Tag: japan

Holding, Eating, Caring

Chopsticks Are – written by Chloe Ito Ward, illustrated by Lynn Scurfield
Chronicle Books, 2026

Chopsticks Are is a comprehensive, and incredibly beautiful, look at a ubiquitous utensil used for eating in many Asian cultures. The endpapers feature an array of different chopsticks tall enough to extend from the top to the bottom of the page, and the book concludes with illustrated background information, and a food index. The pages in between are a voyage shared with people, objects, places, and foods that all share a common bond, but are also quite distinct from one another. The audience for this informational book encompasses readers interested in food, Asian culture, beautiful artwork, and the unbreakable ties of family. In other words, this is a book for virtually anyone, offering aesthetic joy and enrichment.

Chloe Ito Ward applies to chopsticks a simple definition; they are tools. Having established that fact clearly, she animates these tools by explaining their many uses. “Flipping pancakes,” and “frying fish,” as well as “whirling,” “whisking,” and “blending,” involve cooking. Some of Lynn Scurfield’s (I reviewed an earlier book of hers here) pictures portray people, while others focus on the hands that make infinite use of chopsticks. But they are also used for picking up food and bringing it to one’s mouth, a task that is acquired early in some cultures, but may seem awkward and daunting in others.

A scene of children eating emphasizes that chopsticks can lift Asian foods (“navigating noodles and natto”), as well as chips and popcorn. I have to comment on one particular scene of a Jewish family sharing a meal of Chinese food. There are men and boys wearing kippot and a woman with a traditional head covering. Those seated at the table are old and young, and of different races. I was very moved by the inclusivity of this specific scene, but there are several others with multi-ethnic and multi-generational characters, personifying the sharing of food and family traditions.

Scurfield’s images are rendered in acrylic ink and acrylic gouache, with lines created digitally. The colors are bright, with both earth and jewel tones. Faces, both old and young, are expressive. Foods are scaled to provide different perspectives, as part of pictures full of human activity, and composed against white space as larger items. The composition is a key element throughout the book. A round dish holding round dumplings is accompanied by chopsticks , to its left, resting on a holder with a blue border. In contrast, a square bento is underlined by a pair of horizontal chopsticks resting on a fish-shaped rest. Both pictures are captioned with alliterative phrases.

The depth of information in the backmatter is also integrated into the text. For example, chopsticks may be long or short. Looking at the pictures, you may also notice that the people using them may be tall, if adults, or shorter, if children. There are no wasted words or images, and every fact is related, if only be implication, to another. Food is not an isolated part of culture, as demonstrated on a page where people wearing different types of clothing seem to parade across a piece of fabric. Above them, a pair of oversized chopsticks forms a kind of roof, or border, to the image.

Buying and consuming food are central to families, and to larger communities. A market scene captures the way that eating unites all the shoppers and diners, depicted as separate groups and individuals, but also as participants in a larger and more unified world. Readers will spend time imagining the conversations here, between couples, parents and children, chefs and customers. A seamless connection between objects and the people who use them is another understated current, with pages that are veritable odes to chopsticks, “painted, patterned, or plain” to the bustling humanity that endow them with meaning. The book’s inexhaustible richness, both visual and poetic, will reward many shared readings.

Reconciliation without History

Returning the Sword: How a Japanese Sword of War Became a Symbol of Friendship and Peace – written by Caren Stelson, illustrated by Amanda Yoshida
Carolrhoda Books, 2025

There is an understandable connection, for many readers, to books that promise a hopeful vision of reconciliation after conflict.  I have read and reviewed many books in this category.  While I respect the principle of deriving a positive lesson from a disastrous historical event, I have difficulty with facile messages of friendship in the absence of context.  Returning the Sword has beautiful illustrations by Amanda Yoshida, and the text by Caren Stelson is obviously the product of sincere beliefs. She is a serious author committed to writing about important topics. However, I am troubled by the book’s almost complete absence of accurate information about Japanese aggression before and during World War II, and its depiction of the Japanese people as the sole victims of that conflict (as was also done here).

Stelson relates the story of Orval Amdahl, a man who served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and in the postwar occupation of Japan. He was horrified by the death and destruction wrought by the atomic bomb, a response shared by people throughout the world.  Although more people were actually killed in the firebombing of Tokyo, inflicting death by radiation poisoning in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was conceived as a different category of weapon, one to be avoided ever again. 

The decision to use that weapon to end the war, while one with terrible consequences, did not occur in a vacuum, but readers would never learn that from the book.  Reporting Captain Amdahl’s reaction in Nagasaki, Stelson writes that “The city had been destroyed by a terrible bomb,” and “So many people had lost nearly everything important to them in this terrible war.”  The starving children he meets, and the other civilian victims, had been living under a fascist regime that inflicted torture and murder throughout the countries they occupied, and upon the Allied soldiers who fought against Japan’s imperial forces.  The Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the abuse of Korean “comfort women,” and other atrocities, are completely absent, not even indirectly suggested in an age-appropriate way. I am not suggesting that these sources be directly presented to children, which would be totally inappropriate, but they could be offered as a context for adults sharing the book, since Japanese suffering is uniquely at the center of its message.

Like many soldiers who served in the Pacific, Captain Amdahl returned home with a souvenir sword. This item continued to plague him psychologically, and he ultimately decided that he would like to return it to, as he interpreted it, its “rightful owner.”  Stelson describes the swords as works of art and family treasures.  The craftsmanship used to create them is somehow allowed to displace their actual purpose as symbols of military might, and also, to a lesser extent in World War II, as actual weapons used to perpetrate atrocities I prefer not to describe here.  The U.S. military leaders who encouraged soldiers to appropriate them are cast as heartless. Captain Amdahl enters a room where the swords are “piled eight feet high,” and selects one to take home. This scene struck me as an inversion of the often-described encounter between the liberators of Nazi concentration camps and the bodies they discovered. The swords themselves are personified as lifeless victims.

Eventually, Captain Amdahl contacts Tadahiro Motomura, the son of the sword’s owner.  Mr. Motomura writes of how his father did not talk about the war, but expressed his sadness at the loss of his sword: “At the end of the war, it hurt him to give it up.”  (Without describing atrocities, the author might have suggested the incomplete nature of this statement. Even a mild indication of its irony, such as “The Japanese had caused great suffering in the countries they occupied. Still, Mr. Motomura felt sad about the loss of his family heirloom,” would have been closer to the truth.) Unlike in Germany, where an incomplete, and ultimately truncated, version of denazification was U.S. policy, in Japan a decision was made, in the context of the Cold War, to avoid forcing responsibility on the defeated nation.  The emperor remained as a figurehead and there was virtually no educational program to ensure that the Japanese understand anyone’s suffering other than their own. 

Captain Amdahl and Mr. Motomura believed that their personal reconciliation had embodied the idea of “peace with honor.” Perhaps if they had each come to terms with the historical realities that brought so much destruction, culminating in the terrible choice of using an atomic weapon, their decision would have been more meaningful.  The book’s visual beauty, and even the ideal of reconciliation, could prompt a serious discussion with children about the consequences of both totalitarianism and violence.  Historical facts and the idea of accountability would need to be part of that dialogue.