Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story

This is an extraordinary true-life POW story, told by a Japanese soldier captured by American forces during World War II. Ooka's concern with his imprisonment was not fear of brutality, but with how capture would look back home in Japan. In this endearing account, he relates how his American captors treated their prisoners as human beings, confusing the prisoners who saw themselves, through their own cultural filter, as dishonored wretches who had allowed capture rather than suicide or martyrdom. Ooka writes that this cultural dissonance prevented the Japanese POWs from "accepting the Americans' warmheartedness with simple gratitude."