2 comments about A World Overturned: A Burmese Childhood 1933-1947 (Literature).

1. This is a marvelous memoir of a young girl's surviving in Burma during the years leading up to and during World War II. Details are remembered with astonishing clarity and sharpness, the characters of those around her are quietly drawn, and the author stands forth as a bright child full of curiosity, resilience, and determination.

   As the Japanese forces advance, young Maureen is left in a Catholic boarding school by her parents, a Burmese woman married to an Irish colonial administrator. Deprived of her mother's affection and language, she finds herself with a couple of British girls in the care of the Italian nuns who run the school, although speaking neither English nor Italian. When the Japanese military occupation arrives, with fairly dire effects, the author observes and describes the enemy soldiers with the same dispassionate clarity that she sees her teachers and companions. At the end of the War she is returned to her paternal grandmother in Ireland where the extreme culture shock after her life in Burma is dealt with briefly. The reader's heart yearns for her to be given the love and affection she has been deprived of during the War, but it is not forthcoming, yet the ending is neither bitter nor depressing. Clearly, the author has lived to become a successful person and parent in her own right, in Great Britain.

   All this needs to become a terrific movie is dialogue to be added (there isn't very much--my only reason for not giving it 5 stars). The background is described sufficiently for the set-makers to get right to work building them.

   To current discussions of racism and racial conflict, this adds an unusual Anglo-Burmese perspective.




2. This is an autobiographical jewell! I lived in Burma as a teenager from late 1958 to mid-1962 and am familiar with the history and cultural crosscurrents that are interwoven so skillfully throughout Maureen Baird-Murray's focused and economical, but never dull text. One does not,however, need such a background to appreciate the work, although watching "Empire of the Sun" on a video is good preparation for the "World Overturned" part of it.

   Born in the Shan States of Burma to an Anglo-Irish (Portestant) father of the Burma Frontier Service and a Burmese Buddhist mother, Maureen is, for her first 5 years, raised essentially as a happy Burmese child knowing only the Burmese language, which she and her parents speak exclusively. Disturbing things happen in her life and she is packed off to a convent run, ironically, by an order of Italian nuns who force her to speak only English and sort of cold-forge her into a more European type of young lady.

   After the Japanese occupy Burma, she loses contact with her parents, and for three and a half years (1942-1945) lives a rather hardscrabble life with the nuns, whose Italian nationality shields them from the worst of the brutalities which the invaders exacted upon Europeans who had to stay behind. Following liberation, by then an adolescent, she discovers the fate of her parents and a story of heartbreaking betrayal. Nevertheless, ultimately reclaimed by friends of her father just before Burma's independance from Britain, she is taken away to a new homeland with its own astonishing revelations.

   This story could be a soap opera script, but it is not so. The author has just cause for great resentment, but she evinces nothing of the kind. Rather, in the delightful reminiscences of a child's perspective of a Burma socity that is long gone, including the hurtful and the humorous parts in rapid succession, Maureen Baird-Murray reveals a thoughtful appraisal of her own personal experiences, and a compassionate, forgiving character.

   Although limited in the period it covers, with leap to when the author is an adult, "A World Overturned" is likely the best autobiographical account ever written to date by the child of a mixed marriage in colonial Burma. Always a page-turner, it is informative, gripping, sometimes heart-rending, but ultimately soul satisfying.

2 comments about Makiguchi the Value Creator: Revolutionary Japanese Educator and Founder of Soka Gakkai.

1. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi is one of Japan's most significant yet perhaps least-recognized educators. His fame as the founder of Soka Gakkai has somewhat eclipsed his reputation as an educator. (Soka Gakkai International is now the largest Buddhist organization in the world with over 12 million members in 128 nations.)

   Mr. Makiguchi had spent a lifetime developing his "value-creating" educational philosophy from his experience as teacher, principal, and teacher of teachers before he founded the Buddhist lay organization.

   A man ahead of his time, Mr. Makiguchi made proposals over sixty years ago that are being made anew today. He was staunchly opposed to the rote memorization that was the backbone of Japanese pedagogy in his day (and largely remains so today), and he called for greater involvement by community members in the education of children.

   The author, himself an educator, gives a clear and vivid picture of the magnitude and revolutionary quality of Mr. Makiguchi's theories. Until this book, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi has gone virtually unrecognized in the West because so little information on non-Western educators has been available in English. This work fills a need at a time when Mr. Makiguchi's impact on education and society is of increasing importance.




2. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi is one of Japan's most significant yet perhaps least-recognized educators. His fame as the founder of Soka Gakkai has somewhat eclipsed his reputation as an educator. (Soka Gakkai International is now the largest Buddhist organization in the world with over 12 million members in 128 nations.)

   Mr. Makiguchi had spent a lifetime developing his "value-creating" educational philosophy from his experience as teacher, principal, and teacher of teachers before he founded the Buddhist lay organization.

   A man ahead of his time, Mr. Makiguchi made proposals over sixty years ago that are being made anew today. He was staunchly opposed to the rote memorization that was the backbone of Japanese pedagogy in his day (and largely remains so today), and he called for greater involvement by community members in the education of children.

