Many Thanks, Mr. Nishino (Concl.)

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Many Thanks, Mr. Nishino (Concl.)

With Old Notes of his Young Days’ Struggle

By Seishu Hamano, Japan Romanticism Academia

The Japanese prose is translated below, and the English passages already present in the original publication are separately identified and preserved as written. The concluding tanka remain in Japanese. Accounts of the war and of health conditions, figures, spellings and the differing Japanese and English section numbers belong to the original text.

On writing the concluding installment

It has been a long time since Mr. Nishino (西野龍男), who taught us Japanese and history during our years at Tomioka Junior High School, passed away. When I look toward my hometown, I can still picture his lively face. How quickly time passes: his former pupils are themselves approaching the age he reached. Drawing on the copy of his unpublished writings that his wife gave me when I visited to offer incense, I wrote the first and middle installments and have now reached this final one. It has turned into a serial rather like Fuefuki Doji, which we saw at the Tomioka Theater. That is how varied were the joys and sorrows of a postwar history that unfolded so dramatically—during the war, after it, and in every day we spent in the junior-high classroom. In our school years in the Showa 20s and 30s, the war was over, yet I feel that its atmosphere still hung heavily about us.

Mr. Nishino's writings, calmly set down in his own lucid handwriting, bring those harsh wartime days to life again. How many times they have brought me to tears, even now. Set against the half-hearted way I have lived my own postwar life, they force this question on me: had our own boyhood placed us in his position, could we really have gone on writing with so firm a perspective? I cannot help being seized by that thought.

Tomioka Junior High School lies in the southern part of the Osaka Plain. Get off at Kitanoda Station on the Nankai Koya Line and take the main bus road toward Omino. It is a public junior high school that still exists in Sakai City's Higashi Ward. Today it is a well-equipped, medium-sized school, a splendid place with an accomplished brass band. Back then, however, it occupied a single-story, wooden, mortar-finished building resembling a long row house, built soon after the war. Even so, we called it our “white palace,” quite undeterred by the powerful smell of coal tar rubbed into the floors. Boys and girls sat together—something that would have been forbidden during the war—and we took equality, indeed a spirit of respect for girls, for granted. We recited Akiko Yosano's “Kimi shinitamau koto nakare” with our teacher. It was one of the very earliest junior high schools under the new system. Raw eggs were still a precious source of the very best nutrition, just as before the war.

Classes, however, were strictness itself, for most of the teachers had served in the military or received military training. We stood rigidly at attention, lined up in military fashion and called our numbers out loudly to one another, doing all this diligently as a matter of course.

Mr. Nishino was particularly strict. In our rebellious years, we had naturally been infected by the disordered materialism of an overextended democracy that we saw when we went into town—or perhaps that was just me. Perhaps infected, too, by the atmosphere of the purge of war criminals and the Red Purge that followed, I became all the more insolent. I remember putting questions about Toson and Akiko to Mr. Nishino that were intended to disconcert him.

Was that a youthful misstep? From an incidental conversation in later years I learned that my presence had left a strong impression on his memory. But I regret having behaved toward him in a way for which I owe him an apology.

Yet once I had grown up and entered my forties, fifties and sixties, he regarded me with a wonderfully clear and unclouded mind. Whenever I published a new work, I sent him a copy and received his comments. Returning home, I would gather with friends from our Tomioka days and, whenever we met our teachers, apologize for the things we had once said and done. Mr. Nishino even came to collect me by car on one occasion. I had heard that his aunt's magnificent tea utensils were now housed in the local museum, and we went to see them. In the manner of Saneatsu Mushanokoji, one might say that we were granted a good day. Yet what was constantly passing through Mr. Nishino's heart was the memory of a thin, pale-faced boy who had been in our classroom. The boy had lost his parents and was going hungry, and our teacher had worried about him constantly. Exchanges with an impertinent young literary enthusiast like me were no great trouble to him at all.

In his later years he attended every class reunion, praising the organizers for their efforts and joining in our cheerful talk. We parted with promises to meet again. But even our apparently robust teacher finally passed beyond return.

We went to his home in Tondabayashi to pray for his repose. There his wife told us about the terrible days of his youth. Feeling that these must be made known to the world, I produced this collection of records in both Japanese and English.

