International Translation Service

Adios to Tears is the very personal story of Seiichi Higashide (1909-97), whose life in three countries was shaped by a bizarre and little-known episode in the history of World War II. Born in Hokkaido, Higashide emigrated to Peru in 1931. By the late 1930s he was a shop keeper and community leader in the provincial town of Ica, but following the outbreak of World War II, he -- along with other Latin American Japanese -- was seized by police and forcibly deported to the United States. He was interned behind barbed wire at the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility in Crystal City, Texas, for more than two years. After his release, Higashide elected to stay in the U.S. and eventually became a citizen. For years, he was a leader in the effort to obtain redress from the American government for the violation of the human rights of the Peruvian Japanese internees. In 1981 he testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Higashide's moving memoir was translated from Japanese into English and Spanish through the efforts of his eight children, and was first published in 1993. This second edition includes a new Foreword by C. Harvey Gardiner, professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University and author of Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States; a new Epilogue by Julie Small, cochair of Campaign for Justice-Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans; and a new Preface by Elsa H. Kudo, eldest daughter of Seiichi Higashide.

For thirty years world-renowned author and scholar Raimondo Luraghi has sought answers to the question: How did an overwhelmingly agricultural country with little industry and nearly no merchant marine succeed in building a navy that managed to confront the formidable Union navy for four years? Pushing aside the long-held belief that the answers went up in flames when the Confederate Navy archives were torched during the evacuation of Richmond, Luraghi combed fifty archives in four countries and uncovered information that shattered prevailing myths about that service's contributions. Focusing on the South's ironclads, commerce raiders, torpedoes, and mines, this study breaks new ground by giving the Confederate Navy proper credit for its strategic successes, international range, and technical advances. For example, the author disproves the widely held notion that the South's ironclads were a failure, built only to break the Union blockade and relegated to other duties because they could not leave protected harbors. Luraghi also argues successfully that breaking the blockade was not the Confederate Navy's single strategic aim, and thus that the navy must not be judged a total failure, as is so often asserted. With this translation of Luraghi's masterwork the English-speaking world has both a complete account of Confederate naval operations and a balanced and realistic analysis.