Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salisbury
My rating: 4/5 cats
i curse my elementary and high school education because it failed to teach me cool shit about world war II. or anything that wasn’t related to the damn 13 colonies. i know everything there is to know about the mating rituals of the quakers (zzzzzzzzzzz) but i have no idea who won the civil war.
here are some things i have just learned today:
hawaii is moving toward japan at the rate of almost 4 inches per year – snapple plum-a-granate tea cap
during world war II, 25 american soldiers of japanese descent who were living in hawaii were sent to “cat island” to be used as bait for dogs being trained as attack dogs adept in “scenting out japs”. – this here book i just read
seriously??
i know i am completely unaware of huge chunks of standard-issue-information that everybody seems to know intuitively or just from casual newswatching, but you would think i would know about this. to me, it is both horrifying and strangely hilarious to think that the president authorized this. can you imagine the conversation initiating this program??
“we are going to have dogs trained to sniff out japs. you know, for war.”
“what a fantastic idea! where are we going to get these japs??”
“well, we have some american-japs in our army”
“okay, but if they are american, can the dogs still identify them as japs??”
“certainly, they are still japs, right?”
“okay, but are our soldiers cool with being hunted like this??”
“well, they are americans! and soldiers! they have taken an oath of loyalty!”
“but you just said they were japs”
“no shit, it’s crazy, right? we are just making it up as we go along here – military improv. did you see pearl harbor?? kaboom! it’s nutso but this just feels right.”
wow. although the above are not actual transcripts, that’s probably the way it went down. (lgm)
so i thank this book for finally teaching me something about the history of my own damn country, and now i want to find a full-length, nonfiction account of all this because it fascinates me. this book was an amuse-bouche for my brain, but 224 mass-market pages are not enough.
bad dog!
