Shelters for the Self

A Review by LaMano

This is as minimal and as compelling as it gets. No “tweaking” to make it sound more interesting like we might come to expect from modern books or movies, it’s just raw and atmospheric and real.

Don’t expect to spend days or even hours reading it the first time. You can get through all of it, the forewords and background and historical context and the actual diary, in about 30 minutes of reading.  But I find myself picking it up again and again; the last time with a calendar of the Pacific war next to it.

A hand-written diary picked up on a battle-torn Pacific island after all the Japanese on the island were dead or captured, passed on to someone else, translated and typed up while the memories were still clear, it has the feel of half a chapter of Henri Charriere’s Papillon; the translation is not perfect, the diarist was not a skilled writer. He just says what he is feeling, tells what he did while the bombs crashed around him, and with each reading you get a little more of his mood..

The writer is a young, loyal, frightened, courageous petty officer attached to an Imperial Japanese Navy anti-aircraft artillery unit on the island of Biak during the American invasion. You get a sense of the kind of propaganda that he had been fed by some statements he makes. He has never been in close combat with his enemy, and yet of the American troops he says “…. the enemy are known to be weak in maneuver and will cry and flee when attacked …..” Each time a Japanese aircraft flies over, they're told that it sank an American ship. Maybe you HAVE to believe that sort of thing in that situation...

Perhaps someday, someone will be able to use the clues in the diary to get this information to his family. But in the meantime, we can get a sense of the fear and hopelessness of a Japanese soldier coming to the realization of just what magnitude of a “sleeping giant” Japan has awakened from its slumber...

Shelters for the Self

(c) 2018 LaMano