   The author, himself an educator, gives a clear and vivid picture of the magnitude and revolutionary quality of Mr. Makiguchi's theories. Until this book, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi has gone virtually unrecognized in the West because so little information on non-Western educators has been available in English. This work fills a need at a time when Mr. Makiguchi's impact on education and society is of increasing importance.

No comments about Caged Dragons: An American Pow in W.W.II Japan.

No comments about Origin Of Ethnography In Japan (Japanese Studies).

No comments about Medieval Japanese Writers (Dictionary of Literary Biography).

No comments about Nomo: The Tornado Who Took America by Storm.

No comments about Prisoner of the Rising Sun: The Lost Diary of Brigadier General Lewis Beebe (Texas A & M University Military History Series).

3 comments about Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story.

1. For eight months during 1945 I served as a Japanese interpreter (U.S. Marine Corps) at the Japanese POW Camp on Guam. I met and interviewed many Japanese prisoners during that time. This is the first account published by a former Japanese POW that I have seen since the War. American POWS have published but no Japanese for reasons made obvious by the author. I was on the outside looking in. To view prison life from the other side of the fence was most interesting, The book is superbly written. It is factual and honest.For anyone who fought the Japanese in the Pacific this book will open windows and offer to you a view that you might never have expected to look upon. T



2. Taken Captive a P.O.W. Story by 0oka Sh0hei, is about a Japanese man name 0oka Sh0hei who was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army to fight the American Forces On January 25, 1945. Being captured from the Americans. This book is is an okay book. There was some action in it,wich was great. It was okay to thouse who are interested in an middle-clsss scholar who tries this to survive the life of the prison. this would be the book for you. If you are interested in action, i would not sugest this.



3. In 1944, near the end of World War II, 35-year-old, Shohei Ooka, was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army. After suffering from malaria and starvation he attempted suicide when American troops had landed on Mindanao and the situation looked hopeless for Ooka and his (mostly dead by then) comrades. He was captured and nursed back to health by the American forces.
   
   As he writes in ''Taken Captive,'' Japanese prisoners had to deal with their depression, and guilt at having shamed themselves by giving up when their comrades had died in battle or committed suicide. Captivity was strange to the Japanese prisoners because the Japanese military had taught them that the US military were savages and would kill them if they surrendered. Ooka wrote that they had a hard time ''accepting the Americans' warmheartedness with simple gratitude. Whereas they saw themselves as dishonorable captives, the Americans treated them as human beings, and this . . . confounded them completely.'' Over time, the prisoners became lazy and fat.
   
   Some of the former prisoners of war, Ooka writes, ''still refer to the camp as 'paradise' and speak of the time they spent there as the best year of their lives.'' Ooka, who died in 1988, became one of the most well known post-war writers in all of Japan with this book and he takes the reader on a travel from soldier, to prisoner, to a fear of disgrace upon returning home, and back to a father and family man. An excellent book that will show that not all Japanese soldiers were war criminals and psychotics ready to die for the emperor. Ooka held Japanese soldiers who "went amok" in China in great distain.

1 comments about The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Koyka (1873-1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright (Harvard East Asian Monographs).

1. In a day when critical biographies are still suffering under the stigma instigated by Roland Barthes' alleged "death of the author" and all such postmodernish fluff, this work really stands out. Much scholarly care has gone into this study, which thus overflows with Inouye's deep interest and respect for Izumi Kyoka and his work. Never descending into useless detail and anecdote for its own sake, Inouye deals expertly with those aspects of Izumi Kyoka's life that grant us some familiarity with this man's experience and personality in ways that add to our appreciation of his incredibly eccentric and fascinating fictional works. One also gets a very tangible sense of this author's artistic development, as everything from his earliest attempts to his final masterpiece (including some of his flops) are discussed in relation with each other and to the "archetype" as a whole (the latter being Kyoka's overall vision more or less informing his various works and to some degree offering the key to unlocking some of their more obscure passages). After reading this, one wants to go back and re-read "Japanese Gothic Tales" and "In Light of Shadows" again with new insight.

2 comments about Girocho: A Gi's Story of Bataan and Beyond.

1. Poncio's story from Bataan to Hirohata, written with total context of the war. An outstanding and complete story.

   Every so often, one discovers a "POW" book that is not only accurate, but well written. Each line, each paragraph, each page weaves a complete tapestry of a Prisoner's life under the Japanese. Add to this, one sees beautifully crafted typography that makes this a classic. Of the more than 1000 books w have on the subject, this book ranks in the top ten.

   Poncio adds depth and meaning to the history of our POWS, especially the guerilla and public support by foreign nationals and Filipinos. His is one of the rare books that even acknowledges the support from the legendary Madame Utinsky, a heroine who deserved the Medal of Honor. No phase of the experience is slighted nor any detail ignored as the writers weave a tapestry of horror endured yet an inspiring and unending battle to survive and sabotage the Japanese war effort. Poncio's description of desperate hunger alone is worth the price of the book. On a scale of one to five stars, Poncio's book deserves seven extra large stars.
   Center for Research
   Allied POWS Under the Japanese




2. Girocho: A Gi's Story of Bataan and Beyond
   
   I had a special interest because John Henry Poncio is/was a relative, but even more because he bore no enmity for the Japanese. That still amazes me. The story of what our troops endured should be required reading in our schools.