This Jew survived WW II — in Axis-era Japan

Growing up in Imperial Japan during World War II, Isaac Shapiro’s best friend was a member of the Hitler Youth.

The friend wore the brown shirt to school every day, not because he wanted to, but because as a German he was expected to project support for the Fuehrer. His peers gently teased him for it.

“Everybody at school made fun of him,” Shapiro said. “We didn’t support the German Reich.”

Countless Jews have harrowing stories of growing up under Nazi rule, but Shapiro’s is different — he was one of the few Jews living in Japan at the time. He lived there when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

Shapiro, 87, is the author of “Edokko: Growing Up a Stateless Foreigner in Wartime Japan,” first released in 2010 and republished last year. The title refers to a person born and raised in Tokyo.

While Shapiro’s story contains elements of World War II-era totalitarianism — the police state, the pervasive propaganda — it is unique because it’s not a tragedy. Shapiro wanted the U.S. to win. He survived American bombings. He had some idea of what was happening to Europe’s Jews. But he also has fond recollections of his Japanese neighbors and childhood friends.

“We didn’t feel we were living among the enemy,” Shapiro told JTA. “Our neighbors were pleasant, decent people. We got the same food rations the Japanese got. They were very fair.”

Shapiro’s family came to Japan in a whirlwind. His parents, both Russian Jewish musicians, met and married in Berlin. They sensed danger early, immigrating to then-Palestine in 1926 to escape Nazi rule. When they found life difficult there, they moved to Harbin, a city in northeastern China with a large Russian Jewish population. In 1931, Shapiro’s father took a job at a music conservatory in Tokyo.

Shapiro was born in Japan, but lived in Japanese-occupied Harbin from 1931 to 1936 because his parents had separated. There, his family got a taste of the Japanese police state: in 1933, the Japanese military helped a gang kidnap his mother and a family friend, Simon Kaspe. His mother was released, but Kaspe was killed. The incident prompted his parents to reunite the family in Japan.

“The Japanese military were unusually autocratic and difficult,” Shapiro said, though in general he “didn’t feel any oppression or any change because of the Japanese taking over.”

His life was shaken up again by the escalation of World War II. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States and United Kingdom declared war on Japan. Shapiro’s British school was closed. His family needed to obtain permission whenever they wanted to leave Yokohama. They received all their news from a heavily censored English newspaper.

“It made us much more conscious of the role of the military,” Shapiro said of the start of the war. “Military police were much more visible everywhere. They would call on us every now and then. We felt we were under surveillance.”

Despite the tight government control, Shapiro spent the early years of the war in the bubble of an international school. At home, he and his family would talk about their hopes for an American victory.

The family managed to maintain some Jewish practices while living within a Nazi ally. They would eat Shabbat dinners at home on Friday night, and his father wore a kippah at those meals. They avoided pork. On Passover, they imported matzah from Harbin.

“We knew what has happening to the Jews in Germany and we wanted Germany to lose the war,” Shapiro said. “We were very quiet about it and didn’t want the Japanese to think we were against them. Privately, we were hopeful that Japan would lose the war.”

The war came home in 1944, when the Japanese military evacuated the coast and sent his family to Tokyo, where they endured heavy American bombing. They ran frequently to air raid shelters and pumped water to put out fires. A friend of Shapiro’s was killed in a bombing.

“Tokyo was burning,” Shapiro said. “The bombs fell all around us.”

By 1945, it was clear that Japan was losing, although censored newspapers downplayed defeats as temporary setbacks. When the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, it was covered as a small item in the paper so as not to scare readers.

When the war ended, Shapiro met an American army officer seeking English speakers. He signed on, at age 14, to be a translator, and ended up translating for the U.S. Navy in Japan.

“I have to go home and get some clothes and tell my parents,” Shapiro recalled telling the officer. But his parents didn’t mind. “They were in such a state of shock,” he said.

A Marine officer and his wife took in Shapiro and, in 1946, with his parents’ encouragement, moved with him to Hawaii. Shapiro attended high school there, then went on to college and law school at Columbia, and a long career at the firms of Milbank Tweed and Skadden Arps.

In 1952, he served in the Korean War, sweeping for mines and interrogating Koreans in Japanese. In the late 1970s, he and his wife got to live in Japan during peacetime, helping establish Milbank Tweed’s Tokyo office.

“There were lots of Americans by that time,” Shapiro said of Tokyo. “It was completely different. When we went down to Hiroshima, it was unrecognizable.”