Customer Reviews

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan

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Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is one of those non fiction books that reads like a novel, almost a French novel, in that the narrator is self-aware and weaving the opinions and feelings and revelations of the characters in the story around the action of the book. The action is haunting -- what DID happen to the MPs and their prisoners in Postwar Japan and why does no one want to talk about it -- but, equally as haunting, is the family suffering the loss of the uncle MP who recently committed suicide. Was what he saw and lived through unbearable? He has sent his writer niece (Terese Svoboda) the tapes of what happened and she listens and then begins to investigate. As with all suicides of someone one knows and loves, she feels she did not do enough. She does enough to tell his story and find the morality that he himself was reckoning with. Of course, the book makes us, once again, reflect on the high moral and mortal cost of all who "serve". It proves that if the serviceman is willing to remember, the pain can get him. Hence, many of Svoboda's interviewees aren't talking. Svoboda's style (in all her books) is spare, sly, and unflinching in getting to the heart of her story. In this book, her father (the uncle's brother) rallies her on. Personally, I am partial to non fiction by novelists, since they cannot but give you all the facts without going to the heart. The book stays with me.

In Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, Terese Svoboda has rendered a beautifully nuanced memoir. Her uncle has a secret about his service as an MP in post-WWII occupied Japan that becomes more urgent when he sees the photographs of Abu Ghraib. But he won't reveal this secret easily to her. He sends her tapes of his memories through the mail, and Svoboda must piece together all the information at her hands -- her uncle's memories, his letters home to his girlfriend during his service, her familial relationships, statistics about the occupation of Japan -- many of which are conflicting, her understanding of heroism, and interviews with aging WWII veteran and Japanese native populations to try and uncover the secret. In the vein of Susan Griffin, Svoboda offers a mosaic text with pieces of the puzzle -- military documents, memories, photographs, and taped transcripts juxtaposed so that the reader joins her in the journey of trying to uncover what her uncle couldn't bring himself to say. This memoir is written for readers who like to be actively engaged by a story rather than sitting back and having it spoon fed to them. Her writing is beautiful. Her honesty is bracing. It should never be forgotten during the reading that this is a true story -- her uncle's last story. If we are to understand how events like Abu Ghraib happened, then we need to understand how it was not an isolated incident in our military history. Svoboda takes the difficult and accurate view that the brave men and women who serve in our military are often asked to do things in the line of duty that will haunt them the rest of their lives. I highly recommend this book.

Writer was sent the taped diary of uncle who commited suicide after being a guard at an American stockade just after the conquest of Japan. The portion of this book
that quotes the uncle's diary in italics is excellent, but unfortunately that is only 1/3 of the book and the other 2/3 which is the author's interpretations are
editorials about the current Iraq war, trying to create a parallel with Abu Ghraib,
and attempts to sound poetic and avant garde but only irritates. Obviously the author who has published other things didn't have enough tape transcripts and she tried to pump up the book with her own interpretations but only managed to make me wish that I had never purchased the book. Despite the poor writing (to me) on the author's part, the point she makes that black servicemen were much more likely to get both arrested and executed for rape by the American military than white servicemen are obviously valid and one wonders if this is true even today.
Not content with listening to her uncle's tapes the author did a lot of traveling and digging and interviewing and probing his former superiors and co-workers as well as doing army library research on the prison itself for which I give her credit, but her writing is simply too self-conscious and too obviously out to impress. I do not recommend this book for casual reading, but her uncles' transcripts are valuable because it's the only source material, an actual diary, that I could find about guarding an American stockade just after the war with the Japanese, and Japanese prisoners are mentioned as well. Particularly interesting is the episode where a young Filipino teenage boy comes with the express purpose of killing some Japanese and actually succeeds. The uncle's transcripts are golden. Another interesting part is where black prisoners escape only to have sex at a geisha house a short distance away. The most chilling part is where the prison commandant has prisoners executed to make space, but note that the only
interesting parts to me are the actual diary transcripts, not the authors' remarks.

A memoir of Svoboda's search for truth behind her uncle's recollections of serving as an MP in occupied Japan, this work is an intense and heart-breaking study of memory. Svoboda is the author of nine novels, and this book begins as an unwanted extra project when her father nags her to write down her uncle's "secret". Svoboda gives in when the uncle, whom she knows as a model of cheerful vivacity, a Superman with "grapefruit-sized biceps", succumbs to depression. After he records his memories on tapes for her to transcribe, he kills himself, leaving the family to hunt for the reason in the stories he leaves behind.
The desire to know the truth will keep you turning pages. The tapes contain a veiled confession to manslaughter, but more importantly, they also hold terrifying evidence of executions performed in a military prison in Tokyo in 1946. Svoboda comes to suspect that her uncle, like many vets, suffered from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder which was aggravated by the Abu-Ghraib revelations. Her efforts to corroborate her uncle's story threaten to unhinge other MP vets.
Yet people become her most reliable source, as Svoboda discovers that the military, unintentionally and otherwise, has limited access to the records of the time. The more she is denied information, the less likely--and the more heart-rendering--it becomes that her uncle's witness could ever be conferred the same place in reality as the undeniable fact of the suicide it brought on.
The book truly soars when Svoboda's gripping mixture of the emotional investment and the purposeful sleuthing puts the reader beside her: in her kitchen, listening to her teen-age son's comments on Abu-Ghraib; on the phone with her depressed uncle, struggling to find the right words; on the streets of Tokyo, partnered with an interpreter to probe the memories of local seniors who might have worked at the prison. It is her honesty and humility at the service of the story she's been asked to tell that make the volume a prize-winning example of the genre:
"I don't think telling his stories had much to do with vanity. I think he had a deep need to plant a secret he wanted me to find. But I grow angry that he's left me without an answer, and neither the government, nor the archives, nor the guards, nor the relatives have solved it."

Anyone who is curious about postwar Japan should read this book. It answers many questions, but also points out that many are still unanswered and that postwar military censorship of our occupation still exists. It is curious that postwar Europe is very well documented and known, not only by historians, but by the public of both the victors and the defeated. Yet the story of Japanese occupation was never of much interest to America. And Japanese officials cooperated with MacArthur in tightly controlling the press. Black Glasses peeks into this murky and fascinating time after WWII.

Unlike Dower's "Embracing Defeat" which is pure history, this book is also an interesting personal story that keeps your attention. Maybe someday complete closure will be forthcoming.

A meticulously researched memoir that in its revelation of truth reads as a work of fiction. The story leaves the reader with an emptiness that is borne of all suicides... even those where the victim is not one of our own. It takes courage to write a memoir like this one, how to tell what can be told and that which can not be expressed about an older family member, beloved and iconic, whose death forces those who wish to grieve silently to try to find a way back to the missing. It is a story of war, all wars, a story of survival and how with the stories we tell we keep the dead alive. The reader is relieved to see the quotidian details of the narrator's life as a way of momentary displacing grief, additionally these background noises remind us how we are all sitting next to someone who may be making a meatloaf while crying.

I am doing research on the occupation of japan, so that is what I was expecting. That is not what the book is about. The book was well written, but was more about the uncle and his situation in life than about the occupation.