Robert H Kono

Robert Hiroshi Kono was born in Los Angeles in 1932. Detained at age nine with his Japanese American parents after Pearl Harbor, he spent the war years in various internment camps. In 1946, he was forced to leave the US when his father moved the family to Japan, where he became fluent in Japanese. His later academic success at an English-language college in Yokohama led to his recruitment by the CIA as a translator for a clandestine operation in Tokyo. There he met Carol Louise Lippold, whom he...See more

Robert Hiroshi Kono was born in Los Angeles in 1932. Detained at age nine with his Japanese American parents after Pearl Harbor, he spent the war years in various internment camps. In 1946, he was forced to leave the US when his father moved the family to Japan, where he became fluent in Japanese. His later academic success at an English-language college in Yokohama led to his recruitment by the CIA as a translator for a clandestine operation in Tokyo. There he met Carol Louise Lippold, whom he married in Seattle 1959 when they returned home. After graduating from the University of Washington with honors, he moved his family to Eugene and taught at the University of Oregon. He was a prolific writer, self-publishing several works in his last 25 years. East Falls the Sun, a fictionalized account of his early years, was finished a few weeks before his death in 2023. See less