Pasha, an enterprising Jew who once hosted Albert Einstein in Tokyo, photographs old Japan including Yokohama and Tokyo

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Ernst Baerwald was an enterprising Jewish man who also took amazing photographs of old Japan including Yokohama and Tokyo. His son, Hans Baerwald, was a close friend of my father, Don Helm at UC Berkeley, and later at language school and in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. Hans, who later became a professor at UCLA focused on Japanese politics, and wrote a fascinating story of his life here.  Hans’s daughter, my friend Jan Baerwald, received her grandfather Pasha’s amazing collection of photographs of Japan in the early 1900s.

I asked Jan about her grandfather, who she called Pasha. This is what she wrote:

Pasha’s name was Ernst (or Ernest) Baerwald. He was brought as a POW from Tsingtao in 1914 where he lived at the Bando POW camp (in Naruto) until it closed in 1919, when he moved to Kobe – there’s an article my dad wrote which appears as a link on the Wikipedia entry about Bando  that will tell you a bit more. I think the family emigrated to the States in 1940 (except for my aunt, who was already attending Mills College in Oakland). The whole story of Bando is fascinating – seems more like a village, with small businesses, theater groups, an orchestra (Pasha played the violin), etc. They taught the locals how to make beer and bake bread. There’s a fair amount on the web about it.

So Pasha, like my great uncle Willie, spent many years in a Japanese POW camp. But unlike my father’s family, he moved in German high society in Tokyo. In his visitor’s book, there is the signature of Albert Einstein, who Pasha apparently hosted when Einstein visited Japan. The visitor’s book also contains the signatures of my maternal grandfather, Robert Schinzinger, and his wife Annelise.

In any case, Jan has shared with me many of the pictures she inherited from Pasha and I hope to post them on this blog from time to time. Here are a few more of them.

Bq3CJs-Ck6YGi43ve7EVIaa7cgPCMGSMqc7XdB7anz0[1]L3ePNlDyyfzOe2-WR6mhmzu8DhOHKAAW5yQbwqmizdk[1]Presumably this is a sawyer delivering a nice-sized piece of lumber to raise someone’s roof beams.

 

 

 

 

 

But what’s this vendor making. Anybody care to guess? By the looks on the faces of the kids, I suspect it’s sweet.


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