Tom Meschery, "The Mad Manchurian: From the Internment Camps of Tokyo to the Hardwood Courts of the NBA" (Coffeetown Press, 2025)

New Books in American Studies · May 19, 2026 · 1h

I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combatants of the Allied countries, were taken by the Japanese to an internment camp in Tokyo where we would remain four year--to the end of the war. My mother's recollection is that I was a sickly child. By the time I arrived in Japan, according to her, I had survived diphtheria, whooping cough, yellow fever, smallpox and tuberculosis. Such afflictions, to my mother's astonishment, did not keep me from growing to my adult height of 6'6" and muscular…