to read as it is to care about.~Janet Brown

Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Brian Ashcroft (Kodansha)

I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties and one of my favorite pastimes was playing video games at an arcade. I remember the first time my friend and I saw our first video game, “Pong,” at a neighborhood pizza restaurant. Although it was a very simple game, we must have played it for over an hour. When I was a university student at the University of Washington, I worked part-time at a place called the College Inn Cafe and located diagonally from the cafe was a 24-hour video arcade called Arnold’s which I also frequented. However, with the advent of home systems, the video arcade soon became a thing of the past. 

Imagine my surprise when I spent the summer of 1980 in Japan and discovered there were video arcade cafes. These shops didn’t have arcade games where you stood and played. They were built into the tables themselves. You could order coffee or soda, have a sandwich and while seated, eating and drinking, you could play video games at the table. I thought that was so cool. Another fad was also just beginning in Japan at that time, something called karaoke. Who knew then that that would become a worldwide phenomena?

In 1995, I moved to Japan and wasn’t surprised to not find any video cafes, but taking their place were game centers. These were not one-story building video arcades like there were in the States but some of them could be two, three, or even four-story tall buildings filled with a whole range of games to play.

Brian Ashcroft did his own research and wrote the book Arcade Mania : The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers. Turbo-charged might be an understatement. Ashcroft’s detailed account of the rise and popularity of the Japanese game centers will make you want to experience the sensation yourself. Unlike the pachinko parlors with their noise and smoky atmospheres, the game centers in Japan are more family-friendly. 

The game centers in Japan are well-organized. if it’s a multi-story building, on the first floor you would usually find an assortment of crane games. In Japan, these crane games are called “UFO Catchers”, although the term was discontinued sometime in the mid-2000s. What draws people to these games are the different types of prizes they can get. Many of the prizes are limited editions of popular characters. Other prizes may include snack foods. A national crane game championship is held every year as well. 

In the nineties, another craze started at the game centers—sticker-picture machines. In 1995, a twenty-nine- year-old woman named Miho Sasaki, who was working for a Japanese arcade game developer called Atlus, saw that home-video editing machines could superimpose titles on pictures and print them out. This gave her an idea. She recalled “her own love of cute stickers when she was younger and how she’d put them all over her notebooks”. Her idea was to mix girls’ love of stickers and their love of taking pictures of themselves. By blending them together, she thought up the idea of the sticker-pictures, but her bosses initially rejected her idea.

At the time, fighting games were all the rage at game centers. Her bosses were salarymen in suits who thought the risk was too large and that a sticker picture machine in a game center would look out of place. However, three months later when Atlus had a new boss, Naoya Harano, he saw the potential of such a concept and thus the Print Club was born. Or as they say in Japan puri kura and by 1996, puri kura was all the rage, especially among high school girls. 

The crane games and sticker-picture machines are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Japan’s game centers. Ashcroft fills in the reader with the introduction of shooting games, rhythm games, fighting games, and games of chance. He further explores the game center world by talking about dedicated cabinets—“games that are housed in a specific casing and are built especially for the arcade experience”. 

It's been nearly thirty years since the introduction of the sticker-picture machines but they are still as popular as ever. Crane games continue to draw in children and adults alike. Now, there are game centers full of retro games that you can still play. These places appeal to adults who find them nostalgic and remind them of their childhood. For kids, there are now card-based games —“a mash-up of playing arcade games and collecting cards”. 

The video arcade may be a dinosaur of the past in the U.S. but the game centers in Japan are still thriving and will probably be here to stay for another twenty or thirty years. If you ever make it to Japan, aside from seeing temples and shrines, you should set foot in a game center to see what it’s all about. ~Ernie Hoyt

Japan : The Toothless Tiger by Declan Hayes (Tuttle)

Currently, with the weakness of the yen against the dollar and with North Korea continuing to test their missiles over Japanese terrain, Japan’s future is looking pretty bleak. Back at the beginning of the 21st century, author Declan Hayes had already made a number of predictions about Japan’s future. I decided to read his book Japan : The Toothless Tiger, which was originally published in 2001, to see if any of his predictions had come to fruition. 

