Are you looking for color?

Equinoctal moon --
color only beginning now

Glimpses of color:

Tree Guy tells me that the red and orange and gold and yellow colors of autumn leaves are there all summer long, hidden by green. When the green seeps away (chlorophyll “breaks down” and/or stops being produced—obviously, I’m pretty vague on the science), other colors sing forth. 

Already in early September the green of our deciduous trees was noticeably less bright, red undertones darkening the overall effect of the woodland edges. Where I notice brighter color most in September is in pockets—peony foliage in my border, columbine in the shade garden, an isolated, stressed tree here and there along the road, the first red sumac leaves and berries. But the big color show, once it gets underway, will develop quickly—and then be over all too soon, as happens every year.

And oh, already the pin cherries! How often do we pay any attention to them? Look at their vivid color with the low, almost-setting sun behind the leaves!

Flowers and Gardens of the Shoulder Season:

When bee balm goes to seed and phlox begins dropping its petals, I sometimes, with a wave of sadness, almost panic, that the time of blossoms is past—and then the asters begin to bloom. Asters in the village, asters in my meadow, asters along the roadside! Tiny white and pale pink ones and splashy big deep purple flowers. The bees love them, and so do I. 

My old corner from long ago!

Busy bee --

Chrysanthemums in pots appear around the same time and certainly fill an important niche, but it’s the wild asters that make me stop and smile. Carefree as weeds, bright and varied in their colors, they are Nature’s free will offering. Thank you!

Meadow asters

More

There are colors in my garden, too, though. A few marigolds from last year’s seeds, some dwarf hollyhocks (why they came up where they did and why they are so small, I have no idea), a handful of zinnias. My strawberry tower did not yield fruit but survived the summer, and I’m considering bringing it to the bookstore for the winter to see what it will do. Any thoughts on that?

Garden gold

Strawberry tower

Look out for this invader!

I had a nasty shock while Tree Guy and I were working on reducing the number of (total elimination is a pipe dream) young black walnut trees and the ever-invasive autumn olive. A large shrub I had been walking by for years was covered with black berries. What were they? Anything edible? Imagine how I recoiled in dread when the identification turned out to be the horrible buckthorn! That, too? No fair!

Chainsaw, loppers, pruners, poison, and a bag to contain the berries stole an hour from our pursuit of other goals, but I will be on the lookout from now on, and if you see this invader on your land, don't let it get the upper hand!

Buckthorn! Very unwelcome!

What of the 2026 apple crop?

Judging only from what I see as I travel county roads, it looks like a fantastic apple year! My own little trees have produced nicely after two off-years (first because of codling moths, then the next year a late spring killing frost nipping the blossoms). This year I was ready with traps for the moths at the end of winter, and spring frosts were unproblematic, so my only regret now is having neglected to thin the crop, because there are too many undersized apples, too much fruit competing for the trees’ resources. Three years ago, I did a good job of thinning, but this summer I forgot all about it. Oh, well! There are some good-sized apples in the mix, too.

One of my overloaded trees

Orchardists will not have made my mistake. Their crops look great! A place on Swede Road makes the most delicious fresh sweet cider with theirs. 

Cider stop, Swede Road

Wild apple trees look to have had a boom year, also, so there will be plenty of fruit for wildlife this winter.

Big wild apple

What people have been reading this year:

Three categories of fiction frequently requested this past year stand out, along with one of philosophy: (1) science fiction; (2) fantasy; (3) romance; and ((4) Stoicism. Even given the dystopic, post-apocalyptic trends in (1) and (2), the first three genres, as I see them, spell escape from present reality. 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours….

So wrote William Wordsworth, noting further that “we are out of tune.”  

Out of tune. Not in harmony. Out of tune with nature, surely, tragically. Out of tune with our times—perhaps not such a bad thing, since the times themselves are out of tune with nature. 

So where does that leave (4)? Why are American readers—at least in Northern Michigan—turning to an ancient school of philosophy? Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus. As with the escape reading, the Stoics seem clearly a response to the times in which we live, with the difference that Stoicism would have us deal with our challenges, accept our limitations, and keep our cool rather than explode in anger, simmer and shiver in anxiety, or fearfully burrow down the rabbit hole of escapism.

