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Author’s Note

In the 1850s, the first Macneil arrived in Nagasaki to open a business. The trilogy Annals of the Macneil Clan in Japan opens with Neil Macneil and continues with his relatives and descendants. The Macneils of Nagasaki and The Macneils of Yokahama carry the story through the late 1870s.

Historical accuracy is central to these two volumes. Neil Macneil is based on two real-life characters, one of whom, Ranald MacDonald, entered Japan uninvited in 1848 and, while imprisoned in a temple in Nagasaki, managed to become the first teacher of English in Japan. His story is told in Ranald MacDonald, the First Foreign English Teacher in Japan by Katherine Plummer, Tokyo YWCA, 1982.

Thomas Glover, the other character, was a respected British merchant, one of the first to establish himself in Nagasaki after the ports of Japan were opened. Glover built one of the largest commercial conglomerates of the time as well as a still-standing mansion said to have been the abode of the fictional Madame Butterfly.

The protagonist in Nagasaki and Yokohama, Neil Macneil, Sr., is an amalgam of MacDonald and Glover with a generous dollop of the author’s imagination-and knowledge of other true-life personalities of those times-mixed in.

The Macneils of Tokyo tells the story of some Macneil descendants and describes their participation in World War II, illuminating events and situations in that war that the author believes have not been given the attention they merit.

The scheme referred to in the story as FEZ-or Far East Zion-was in fact the Fugu Plan, an effort by the Japanese and certain Jews to settle thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe in Manchuria to advance industrialization of that comparatively barren region. One authoritative account is The Fugu Plan by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, Paddington Press, New York, 1979.

A detailed look into the inner workings of Radio Tokyo is offered, including a more truthful account of Iva Toguri D’Aquino’s work there than has been offered previously. Known in America and to GIs who served in the Pacific Theater as “Tokyo Rose,” she was an outspokenly pro-American woman who refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship throughout the war. Her postwar imprisonment was unjust and her subsequent pardon by President Gerald Ford was overdue. If any Japanese-Americans should have received compensation for what befell them, D’Aquino should have been the first. Of several books written about her, two are reasonably factual.

Intertwined into Tokyo is a subplot describing Japan’s development of atomic weapons. A reliable history can be found in Japan’s Secret War by Robert K. Wilcox, William Morrow, New York, 1985. Readers may be amazed to discover how close the U.S. forces came to being targets of Japanese atom bomb attacks in the final days of the war.

According to page 6 of the Military Press of July 1, 1989, Japan test-fired an atomic weapon one day after we dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. In Tokyo, I advanced that date slightly for the sake of the story.

With five cyclotrons and a good source of “heavy water” in Konan, Korea, Japan was capable of moving ahead quickly with bomb construction and might well have had half a dozen smaller bombs ready when the Allies landed on the beaches of Kyushu in November. Had that happened, what would the Japanese have to say today about those who used the bomb on them? Would they have become the “barbarians” for having used these weapons, as Americans became to many of them?

The Baron Nobutaka Matsui in the novel was inspired by, and bears a loose resemblance to, Baron Takeichi Nishi. He also drove a gold-painted, 12-cylinder Packard and on his horse, Uranus, won an Olympic medal in 1932. Otherwise, my Matsui bears little similarity to history’s Nishi.

Only a few true names are used, but the courageous exploits of our Allied Translator and Interpreter Service teams in the South Pacific are depicted in a way that should reflect kindly on reality and on the Nisei and Caucasian team members, many of whom I have been pleased to count as friends.

About the war in the Pacific itself: the battles, invasions, places, dates, and military units are authentic. The leading admirals and generals, as well as some colonels and majors, are historical personages.

The Macneils of Tokyo might be called an historical (and romantic—for love is at its heart) adventure novel, whose setting is World War II and whose perspective is American. All the Macneils are very much alive in my imagination.

Jack Seward

Houston, Texas

Summer 1999