Rising Sun Blinking: A Young Boy's Memoirs of the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines - Paperback

by Maria Lacambra Jose Maria Lacambra (Author)

In the middle of 1942, the Japanese landed in Iloilo, deep in the heart of the Philippine Archipelago. Earlier, like a skittish octopus, the Japanese Empire had spread its tentacles across the islands, after the last American strongholds of Bataan and Corregidor had fallen.

Jose Lacambra was only eleven years old when the Japanese occupied Iloilo. His firsthand account of the adventures and rites of passage were drawn from a diary he kept during those war years.

With wry wit and a sharp memory for detail, he re-creates the horror, adventure and excitement of those unforgettable years, describing them all with a novelist's skill and style.

Author Biography

Biography of " Rising Sun Blinking"'s author Born in the Philippines of Spanish parents, the author lived his early years during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War. This firsthand account of his adventures and rites of passage are based on a diary he kept during those war years. With wry wit and a novelist's skill, he describes incidents of havoc and sabotage he and his friends perpetrated on the occupiers. Having returned to Spain after the war, he ran the bulls in Pamplona, worked in a shipping Company in Bilbao, and served in North Africa with a military unit attached to the Spanish Foreign Legion. He attended Humanities courses at the Sorbonne in Paris before migrating to the U.S. on a scholarship to Gettysburg College. On graduating, he married the daughter of an American Officer who had liberated his family from the Japanese a decade earlier. He was granted a scholarhip to Duke University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, five years later. Following a brief teaching interlude in that Institutiion, he was offered a job with Lockheed Martin in Orlando, FL., where, for the next thirty years, he worked in missile design and the development of defense system architectures, directing, among other programs, the Strategic Defense Initiatives. Now happily retired, he lives in Winter Park with Ann, his wife of fifty years. They have three children - two physicians and an artist - who have given them eight grandchildren. He travels frequently, dabbles in painting and plays golf. In his spare time, he goes back to his life-long avocation of writing. After having these "Rising Sun Blinking" memoirs first published in the Philippines, he has more recently published "The Lords of Navarre," a saga of his own Basque family. Inspired by an heirloom document discovered in his family's ancestral home in the Pyrenees, he dedicated years of research to trace his Basque roots to the earliest Cro-Magnon migration into Europe during the last Ice Age. He is currently working on a sequel of that historical chronicle. He has published countless technical documents over his Graduate and working years and is a member of the Physics Honorary Society Sigma XI as well as the American Physical Society. He is a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.