Actually, there are two of them — two sons, Christopher and Andrew. My piece on the homepage today is about the former, the elder.
Some years ago, I needed to know about Tojo — and a Japan scholar in America put me in touch with a Japan scholar in Japan: Christopher Szpilman, who has special expertise in fascism and militarism. As you might gather, he is a historian of modern Japan. Born in Poland, he is a British citizen. He has had a remarkable journey.
His father was Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Holocaust survivor who was depicted in the 2002 movie The Pianist. The father did not talk to his children — at least to Chris — about the war and the Holocaust ever. Ever. Chris was about twelve when he learned that his father was Jewish and had had these incredible experiences. “I just figured my father was a neurotic old man who had nightmares,” Chris told me. (Wladyslaw Szpilman was 39 when Chris was born, making him an old father for the time.)
Hating Communism, Chris left Poland when he was 18. He studied at SOAS — the School for Oriental and African Studies in London — and Yale, among other institutions. He has been teaching in Japan since the mid ’90s and is married to another historian, Sato Chitose, who is a Japanese historian of the U.S. (as it happens).
When we met in Tokyo, I talked with Christopher Szpilman about his family and his life, and also about Japan, naturally enough: What about the “peace constitution”? Must that be shed sooner or later? Will Japan go nuclear? What does it mean for Japan when people are living deep into old age and the young aren’t having children? And so on and so forth.
Two months ago, I had the sad task — and the pleasure, in a way, because he was so wonderful — of obituarizing Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East scholar. (Lewis, too, was a graduate of SOAS, long before Szpilman.) The very idea of studying foreign cultures is under attack. Lewis once quoted Dr. Johnson, who said, “A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity; nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations.”
Christopher Szpilman has devoted himself to understanding Japan. You will enjoy meeting him (again, here).