Personalities and politics Buruma is clearly fascinated by his subjects’ louche, scabrous lives. The most interesting thing about collaborators, he finds, is their skill in exploiting the fissures in totalitarian regimes and wiggling their way through the cracks into positions of power. Kawashima passed from one Japanese warlord to another, using her erotic wiles to manipulate them for her own ends, only to end up being double-crossed and abandoned in the end. After the war, she was prosecuted by Chinese nationalists and executed as a traitor. By contrast, Himmler’s masseur made it out alive by exploiting the paranoia and hatred...