by Iwao Peter Sano - 1997, 210 pages, hardback.This is the saga of a California Nisei sent to Japan in 1939 to be come the adopted son of his childless aunt and uncle. He was fifteen and knew no Japanese. When World War II came along he was drafted into the Japanese Army. Sent to join the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, Sano arrived in Hailar, one hundred miles from the Soviet border, as the war was coming to a close. Sano had the bad luck to be in a unit that surrendered to the Russians. It would be nearly three years before he was released to return to Japan.
Sano's account of life in the POW and labor camps of Siberia as a English speaking Japanese from America is an unusual story of a little-known part of the great conflagration that was World War II. Sano recalls his experience with honesty and humor.
Sano eventually returns to the United States to resume his life with his original family. It is also a poignant memoir of a man who was always an outsider, both as an America youth of Japanese ancestry and then as a young Japanese man whose loyalties were suspect to his new compatriots.
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