Now that it is already 2024, you would think a lot of the material would be dated but what he said back in 2001 may still hold true today. “There is a specter haunting Japan and Asia: the specter of Chinese communism”. Hayes mentions two main points concerning his Chinese theory: “The overt, military one that her vast defense forces pose and the covert diplomatic one undermining America’s key alliance with Japan”. 

Hayes argues that it is in Japan’s best interest to rearm itself in order to defend its territories. While in theory, it may sound reasonable but it goes against the principles of Japan’s constitution. Throughout the book, Hayes says that Japan needs to build up its military. He argues under the assumption that the U.S. 7th Fleet, which is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan, will eventually sail home to Hawaii. Without the protection of the U.S. Japan would easily fall into the hands of China. However, his assumption is not supported by any facts.

China has always been a threat to Asia and the world at large. Hayes says once the 7th Fleet leaves the vicinity, “China will eventually incorporate Taiwan and the islands of the South China Sea into her vast kingdom”. He further argues, “China’s resulting hegemony will put severe strain on the weakest link in America’s Asia defense strategy—Japan, the toothless tiger”. 

Hayes claims that because Japan has become a “toothless tiger”, North Korea often tests its missiles which enter Japanese territory and China’s navy often enters Japan’s waters without compunction. Because Japan is a toothless tiger, it can only “toothlessly grin and bear it and hope that things do not get worse”. 

Hayes' main focus seems to be the threat of China but he says it isn’t only China that Japan needs to be wary of. Japan must also build better relations with its neighbor South Korea. Japan’s history of military abuse in both China and South Korea cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Hayes also mentions that until the current government of Japan officially recognizes its crimes committed during the second world war, the relationship between the nations will continue to stand on thin ice. 

His suggestion is a very slippery slope. Although it was the Occupied Forces that wrote the Japanese constitution, it emphatically states that Japan renounces war and will not build up its military might so that it would repeat history. Japan is the only country in the world to be attacked by two atomic bombs and the country saw what devastation that could cause, not to mention the after-effects of the radiation fallout. 

It is now 2024 and the U.S. Fleet has not retired to Hawaii. Japan has also renewed its alliance with the U.S. that will continue to protect Japan and Asia and will also curb the threat that China poses. The U.S. government has also officially announced to China that if it tries to take Taiwan by force, the U.S. will protect Taiwan and will attack China in its defense.

The threat of a world-dominating China continues, as does the threat of North Korea. However, to insist that Japan rearm itself and build up its military goes against everything the Japanese government stands for. As long as relations between Japan and the U.S. continue, Japan will continue to be a toothless tiger but one that has power and an assertive ally on its side. ~Ernie Hoyt

Searching for Billie by Ian Gill (Blacksmith Books)

Louise Mary Newman, Marylou Newman,  Louise Gill, Billie Lee—with so many different personas for one woman, no wonder her son found it a challenge to learn who she really was. Since his mother handed Ian Gill in his infancy to a baby nurse in Shanghai, proclaiming “That was the end of my mothering days,” the eventual reunion between Billie and Ian was undoubtedly a bit difficult for both.

The enigmatic and dazzling figure whom Ian struggled to understand began life in true fairy tale fashion. A stranger left her at the front door of an Englishman and his Chinese wife, a couple living in Changsha. Pretty and smart, Louise Mary, called Mary Lou throughout her girlhood, was destined for great things. Her father told her that, right up until the moment he left his family for another that he had established

At sixteen, in a household that was now close to destitution, Mary Lou left her expensive school in Shanghai that her mother could no longer afford and began a career that would eventually take her to the greatness her father had predicted. In time the infant of unknown parentage would be given an MBE by Queen Elizabeth, becoming a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Gill painstakingly recreates his mother’s eighty-nine years of life in almost agonizing detail. Beginning with her father’s parents emigration from England to Hong Kong and following the bureaucratic career of Billie’s adoptive father far more diligently than is necessary, at last he begins to unfold the meteoric rise of his mother’s colorful life. A woman who was friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s closest adviser, along with the American adventuress Emily Hahn, and the Chinese author Lin Yutang, Billie’s brilliance caused her to rise from secretary to a position of international importance and kept her alive through imprisonment in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation of that city.

