Word: sakimura
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Slight, bespectacled Professor Sakimura poked around the Reich, peered critically into factories pumping out iron, steel, light metals, chemicals and other vitals of war. He took time off from research to marry a Dutch girl. His domestic life was happy. But the more he studied and observed, the worse grew his ideological pains...
...Free Man. By 1943's fall, Professor Sakimura came to certain heretical conclusions: Germany's economic position was not nearly so strong as the Nazis pretended or Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima believed. The United Nations were winning the war. Inevitably, his own country's anachronistic feudal system would give way. Japanese like himself ought to fight for their ideas, break with their Government, dissociate themselves from a wrong and losing cause...
Professor Sakimura quietly sent his wife to her parents in Holland. Quietly he boarded a plane for Sweden. In Stockholm he registered as a political refugee, accepted enough money from the Swedish Academic Political Refugee Committee for food, lodging, cigarets, paper and ink. He turned to the socialistic beliefs of his youth, began to write a book about Japanese cartels, mulled over plans for Japan's future...
...Lost Man. One day a London newspaper broke into Professor Sakimura's seclusion, broke apart his life with a lurid account of his turnabout. Stung into face-saving fury, Japanese and Nazi agents insulted, browbeat, threatened him. They said that 25 of the professor's friends had been seized in Germany as hostages for his return. They brought ten friends to Stockholm to make personal appeals. They arrested his wife in Holland, showed him a letter from her urging his return lest she suffer Gestapo tortures...
Swedes saw frail Professor Sakimura, unshaven and unkempt, wandering through Stockholm's parks, sometimes slumped in dejection on a bench, or stretched in fitful sleep behind a hedge. Last week the struggle with his conscience ended. Swedes saw four Jap officials hustling haggard Professor Sakimura to a waiting Berlin plane...