Book Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

When I was young, we drove past a few grocery stores to get to one owned by an extended Japanese family in Portland. My memories are of the same kind man behind the butcher counter, his taller brother always arranging the bananas, a wife or sister at the check out. They doted on me as a child and I loved the small selection of Japanese candy near the front.

I don't remember how old I was, maybe 9 or so, when I learned about Jewish concentration camps at school or somewhere. I brought the subject up as my mother and I loaded up to go to the grocery store. I told her how shocked I was that one race could decide another should be herded into camps. She sat and listened, and then explained about our Japanese friends at the grocery store, and how this family had been sent to internment camps in the 1940's. It was the '80's and Reagan had recently given them some money as restitution and they had started this grocery store. That's why we always gave them our business. I could not believe it. I couldn't wrap my brain around our country doing something like that. When we went in, I looked at them as if we were now conspirators of some great secret and I finally got to be a part of it.

Homer & Leah 1990's

When I was in junior high I had a WWII project of some sort to work on, and I was asking my dad's dad about his experiences during the war. By the '90's my grandparents lived on the coast and Grandpa was perpetually referring to anyone Japanese as Japs. When I was old enough to notice my mother wincing I asked her about it and she explained to me about Pearl Harbor and why Grandpa felt the way he did, and how some things just don't change for a person over time.

During the war years, before enlisting in the Navy towards the end, Grandpa built fake, lit-up cities for the Army in the middle of nowhere to draw Japanese bombers attention away from populated areas. At one point, and I'm fuzzy on the details, he was near an internment camp. You have to remember that he was part of the generation who never discussed the war, so for him to tell me anything was amazing. I do remember vividly that when he told me this, he got very quiet, and I can even picture the way the words came off his lips when he told me that he would pass cigarettes through the barbed wire to the prisoners. And sometimes food. Again, I was shocked.

Leah, my dad, and Homer - 1946

This was growing up in the Northwest, many years after the war. And so Japanese WWII stories have always interested me. The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford, which has been read by nearly everybody but me until now, is a strong book, a snapshot of that era. The way one man broke the chains in childhood where he could, and into adulthood, where it was harder. Many things have been said about this book, so I'll just add that it was clean, picturesque, and I'm glad I read it.