“The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Having lived in Seattle for five years, I have only one regret. I wish I had taken the tour of the underground city. Apparently there are remains of old Seattle beneath today’s streets where one can see what life must have been like for the many people who came to seek their fortune in this beautiful coastal city.

Reading this book make up for part of that regret. Ford brought alive the ambiance of one of Seattle’s old neighborhoods which disappeared with WWII, Japantown. The many immigrants from China and Japan formed vibrant communities, not just to survive in the dominant white society, but also to keep their own languages and cultures alive.

I really enjoyed this coming of age story told from the perspective of an elderly Chinese-American man. Through the discovery of dusty personal possessions stored and long forgotten in a shuttered old hotel, the elderly man remembers what happened a lifetime ago-when he fell in love with another exile, a Japanese-American girl who was the only other non-white student in his school.

Apparently, this old hotel really does exist and was restored as it was described in this story. Ford created an entertaining, moving story around this hotel, a story of two young people who form a bond despite the many barriers put up by their families, society and the world at war. This story personalized how American children experienced WWII, the internment of friends and classmates who happened to be Japanese-American, and the difficult, complex relationships between Whites, Chinese and Japanese during those years.

When I lived in Seattle, I often went shopping in the International District. There were tantalizing hints of its history in the funky old buildings and the mish-mash of shops and restaurants. But I was too busy in those days to look beyond the surface. Now I know something about that neighborhood; Japantown, its community, people and businesses which originally thrived in that same area, and why Japantown disappeared.

 

As gut wrenching as Tei Fujiwara’s story is, it is sobering to know that the suffering of refugees continues today, seventy years later. As George Clooney noted in the video clip posted by the International Rescue Committee, the huge numbers of refugees is mind numbing and one is tempted to just turn off the news, and focus on one’s own life. We’ve all got enough problems of our own. But when we can hear the story of one family, one person and see the tears of one child, the suffering becomes real. Connecting with such suffering at the individual level is what compels us to take action. Tei Fujiwara had the courage and the strength to write down her experiences as a refugee mother with three young children. Her story was one of suffering and honest reflection, but also of great hope and belief in the goodness of people. Her generation of Japanese civilians, including my mother, recovering from WWII read her story, were encouraged, and still urge the young today in Japan to read her book, to truly understand what war meant for Japan. My mother, who grew up during the war, read Tei’s memoir when she was a young woman before she immigrated to America. When I was a teenager myself, my mother was thrilled to meet Tei Fujiwara’s son, who came to the University of Colorado as a visiting scholar. I also met him but wasn’t really aware of his mother’s story until my mother shared Tei’s Japanese memoir with me years later. Through the friendship between our families, I contacted them and began translating Tei’s memoir a few years ago. After translating her story into English, “Tei, a memoir of the end of war and beginning of peace”, I’m excited to see that readers today are also deeply moved by her story. I believe Tei Fujiwara would want her story to enlighten us in the English-speaking world, to help us understand the refugee’s story, no matter what part of the world they are in.

 

Refugees

After a year of getting feedback from readers, I’ve been happy to hear how readers were moved and impressed by Tei’s remarkable story but very few readers can really evaluate the quality of my translation.

Happily, last October I received a letter from Columbia University after I submitted Tei to the 2015- 2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. I didn’t win the translation competition but the judges sent me a very nice letter which I will share below.

Translation, especially from Japanese to English, is a tricky business since the two languages are so very different. I want the translation to be as accurate as possible and at the same time, the English version to be as readable as possible.

 

I’m grateful the translation judges felt I did a decent job. I hope Tei Fujiwara will be happy to know that English readers are can also appreciate the rich textures and nuances of the story she wrote seventy years ago.

 

 

 

I just finished listening to the audio book of “The Art of Asking” by Amanda Palmer who became famous for her TEDTalk in which she said something like – perhaps we ought to think about, not how do we MAKE people pay for music, but how do we LET people pay for music. That made me think about the new audiobook I made of the Tei book. How do I make it as easy to listen to Tei’s story as it is to listen to music?

Just like music, audiobooks have almost become a required staple of many busy people. Audiobooks are easy to load, listen to while we do all the mundane chores of our lives — driving, washing dishes, writing blogs. In fact, I am listening to an audiobook now as I write this blog. (Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”).

This month, I plan to explore where I can distribute the audiobook version of Tei. I hope to let readers/listeners access the audiobook for free or a low fee. If you have any suggestions, please use the contact form here to share your ideas. Thanks!

 

Fujiwara’s spirit radiates through the pages and her love for her children is unmistakable. Her emotional memoir, written over 60 years ago and now available in English, will inspire thought and feeling as she shares her struggle and her will to survive.

Word of this book is spreading through the English language community in Japan. Check out the review by the biggest and oldest English language newspaper in Japan–the Japan Times.

Books

A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II, by Eric Jaffe, Schribner (2014)

The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945-1956 by Andrew E. Barshay, University of California Press (September 2, 2013)

Year Zero: A History of 1945, by Ian Buruma, The Penguin Press. (September 26, 2013)

Under the Black Umbrella, Voices from Colonial Korea 1910 – 1945, by Hildi Kang, Cornell University Press (2001)

YouTube videos

Two film of Tokyo, Japan in the 1930’s. http://youtu.be/wY2hAFPBIaI
Manchukuo (Manchuria) 1938 http://youtu.be/16IVkiVQut8

Wikipedia articles.
Manchukuo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo

Other

Some of the Serious Conditions in Japan After World War II http://www.phoenixbonsai.com/bigpicture/PostWarJapan.html