Last Tenko

This book covers the conclusion of the Tenko television series that was about English and Dutch women and their children who were taken by the Japanese during World War II and placed into internment camps. The conditions in the camps were horrible and there were lots of death from starvation, disease and other causes.

The television series covered how the women tried to survive in such conditions and it shows their strengths and their weaknesses. Their physical condition condition to worsen as the years wore on. The novel describes the camp in detail and discusses the behavior of the leader of the camp and the soldiers under him.

It seems that such camp duty was an embarrassment to the Japanese soldiers who wanted to be on the front lines. It's not a novel nor a series that is for the feint-hearted. The individual women have some very strong stories to tell. The stories are based in general on the things that actually happened to the real women in the real camps at that time and, if anything, what really happened was even worse then in the series, making one wonder how any of the women and children got out alive.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page