nisei weekly, the Japanese American Courier, and
contributed essays and poetry to other Japanese-
American newspapers.
Upon entering graduate school at UW, Jack
was advised that his best career prospects, given
his ancestry, were in Oriental Studies. In 1936 he
and his wife Mary undertook two years of study in
Tokyo on a Japanese government fellowship, and
to enhance his scholarly credibility, Jack adopted
the Japanese surname “Maki.” In 1939 Maki was
named Associate in Oriental Studies at UW and
returned to America.
In May 1942 Maki was confined with other Se-
attle Japanese Americans in the Puyallup Assem-
bly Center. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited as
a Japan specialist by the Federal Communications
Commission, and he and his wife were permitted
to leave camp for Washington, D.C. In June 1943
he joined the Office of War Information (OWI) as
a psychological warfare policy specialist. In the eve-
nings Maki drafted a work on Japan in anticipation
of a postwar American occupation. Maki’s study, re-
leased by Knopf in May 1945 as Japanese Militarism:
Its Cause and Cure, was the first mass-market book
by a West Coast nisei. Maki argued that militarism
was embedded in Japanese culture, and democra-
tization would thus require revolutionary social
change. In one passage, he recommended against
executing the Japanese emperor and prophetically
suggested transforming the emperor instead into
a vessel for democracy. Maki’s book received wide
publicity, and it sold out its original run.
In 1946, after serving briefly in the American
occupation of Japan, Maki enrolled at Harvard
University, where two years later he became the
university’s first nisei Ph.D. In 1949 Maki was
named assistant professor of Asian studies at UW.
In succeeding years, he became a renowned expert
on Japanese constitutionalism with books such as
Government and Politics in Japan (1962). In 1966
Maki moved to the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, and served as professor and vice dean.
He retired in 1980. In 2004, the nonagenarian
Maki privately published a moving memoir, A
Voyage through the Twentieth Century.
Greg RobinsonMartyred, The Richard E. Kim (1964)
RICHARD E. KIM’s first novel, The Martyred, fo-
cuses on the Korean War and Korean Christian-
ity as its two main objects of scrutiny, examining
the complex interrelationships between suffering
and faith, death on a massive scale and everlasting
life, the needs of a country and individual inter-
ests, and honesty and guilt. Set during the latter
part of the Korean War, Kim’s work dissects the
contradictions and irresolvable tensions between
the warring military machines. Brought in to sift
through sketchy evidence concerning the group
murder of 12 Christian ministers in Pyongyang
by the Communist army—those later consecrated
as “the martyred” by the local citizenry—Captain
Lee of the Republic of Korea army must discern
why two ministers escaped execution, why, out of
the 14 Christian ministers imprisoned, only two
avoided a death sentence.
As Captain Lee progresses in his search for in-
formation, he befriends the minister Mr. Shin, who
along with the mentally ill Mr. Hann, lived through
their imprisonment and torture by the Northern
army. Colonel Chang, Lee’s commanding officer,
believes that Mr. Shin knows more about the ex-
ecution than he lets on and forces Lee to press Shin
on this point. As Lee discovers the truth, with the
aid of Chaplain Koh and his friend Park, he must
confront the problem of multiple truths, each one
competing on different, but equally difficult terms
with regard to their likely effect on the Christians
living in hunger, poverty, and despair in the war-
ravaged North. Though the reader learns that Mr.
Shin remained defiant until his imminent end,
spitting in the face of his captors and refusing to
grovel and renounce his faith, Lee also draws out
the reason that Shin has remained silent about his
actions and those of the 12 executed ministers: The
murdered ministers each “died like dogs” (141),
turning against their faith and begging for their
lives before being shot one at a time by the North
Korean guards. Mr. Shin bears the burden of ven-
erating the martyrs—receiving the public outcries
of “Judas! Judas!” with great stoicism (186)—as he
sacrifices his own honor in order to lessen the bur-
den of the city’s Christians, providing them withMartyred, The 181