Eric Leicester

Eric Leicester is nom de plume of the Rev. Eric Leicester Andrews, who was born and brought up in Japan. His father had gone to Japan from England as an Anglican (Evangelical) missionary priest around 1878, and was eventually made Bishop of Hokkaido in 1900.

Eric became a priest himself, following the different, Anglo-Catholic, tradition, and also became a missionary in Japan, where his children spent the early years of their lives. He left the country in the 1930s, but returned to the Far East during WWII, working in Singapore with the US forces, where he trained American servicemen to speak Japanese.

When Singapore fell to the Japanese, Eric was caught and interned in the notorious Changi prisoner-of-war camp, where, despite the suffering that he and others endured, he found himself with a rare ability: fluency in his captors' native language. coupled with a deep insight into the Japanese psyche, and for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt able to fulfil his priestly calling most effectively in that he was able to use his intimate knowledge of the Japanese language and culture to save lives in the camp.

This Good Way Out was written in the mid-1930s, while Eric Leicester was living in Kiryu, and he tried unsuccessfully to get it published during his lifetime (he died in 1951), but the manuscript passed into the care of one of his grandsons, who did not give up hope of seeing it in print one day.

***

This Good Way Out will be published by Read around Asia in 2007.