Hidenari terasaki biography of barack obama

Posted to Washington in , he met his future wife and married despite potential for real hardship. She had to confront anti-Asian feelings in her family and society and he had to consider relations potentially souring between America and Japan. Ominously, they married the November following the Manchurian Incident, after which Terasaki was sent to Shanghai.

Transferred to Havana in he then helped establish an intelligence and propaganda network across the Caribbean before returning to China in About half the book focuses on the year prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War. This is one of the more intriguing angles of this study, as Jeans persuasively shows that rather than being more concerned with events in Europe, some American isolationists and pacifists were very interested in the Pacific, petitioning key figures accordingly.

Terasaki enjoyed a variety of American connections and through his wife could access others. Through the consulate Terasaki was also linked to Japanese businesses, some potentially in positions to gather intelligence. She speaks of war from the perspective of someone who has experienced it directly, not as a soldier thousands of miles from home but as a child who lived with her family among other vulnerable civilians during one of the most intense bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare.

Her uncle, Taira, visited the family in Tokyo over Christmas of A physician based at Kure naval base, he had led one of the first medical teams into Hiroshima some three hours after the first atomic bomb exploded over the city. She listened as he described the utter devastation and hopeless suffering he encountered, the grisly scenes of children dying en masse from fallout, of mothers dying with infants in their arms.

Now in her seventies, as she witnesses the spread of nationalist fervor and aggression across the globe, she is more than ever convinced that mankind must choose between war or survival. Terasaki was anxious for his daughter to escape the privations of life in Japan and resume her education. He never saw them again. He died of a heart attack at the age of 50, two weeks before the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty.

Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Bridge to the Sun. Skip to content. Hidenari Terry at Brown University. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Proudly powered by WordPress. Some nine years later I would be reminded of what we had for lunch that day.

When we finished, my mother casually remarked that she liked a ring the workman wore. It was a silver puzzle ring made of four separate bands adorned with silver flowers. She regretted the compliment, because he promptly took it off and gave it to her. She tried to refuse, but he insisted. In we visited Tokyo on our way to the United States from Shanghai.

I was eight years old. I remember enormous crowds waving little Japanese flags.

Hidenari terasaki biography of barack obama

I imagine many readers have vivid recollections of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public school. Patriotic indoctrination begins when we are tiny children. It continues throughout our lives, often with lethal consequences. These crowds of well-meaning people cheered and waved little flags as Japanese militarists plunged them into a war that would kill millions and leave their country in ruins.

Today, most have forgotten the rage against the military that swept Japan after the war. As we mark the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the drums of militarism are resounding once again in Japan. And the United States, which has garrisoned the globe with bases and undertakes military operations in countries on virtually every continent, is encouraging this awful development.

There is strong opposition among the people of Japan. I support it wholeheartedly. I was nine years old when the Pacific War began, a spoiled child accustomed to a posh existence as the daughter of a rising Japanese diplomat. It also marked the end of my idyllic childhood. By the time the war was over, I was a jaded adolescent who had seen enough human suffering and iniquity to last a dozen lifetimes.

By the summer of , during the massive carpet-bombing of Japanese cities, we were clinging to survival on a mountainside near the remote village of Tateshina in the Japanese Alps. We had never before experienced hunger. Now every day was a struggle to get enough calories to keep ourselves alive. Famine stalked Japan, and unless something changed, we knew we would starve to death.

Memories of starving people in China came back to me in sharper focus. My father suffered from severe hypertension, the illness that would eventually kill him. His blood pressure was in the stratosphere, and there were no medications to control it. In desperation, my father and I tried our hands at farming. We cleared a little garden plot near our cabin.

He would pry rocks loose with a shovel, and I would pick them up and put them in a burlap sack. One day he stopped and gazed off at the mountains. He knew we were engaged in a hopeless task. Anguish and amusement played upon his features like the patterns of light and shadow drifting across the pines. He asked me whether I remembered the distinguished young man who had moved our furniture in Shanghai.

I drew a complete blank.