INTRODUCINg TATTERED KIMONOS IN JAPAN (from the preface)

I used to work in public radio, where I collaborated with a lot of really smart people who excelled at telling stories, which is what public radio does best. Along the way I received advice from colleagues, genuinely creative journalists more experienced than me, regarding how those stories could most effectively be told.

“Put your best tape first,” one of them said. In other words, listen carefully to the interview voices and sounds collected on your recording device (the source material gathered while researching a story) and prioritize themost compelling stuff. Another colleague likened that process to “finding the poetry in news.”

A third associate boiled it down to this: “Tell the big story in the smallest way possible through the experience of someone whose life is involved in the subject matter at hand.”

All of that insight informs this book.

The big story here is World War II and its imprint on Japan, told in the smallest way possible through the experiences of Japan’s war generation: the individuals who fought in the war or grew up during the war years; who remembered what it was like and grappled with the consequences of those recollections; and who managed, often against all odds, to carry those memories into the twenty-first century, where they crafted lives made from long-ago misfortune. Their stories constitute my best tape: interviews gathered over two decades of traveling to and through Japan and speaking with Japanese about their wartime pasts and postwar presents. Hopefully, readers will find poetry in some of what they told me.