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Forgiveness

a Gift From My Grandparents
May 04, 2015sharon711 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Sakamoto eloquently describes the wartime experiences of two Canadians, his paternal grandmother Mitsui and his maternal grandfather Ralph. The disenfranchisement of Japanese Canadians based on ethnicity was racism as unacceptable as the Nazi treatment of Jews in Europe. But the brutality of the Japanese army against Canadian prisoners of war captured in China, then enslaved in Japanese factories, was even more horrific. Sakamoto describes how his grandparents were able to move on after the war and forgive their transgressors. But what he fails to show us was how these scars affected their own children. his parents. I found the uneven treatment of Sakamoto's parents a big hole in the tale that left me often confused. Just who forgave whom for what was not made wholly clear to me.