The Serenity Prayer is an example of the Stoic approach to life: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

 

Courage to change the things I can, 

 

and Wisdom to know the difference.

Stoicism is not resignation. Change what you can and then don’t give your one brief precious life over to agonizing about what you cannot control.

It has been an interesting summer of bookstore requests, this one of 2026, with three frequently requested categories of reading to escape reality and one to help us deal with it.

I am reminded by a recent customer request that there have also been more older adults than usual looking for the simple stories of their early years. Women have always been ready to revisit Nancy Drew, but in 2026 I’ve had men in their 70s wanting to re-read Hardy Boys books. Comfortable familiarity is another welcome escape, so there is a fifth popular category.

What I’ve been reading and thinking about:

For myself, I read and think and attempt to deal with life as it is and also periodically plunge from the present day to a previous century and another continent, escaping the here and now, or binge on two or three murder mysteries in a row. (Murder mysteries are a satisfying escape because the genre generally dictates that justice triumph in the end.) I recently finished my reading of the Anatole France novel, The Gods Are A-Thirst, a novel of life immediately following the French Revolution of 1789 (which is not at all escape reading, given the Terror and all that it involved), but I fell into a nonfiction book that turned out, to my surprise, to lead off with an introduction to Stoicism, and while I can’t go the whole nine yards to believing that “everything happens for a reason,” i.e., according to some kind of grand plan, the idea of imagining a worst-case scenario is long familiar to me, something I’ve done for years, though I never gave it a name or realized it was part of Stoic practice. 

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Thinking about a possible worst case, I can decide ahead of time how to deal with it, should it come to pass. That gave me a measure of control—not over the outcome but over my response—and thus a reason not to fret overmuch.

Memento mori thinking is something else that has meaning for me, so encountering it in Stoicism is like meeting an old friend. Before my husband died, we had already lost many good, lifelong friends, and the Artist would often say in the morning, “It’s a beautiful day! And we’re alive!” The implication, sometimes voiced, always implied, was that we would not always be alive—obvious, but not something everyone wants to contemplate daily but for us a happy reminder to rejoice in the day we were beginning together. Now that he is gone, remembering that I too will die still reminds me to appreciate the moment and hour I have while I am in them. Not only will I die, but so will Tree Guy, and so will Naughty Barker, and so will all the people I know and love, but we are here now, and life is all the more precious because not unlimited. 

Stoicism, though, isn’t just about feeling good. That would be a shallow and simplistic reading of it. As Oliver Burkeman notes in his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, when a Stoic thinks that any day could be her last, she doesn’t go wild and max out her credit card because she won’t have another chance to buy things and besides, she’ll be dead and won’t have to pay the bill. That is not memento mori thinking at all. Rather, the Stoic idea is that every day is an opportunity to live a virtuous life, to be courageous, practice healthy moderation, and to pursue justice and seek wisdom. We won’t have an eternity of chances, but we have today. Here’s a quick introduction that may lead you to want to read more.

Dogs are natural stoics, a friend reminded me. So true! The dog with a sore leg avoids straining it as much as possible, and even a dying dog doesn’t weep and wail, “Why me???” Which makes me think of Sarah's last day of life and the photo I will put here of that day, and, as for taking the opportunity to practice doggie virtue, the way she staggered to her feet in the late afternoon, four hours before her last breath, and asked to go outside. She needed to pee. We would not have cared if she had peed on the floor, but she was still concerned with doing right, as a good dog sees right.

Our last day together: Dos Cabezas, Arizona

Brief comment on the news:

I really will keep this brief. My response today is to the Vice President of the United States, who defends the President's actions against media networks whose coverage he doesn't like. (The president has barred those networks from future press conferences. They are suing.) The Vice President says that negative coverage of the president is (I'm going to paraphrase rather than look this up) “not representative of the American people's views.” Huh? Does he understand the difference between news and opinion? Or is he like my stepson's grade school teacher? That teacher told the class, “We only like nice news.” VP also called negative coverage “left-wing propaganda.” Hmmm, propaganda. News ≠ opinion ≠ propaganda. I could say more but won't. You all know what propaganda is, I hope.

