In the Eye of the Wind: A Travel Memoir of Prewar Japan

Yokohama, a quiet fishing village when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his gunboat diplomacy in the mid-1800s, was quickly transformed into a bustling port for international trade. The change brought affluent foreigners to the city but also mobilized Japanese nationalist hostilities. It was in this setting that Ron and Martin Baenninger’s Canadian mother and Swiss father met in 1933. rnrnRelying on Ron’s early memories, their mother’s diary, and the acute memory of their father, who lived to be over 100, the Baenningers recount the initial years of their parents’ marriage and provide glimpses into relations between Japan and the West from the turn of the century to the onset of the Second World War.