Say, Allen. The Bicycle Man. Parnassus Press, 1982.

Allen Say is a Japanese-American author, born in Yokohama, Japan. Say came to the U.S. just after WWII with his father. His father enrolled him in a military school in California, and Say hated the school and the United States. He was expelled from military school after a year, enabling him to explore California on his own. He began to write and illustrate children’s books while doing advertising photography for a living.

I suppose that even after having been expelled from military school, Mr. Say still had some respect for the American military and its soldiers and an appreciation for his adopted country and its new relationship with Japan and the Japanese. His book The Bicycle Man is set in Japan immediately after World War II. In the story, two American soldiers visit a Japanese schoolyard on “sportsday” and show the children tricks on a bicycle. Actually, while one of the two soldiers is a red-headed white guy, the one who does the bicycle tricks is a black soldier. It’s a story of international and even interracial healing and understanding after World War II, an event that tore the world apart in many ways and places.

The school in The Bicycle Man looks a lot like the school that Allen Say describes from his childhood.

“When I was a small boy I went to a school in the south island of Japan. The schoolhouse stood halfway up a tall green mountain. It was made of wood and the wood was gray with age. When a strong wind blew, the trees made the sound of waves and the building creaked like an old sailing ship. From the playground, we could see the town, the ships in the harbor, the shining sea.”

Allen Say wrote this autobiographical story from his memory of that school and of a special sports day in which the American occupiers and the children and educators of a small Japanese school came together to enjoy an innocent performance of bicycle tricks. And Say’s illustrations take the reader back to that time and place and show off the budding friendship that began to take place between the U.S. and Japan despite the terrible memories of war and destruction.

Say also won a Caldecott Award for his book Grandfather’s Journey about his own grandfather’s immigration to the United States.