A common enemy?

It’s often said that nothing unites people as much as seeing a common enemy. Without one, we find reasons to feud with each other; with one, we make common cause. 

With election year competition and conflict and vitriol building to fever pitch, there is at the same time a growing sense that the American people see AI as their common enemy. Will this be the future conflict? Humans vs. (for lack of a better word) “robots”? Sounds like science fiction, but if it would unite all human beings on earth, I can imagine worse scenarios (e.g., the one we've been living most recently).

How agile are we?

Sunny and I had another agility session with Coach Mike on Monday morning, and he had us doing some complicated new things that we did, I must say, very well. Sunny seemed happy to do what I asked of her, and I was happy with how well we both did. One more reason to keep the grass mowed in my yard is to keep the stage clear for agility equipment. Ah, but Sunny is just as happy with her beloved tennis balls. She is demanding but only within a narrow range!

(I can't photograph her when we are running the course.)

I cannot leave this unsaid.

I learned this morning that one of my oldest and dearest Leelanau friends died last night, Wednesday, Sept. 22. I saw her the previous Friday and a couple Mondays before that and thought there would be more visits, more time to hold her hand and tell her I loved her and what a good friend she had always been. The next-to-last time I was with her, I'm not sure she knew me, though she had called me by name two weeks earlier, and we had shared some laughs. Last Friday, though, she had a beautifully lucid moment when I mentioned all the good times we had had together. She said, “There's one thing we didn't do. We didn't go to the U.P. together. We need to make that trip.”

Ellen, you will be in my heart wherever I go!

Another: One year four of us drove down to the countryside near Buckley to see the giant elm. At the side of the road, on a metal folding chair, inside a Tupperware sheet cake container, there was a guest book. We all wrote something in the book and signed our names. I don't remember what year that was, and now I can't ask the others, because they are all gone.

Ellen, Ann, Linda
(I was cameraperson for this shot.)

Look in the Mirror. Do You Read the Future There?

Marina sunrise, Monday, October 1, 2023

What kind of world do you see around you today, and what future world do you envision? Is it one you want?

 

Years ago here in Northport, when our community was even deeper in the doldrums than the rest of the country, a series of “visioning” meetings was held for local residents, and at one meeting, we were asked to draw a picture of our “vision” for the future. I use scare quotes there because I interpreted the word as meaning something positive – something like a best-case scenario that we might be able to work toward and bring about. (Yeah, yeah, prepositions at the end of the sentence. Move along, move along!) One local woman, however, took “vision” to mean a prediction, and hers (obviously based on the times we were in) was ominous: her drawing showed a street of empty storefronts with big CLOSED signs on all the windows. Very unhappy "vision," I thought. 

View from inside my bookstore to Saturday morning preparations for street fair --

Leelanau UnCaged 2023! Northport was full of life!

My bookstore, like all the village, was full of life, full of people this past Saturday for our annual street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. Music, food, arts and crafts, face painting and art fun for the kids! It is a happy day in Northport, and my guest poets, Fleda Brown and Michael Delp, read to an attentive audience – though I fell down on the job, neglecting to pick up my camera, too overwhelmed by their powerful words. If you weren’t here, I’m sorry you missed them.

But coming back to my sheep (meaning and origin of that French phrase here): Asking the question about the future today, I’m not trying to elicit only positive visions but not exactly asking for predictions, either. I’m asking what you expect, personally, in our country and in the world in the coming years. Is yours an optimistic or a fearful vision? Do you welcome the future you see? Or maybe you don’t look very far ahead, but even if you’re focused more on today than tomorrow, please keep reading, anyway, because today is where we all are now.

 

This post will not be a book review. (For a fuller idea of the contents of the book, please see the publisher’s description I have included in the comment section below.) Everything Naomi Klein has written in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is worth reading, and most of it is very, very important, but I want to address a single narrow issue, more or less, one that has been hurting my heart. And I’m not just pointing a finger, either, because the temptation and danger are there for me as much as for anyone else. 

