Today, Isaac Shapiro joins Leonard in conversation about living in Japan during World War II
Isaac Shapiro was in his early teenage years when he experienced the American fireboming of Japan firsthand in the early 1940s, as he describes in his autobiography “Edokko: Growing Up a Foreigner in Wartime Japan.” With World War II suddenly at their doorstep, Isaac’s family was forced to move from city to city in the war-torn nation. After US troops began their Japanese occupation, he was hired at the age of 14 to be an interpreter for a U.S. Marine Colonel from Arkansas, a job that led him on a circuitous path to America.
