George L. Olson

Pre-emptive Love: How a Hiroshima Man's Story Might Save Hong Kong George L. Olson

The choice between an easy road of cowardice and a perilous one of bravery confronts everyone at some time. Pre-emptive Love begins in the summer of 1996 with the arrival in Tokyo of a British television producer who disrupts Joe Weaver=s vacation at Lake Nojiri. From that moment, circumstances converge to cause a seventeen-year old American and a beautiful Chinese journalist to join them in a venture to head off a crackdown on freedom expected after Hong Kong=s honeymoon period with China ends. The team resurrects the story of Weaver=s former co-worker in Hiroshima, Kiyoshi Watanabe, a Gettysburg-educated Christian pastor. The Japanese army conscripted him in 1942 to serve as an interpreter in the Shamshuipo P. O. W. Camp in Hong Kong. There he faced a terrifying dilemma: either obey his Emperor=s commanders or obey God by smuggling in medicines and vitamins to the dying prisoners. In working through the Watanabe story, the four team members soon discover how different each has interpreted past events dealing with Western imperialism, the Chinese Communist Revolution and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They also have to thwart the machinations of a Christian Judas and loose-cannon Maoists who try to derail the TV mini-series scheduled to be aired on the eve of Hong Kong=s return to the Peoples= Republic of China.