 

Klein notes that as the political divide has widened across the U.S., thinking has become binary on the left as well as on the right, with the left, simply to counter lies and conspiracy theories on the right, often defending the status quo rather than offering nuanced critique.

 

It's as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes…. 

 

When fear-mongers on the right encourage panic, the left knee-jerk is to dismiss all worry, and vice versa. The problem doesn’t stop there, either. 

 

There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.

 

I added emphasis to the sentence above and set it apart by itself (though it does not take up three lines on my laptop screen) because that sentence brings into focus my today's concern. 

Potentially murky waters --

 

There were groups of people during the height of COVID concern who refused to wear masks, and when some went so far as to say it was for the good of the country and the human species if the weak and old were to die, mask wearers were indignant and horrified at such heartlessness. And yet, when unvaccinated people began to die, how many mask wearers made jokes about people dying of stupidity? “How,” Klein asks, “did we cede so much territory? Become so heartless [ourselves]?"

 

Klein uses this insight to introduce Steve Bannon’s strategy, that of picking up and using the left has dropped,

 

…identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have left neglected or betrayed…

 

-- but my concern here and now, in this post, is with what we are all becoming. The radio/television network that its followers call “conservative” has long hosted name-calling screamers who ridicule their opposition. (I choose to read their news online occasionally to know what they’re saying without having to hear the mocking voices.) I find it equally disturbing, however, when my fellow liberals stoop to name-calling and bad jokes, though I understand the temptation. “We have to laugh so we don’t cry,” one friend told me. But ridiculing our political opponents and those the opposition holds up as leaders and pundits will not open a single mind or heart, and, beyond that, it certainly does not make us kinder, happier people. A hate-filled future for our country? Is this what we want?

 

*****

 

Okay, let me switch gears. How do we escape from what Klein calls “the mirror world”? When I had almost reached the final chapter of her book, I picked up a paperback from 1962, The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Historian Boorstin’s thesis was that America had replaced originals with images, and now, like Narcissus in the Greek myth...

 

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. 

 

When cursed-by-the-gods Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love with his image and “died of languor” on the spot, his own image a narcotic that not only put him to sleep but ended his life. And so Boorstin can’t help but wonder,

 

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power? 

 

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirrorlike.

 

(Are dogs wiser than humans?)

Again with the mirrors! In the mirror world both Klein and Boorstin describe, the kneejerk reach for false villains is matched by an equally desperate reach for false heroes. And here is a problem I have with e-mails that plead on a daily basis for my donations in these “dangerous” times: It isn’t that I don’t see our times as dangerous, because I do, but I see our fear and fixation on opponents as dangerous narcotics, too, not as signposts to peace among neighbors. Because what we are being asked to fear is our neighbors! Each other!

 

I don’t know how much common ground there might be between Boorstin (who died in 2004) and Klein, since the former traveled from Communist Party membership to mid-20^th century conservatism, while the latter makes no bones about being an anticapitalist eco-leftist. Boorstin saw the beginnings of today’s mirror world when advertising invaded American politics, and Klein sees how the mirror world has divided Americans until, gazing at doppelgangers of one another over the abyss, we no longer share a view of reality. But somehow I don’t see them greeting each other as hard-and-fast comrades, because while they see similar dangers, they reach very different conclusions on what we need to do to get beyond the impasse.

 

Boorstin’s map for escaping the mirror world is stronger individualism:

 

Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

 

“Each of us must disenchant himself,” he counsels. 

 

Klein, on the other hand, sees too much individualism as part of what lures us into the mirror world – the idea that each of us, on our own, is responsible only for ourselves. The first wave of COVID, like the shock of 9/11, initial brought Americans together in common cause. Quickly, however, we retreated not only to our respective “sides” (and in the case of COVID, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so, to the safety of our private homes) but also from connectedness. And now, too many who should be making common cause on important issues have become sidetracked into splinter groups with tiny, often entrepreneurial, self-admiring agendas. Fearing and ridiculing a dangerous, monolithic opposition, we subject one another to scrutiny, too, and who on earth can measure up on all possible counts? Even if we don’t begin from individual isolation, it’s where we may end up if we can’t give each other a little slack!

 

So Klein’s recipe for exchanging mirrors and images for reality is not more individualism, but solidarity and connections.

 

We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

 

Our doppelgangers can teach us, she urges, that we are “not as separate from each other as we might think.” And while working on ourselves is a start, changing the larger world requires collaboration and coalition, even in the face of discomfort.

 

I cannot urge too strongly the reading of Doppelganger. Naomi Klein writes as a friend, trusting readers with her own errors and weaknesses and difficulties in her journey through the mirror world. As I said, this is not a book review, and I have left vast numbers of the author’s ideas for you to discover on your own, because I have been wanting for a long time to address what I see as outright meanness in utterances and writings of those with whom I otherwise agree, and it makes me sad, and one of the things I most love about Naomi Klein is that she refuses to stoop to unkindness. 

 

Besides, it’s a fascinating journey! Doubles, twins, identity thieves, avatars, doppelgangers, a house of mirrors – it’s an irresistible story, isn’t it? 

 

But now I need to get back to Iain McGilchrist, because a common underground thread I see connecting all of us in this splintered, divided, many-mirrored world is what McGilchrist identifies as a cultural over-reliance on the left brain, that narrowly logical, super-rational “emissary,” with its intolerance for ambiguity and an inability to make room for facts and ideas that conflict with its orderly catalog of guarded knowledge. 

 

Another strength of Klein’s view and her book: she sees the irresistible temptation to judge characters globally on the basis of single issues. Is so-and-so this? Or that? We are all, she says, both this and that, neither devils nor angels. 

 

And every new day is an opportunity for us to make better choices.

THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER, Part II

During the time Ulrich Straus was writing his book, THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER: JAPANESE POWs IN WORLD WAR II, he thought its importance would be chiefly as part of the historical record of that war. He did not dream then, or even after the book was first published, that the United States would be debating the permissibility of torturing prisoners in the 21st century. But because of stories that came out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo since the publication of his book, and because of public statements by individuals highly placed in the American government, Straus has been repeatedly invited to speak and write on the subject of treatment of war prisoners. It has almost become a second retirement career for him, and he is passionate about it.

In the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, on December 22, 2004 (complete text available online), Straus wrote: “The abhorrent and illegal treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the coercive interrogation of Afghan war detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, contrast sharply with the human extraction of ‘actionable’ intelligence from Japanese POWs during World War II. Sixty years ago, we learned that abiding by international law and treating the enemy as a member of the human race not only shortened the war in the Pacific, but also helped win the peace in the occupation that followed.” During that long war, Straus writes, the United States “realized that in order to win the war and, equally important, the peace that would follow, we would have to treat POWs decently, as we ourselves would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.” This was the right strategy both on moral grounds and in terms of its consequences: It was the respectful way to treat fellow human beings, and it worked to win them over to our side.

When I contacted Rick by e-mail recently, telling him I wanted to feature his book in my blog, this was his reply: “Pamela, Your message could not have been more timely. My book has become the centerpiece, it seems, of an effort by retired and active duty U.S. military to stop the torture of POWs in Iraq. My book demonstrated, quite convincingly I think, that by and large we treated Japanese POWs in World War II decently, with the result that we got information that helped shorten the war somewhat and also contributed among many factors to a successful Occupation. When I wrote the book all this did not seem especially relevant, but that was before the US Government made torture a valid form of POW treatment. Aside from being illegal and immoral, torture is generally not an effective means of gaining intelligence. Our military hate it because it leaves us with nothing to say when, in the next war, the other side employs torture against US POWs.” In other words, when we desert the moral high ground in our treatment of those we hold as prisoners, we cut out from under ourselves any ground from which to ask for humane treatment for our people taken as prisoners. Immoral, illegal, ineffective and dangerous to our own people. Straus makes a strong case, not based on argument alone but on evidence from wartime prison camps. This is a story that demands attention, now more than ever.

