23. In large measure, the generous Japanese treatment of their prisoners derived from the captives limited number and from the fact that in modernizing of their military in the Meiji period the Japanese had attended to Prussian successes, constitutional and military. They respected my grandfather’s cohort as soldiers. Several pictures, such as this large bell outside a Shinto shrine, suggest his admiration for Japan and its culture. Once in America, to which he escaped from the hyper-inflation in 1926, bringing with him his wife and my oldest uncle and my father, the rise of Hitler would present him with a devastating sense that Germany’s ultimate defeat was self-inflicted. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor deepened his grief, for standards of order and decency which he had endeavored to make his own would be lost in such bigotry and violence. From the post-World War II perspective—after the Bataan Death March, after Auschwitz—my grandfather’s love of honor and organization, his trust in authority, seem remarkably antiquated, naïve. And yet.
24. In this photograph, he crouches in the middle of the second row. It could be a very ordinary picture of a company of soldiers in smart uniforms, all looking fit and healthy, assembled for an official photograph, were it not that the men in this photograph are all prisoners of war, inmates of the Narashino camp, who apparently had their dress uniforms in their kit when they left Tsingtau. They have assembled outside the boundaries of the prison to have their picture taken in front of a splendid Shinto temple. Yet, the historical momentum that culminated in the fall of Tsingtau was the same as that which took Rupert Brooke almost to Gallipoli, or led Remarque’s Paul Baumer to the moment when, the last of his platoon, he stretched his hand toward a butterfly, or Wilfred Owen to the Sambre-Oise Canal where he died exactly a week before the Armistice. In our Eurocentric reading of the catastrophe, we ignore that elsewhere the catastrophe may read differently. In my family, it comes down to the simple fact that my grandfather had the great good fortune to be taken prisoner by the Japanese halfway around the world at the moment of the First Battle of Yprès in which eight thousand Germans would die, ten thousand would go missing, and nearly thirty thousand would be wounded.
