I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.
I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.
I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan.
I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.
Beijing was a huge slap in the face, and it forced me to look at myself. I have to realise that this is my life.
In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945.
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.
I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me.
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.