Gill’s family history flares into a fascinating narrative when he describes the circumstances that led to his birth. In the harsh conditions of Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison Camp, Billie, now the wife of a British soldier, went through a living hell when her young son died. As she began to recover, she was certain her mental health depended on having another child.

An affair with a handsome journalist brought about a pregnancy. Billie, despite severe malnutrition, carried her baby to full term, throughout her time at Stanley, onto a ship that would carry her to New Zealand after the Japanese surrender, and into a Wellington hospital. There she gave birth to the baby she had longed for, an event she never would have survived if she had still been within the confines of the prison camp.

Billie’s astounding luck pervaded her entire life and coupled with her brains, brought her to an impressive career at the United Nations. However intimate relationships weren’t her specialty. Although she had several long and devoted love affairs, none of them were permanent. And although her son is a byproduct of her stunning ambition and determination, their bond only becomes close after Ian grows to adulthood.

Searching for Billie is a book that demands persistence. It sinks under unnecessary details and lingers far too long upon family members who are extraneous. However through the slog, Billie shines like a submerged diamond, irresistible and worth all the effort it takes to rediscover her life.~Janet Brown

Under the Naga Tail by Mae Bunseng Taing, with James Taing (Greenleaf Book Group Press)

Mae is eleven when Apollo 11 puts men on the moon, a feat that captures his imagination and makes him believe he’s living in a new era when anything is possible—even for a boy living in rural Cambodia. But as he nears the end of his adolescence, another era closes in upon him, his family,  and his country, one that begins with Year Zero.

Cambodia has been in turmoil for several years, with “freedom fighters” battling the puppet government of the U.S.-backed Lon Nol. Popular opinion sides with the insurgents because they purportedly will restore King Sihanouk to his throne. Mae’s father is a firm believer in this theory, even when a woman emerges from the jungle, fleeing in terror for the nearby Thai border. 

“Monsters…barbaric monsters…that’s what they are,” she tells Mae’s family as she recounts the atrocities committed by the rebel forces, “You must leave.” But Mae’s father is positive that “the freedom fighters were defending the honor of the king.” He had already fled one country, leaving China to find peace and prosperity in Cambodia, and he is certain it’s unnecessary to do this again. He and his eight children are staying put, even though it’s a short journey from their home to Thailand.

Within the first twenty pages of Under the Naga Tail, his decision becomes engulfed in horror that turns impossibly and dreadfully more intense with every passing chapter. Although the rebel forces prevail and are greeted with cheers and hope, they immediately close the border and kill three “Thai thieves” in a public execution that the entire community is forced to watch. Then they evacuate the area, claiming it’s a temporary measure to avoid American bombs. Mae and his family would never live in their former home again and many more wouldn’t survive to reclaim what once belonged to them.

The savagery that engulfs Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is unmitigated by liberating troops from Vietnam who have no room for compassion. Across the border, where Mae and his family seek the safety of Thailand after barely surviving four years of starvation and forced labor, there’s no sanctuary waiting for them. According to C.I.A. reports, forty-two thousand Cambodians, Mae and his family among them, were removed from refugee camps by Thai troops and were taken to the sacred mountain of Preah Vihear. From there they were forced to climb down the other side of the mountain, back into Cambodia. Ten thousand of them were never seen again.

Scant mercy is given to the Cambodians who are displaced and subjected in the years between 1975 and 1979—not offered by the liberators nor by the country that could shelter them. The atrocities of the Pol Pot Time and the cruelties of its aftermath are revealed in excruciating detail, disclosed as Mae and his family live them. His account is appalling and soul-wrenching and guaranteed to disturb your dreams.

The miracle of his survival, with almost all of his family, only occurred because of strength and courage that goes beyond all human limits. If this book is painfully difficult to read, only imagine the agony that came as a son wrote the words his father used as he recalled and resurrected a hell on earth for the world to see and remember. Under the Naga Tail shows the bare bones of history that are all too often veiled in statistics and sanitized by bureaucratic reports. It turns readers into witnesses who just might help to change present-day crimes against humanity.~Janet Brown

Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese. This apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and meet the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants while wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and tarnished by his thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this Texan who only made it through high school. In a magnanimous description he says Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, while he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown