George Sidline

Although this book is hardly "literary" with any beautiful turns of phrase or anything like that, it is a solid, craftsmanlike memoir/history, all the more impressive given as it was written by an engineer. The chapters are short, only a couple of pages each, and often not so much like "and this happened" but a description of a certain aspect of the author's life. The perspective is a very unusual one: George Sidline was a Russian-Jewish child born and raised in Japan during World War II. From the title I wondered if his family were refugees that fled to Japan in the wake of the Nazi invasion, perhaps some of Sugihara's Jews, but it turned out the Sidline family had been living in Japan since before the war started.

I learned a lot from this book. Given the antipathy the Japanese have traditionally held towards foreigners (evident even today), they treated their small Caucasian population remarkably well during the war. Although the Americans and the British were made to leave, everyone else could stay. There weren't many restrictions placed upon them -- in fact, in many ways the white people had more freedom and privileges than the Japanese themselves did. The children were allowed to attend English-language schools and it wasn't until like 1942 that the government even made those schools teach Japanese as a second language. Japan's Nazi allies tried to import anti-Semitism with little or no success; in fact, as Sidline notes, the Japanese government even made special concessions to the Jews by, for example, letting them bake matzo during Passover instead of receiving the usual bread ration. Etc etc etc.

I've never been as interested in World War II in Asia as much as I have been in Europe, but I'm glad I picked up this book. It really changed my perspective on things and I don't think there are many more books like this one.… (más)