Rick Straus serves on the board of the International Affairs Forum held at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, a series of presentations in which top international issues are addressed by former ambassadors, government advisors and think tank participants. Recognition of the importance of his book continues to grow.

THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER, Part I

(This is a corrected version of the original posting.)

Like many retirees, Ulrich Straus wanted to write a book, and he did. Unlike most other books by retired state department people, he did not write a memoir but a book of history, a story from World War II that had not been told before in English, the story of Japanese soldiers and sailors taken as prisoners of war by the Allies in the Second World War. The plight of Japanese-Americans denied their civil rights and interned in camps during World War II is familiar now, even to schoolchildren; by contrast, the story of Japanese prisoners of war is barely known at all. Perhaps it took someone with Straus’s unique personal history to bring this chapter to light.

Leelanau County is Rick Straus’s retirement home, but over the course of his life, beginning in childhood, he lived a total of about 27 years in Japan. His father was a German businessman who was sent to Japan by his company during the Great Depression and later moved his family there. When Japan started to feel unsafe, the elder Straus brought the family, still German nationals, to the United States, where Rick finished high school and went on to the University of Michigan for its Intensive Japanesse Language program.

Enemy aliens could not volunteer for the military, but they could be drafted, and the story of how Rick, still a teenager, was drafted into the army is a story in itself but one I won’t get into here. He served in the military in post-war Japan as a translator of German and Japanese documents at the Japanese War Trial in Tokyo in 1946-48 (he was 18 at the time), later went back to Japan as a Fulbright scholar, and eventually went to work for the state department, finally serving as American consul general in Okinawa from 1978 to l982. It was an exciting life. His interest in Japanese POWs was natural: besides having lived in the country as a child, had the war lasted longer he would have been interrogating Japanese prisoners of war himself.

David and I first met Rick on the beach at Gills Pier Road, when his Samoyed approached our Nikki, their tails wagging. Fast-forward several years to 2001 when Rick asked me to edit the manuscript for his book, THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER: JAPANESE POWs OF WORLD WAR II, subsequently published by the University of Washington Press in 2003. Everyone remembers the fall of that year. Waking from nightmares in the wee, dark hours, I would make coffee and sit down with the pages of an engrossing story from over half a century before. The work kept contemporary demons at bay but did not banish them utterly, for one very good reason: perception and treatment of enemies forms the thematic core of THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER. When the project found a publisher, David worked with Rick in selecting photographs for the book. We were honored to be able to make our modest contributions to the large, important work Straus had produced.

Straus conducted thirty-five personal interviews with former Japanese POWs for his book, on top of copious documentary research, and when I say he tells the “life stories” of these men, that’s what I mean. He begins by tracing the development of the traditional Japanese military man from schoolboy indoctrination through formal military training. Never denying that Allied troops captured by the Japanese suffered terribly in captivity, he makes it clear that everything in Japanese culture up to the close of the Second World War taught that surrender was shameful and that those who surrendered had dishonored themselves. The Japanese had never even ratified the Geneva Conventions, their reasoning being that the enemy would not have to feed and house Japanese prisoners—there would be no Japanese surrendering—so why should Japan take on the cost of caring for prisoners?

Because they expected to be severely punished and believed they deserved it (as the Japanese military believed, too, of those they captured), Japanese POWs were overwhelmed to receive humane treatment, including good medical treatment and gift cigarettes, from their captors and guards. Amazed and grateful, they quickly began to see their captors as human beings rather than monsters, and most were eager to cooperate with the Allies. Escape attempts were rare.

When the Japanese government was sent lists of men taken prisoner, they notified the families that these men had been killed. Dying for the emperor was honorable; surrendering was not. Most of the prisoners, for their part, dreaded returning home, and many felt they would never be able to do so, that returning would bring shame on their families. Reality was kinder, and Japanese culture underwent deep changes as a result.

Coming Tuesday, January 22: THE ANGUISH OF SURRENDER, by Ulrich Straus, Part II