Hiroko was born in 1933.
She was a daughter of a Buddhist priest.
She loved reading books – all the classics like “Wuthering Heights”, “Little Women” and so on. She
built a dream to be a writer.
School teachers started telling her and everyone else
that Chinese, Koreans, Americans, Indonesians and all the rest of the world were
all beasts and they didn’t deserve to live. Japanese were the children of God. Everyone
believed it.
The war started, and the Japanese military started murdering
everyone, everywhere they went. Some good teachers that were more humane, and
were loved by their students, never returned home, after they were sent to the fields
of war.
The war was finally over after four or five years, in 1945,
a few days after Hiroko saw the gigantic mushroom cloud in the distance over Hiroshima.
After the war, her brother was sent to Kyoto, where he was being trained to be a
priest in a well-known temple. Hiroko’s sister packed potatoes, rice and other
items in a bag, and traveled by ship one day to bring them to her brother in Kyoto.
After seeing her off, Hiroko and her mother took a train
home that night. Because of the crowd on the train, they were standing up.
There was a very tall American standing right in front of them. A few days
before, Hiroko had found some empty food cans that US soldiers had discarded by
a river. She had eaten the sweet grapes left inside.
On the train, her mother - the preacher’s wife - said to twelve-year-old
Hiroko, “Don’t look at him! Put your face down!” She communicated this not with
words, but by sending a signal that Americans were demons and devils.
After a few moments, the soldier took out a bag filled with
candies from his military rucksack, and put the entire bag in little Hiroko’s hand-made
cloth pouch. Everyone in the train was shocked, and at the same time they
watched enviously since everyone was hungry.
Mother told the girl not to eat it, as if it was poison.
When they got home, they took out the bag of candy and
saw all the candies wrapped in the most beautiful papers that they had ever
seen. Hiroko ate it, and felt that it was the most wonderful taste she had ever
experienced.
He was not a devil. He was extremely sweet.
* * *
Fifteen years later, in 1960, Hiroko had her second baby,
and that was me, Eiji.
I give thanks to that soldier from America. Hiroko
could have been dead from hunger without those candies. But more than the fact
that it was a life-saving food, it was a heart-saving present. I wouldn’t have
been here now either, of course.
Thank you, soldier, for showing Hiroko that the world has
love that’s far stronger than hate. Hiroko became a very sweet person instead
and that saved my life. Mr. Soldier, I will pass it on to future generations.
* * *
In September of 2008, I took Hiroko to the Jewish Concentration
Camp in Dachau, outside of Munich. I showed her how many, many groups of
school children, mainly from Germany,
were being led through the camp by their teachers. As they listened to the
teachers’ stories, none of the students said a word. They just listened.
I asked Hiroko, who was a teacher for many years in Japan,
“Do you think that Japanese schools would take students to the camps and prisons
that the Japanese military built, and explain what they did there?”
Hiroko replied, “No chance. They will never leave the
camp sites visible. They will destroy everything and will deny their existence.”
When she rides a train now, there are so many young
people occupying all the seats, playing computer games, reading manga comic
books and putting on makeup. None of them give seats to the older people. They
make them keep standing.
Hiroko says, “They are not human.”
Now, Hiroko is writing a lot about those days.
“Not human.”