Returning to the present, the whole world is gripped by fear of the coronavirus. But to those who know the years immediately after the war, epidemics of this kind were something one expected to encounter. Soldiers returned from the south still infected with malaria and repeatedly suffered attacks. People ate unhygienic fish that had not been frozen, or bananas that had undergone no preventive treatment, and developed typhoid or paratyphoid. Young people died of tuberculosis one after another. Such things were everywhere. At the public bath there were even people with gonorrhea who urinated in the bathwater, and children who lost their sight through those bacteria.

To speak of Japan against such a background: this isolated island country of the East ended its 260 years of seclusion and opened its doors to the world's nations. It strove desperately until it could stand on its own as a modern industrial country, but the road was by no means a smooth one. Even if the Second World War is regarded as a turning point in Western colonialism, the country continues, unwillingly, to suffer calamity.

7. From Mr. Nishino's notes

The great Tokai earthquake

December 7, Showa 19 (1944): the great Tokai earthquake struck. Magnitude 7.9. Seismic intensity 6. Deaths: 998. Houses destroyed: 26,000. The factory chimney broke.

American air raids

On December 13, Showa 19 (1944), the American military began full-scale air raids on the Japanese mainland. Eighty B-29 bombers came to Nagoya. Nagoya, which accounted for 60 percent of the nation's production of army and navy aircraft, was frequently bombed after this. From March through May of Showa 20, in particular, the raids intensified, day and night alike. During this period, Aichi Tokei and Nagoya Castle were also bombed. I saw a Japanese aircraft ram a B-29 before my very eyes; I witnessed direct hits on private homes around our dormitory; I ran for my life and escaped danger by jumping into a ditch in a rice field; and I heard accounts from a friend who had gone to see the place where a B-29, hit by antiaircraft fire, had crashed.

Before dawn on May 17, Showa 20 (1945), 468 B-29s came. Kasadera Dormitory burned to the ground. Everyone's belongings were destroyed. Having worked at the factory the previous night, I watched the fierce burning below from the factory on the hill. When I returned to the dormitory in the morning, everything had turned to ash. That day we were each given one sho of rice. Wearing clothes like burlap sacks, with nothing but what we stood up in, we changed trains along the way and returned to Osaka. We encountered air raids on the journey. I witnessed the raid at Maizuru Park: its terrible scenes are beyond description. When I finally reached home with nothing but the clothes on my back, I was so thin, so covered in dirt and so changed that my father asked who I was. Yet as soon as I got home, the school summoned me. Until August 15, the day the war ended, I slept in a classroom at Osaka Daiichi Teachers' College and worked at breaking up the playing field and growing sweet potatoes.

8. Despondency after the war

Everyone in the country experienced the prostration that followed the end of the war. Mr. Nishino writes as follows:

“With the end of the war, I could at last study: I literally returned to being a student. But society was in utter confusion, and with life so unstable, just getting enough to eat was all we could manage. Teachers and students were in the same position. Moreover, after the war my two older brothers were demobilized from China—northern and southern China—and returned home. With more family members, the food shortage became even more severe. We cleared hillsides for fields and worked desperately at growing rice. This condition continued right up to my graduation in March, Showa 23 (1948). I could not study during my youth, especially in those precious years when I ought to have been learning. In the sensitive period from my late teens into my twenties, the war robbed me of my youth. It was a dark time in which dreams and hopes were all too easily lost.”

He goes on to record: “Toward my two older brothers, I felt something like inferiority or indebtedness because I alone was being allowed to attend school. I was driven mercilessly into work at home, especially farm work and work in the hills, and there were times when it was painful.” Whether he was at home or sent away through student mobilization, there could be no joy in his youth.

Even in such circumstances—or rather, precisely because Mr. Nishino had been placed in this situation, blocked on every side—hope was never abandoned. His determination to improve himself grew from a spirit of self-help. We pupils, meanwhile, could sit in our classroom and study without fear of bombing. When I think that we owe who we are today to the way he admonished and trained us, so apt as we were to seek an easy life, I feel I can never thank him enough.

With gratitude

Thank you, Mr. Nishino.

Nothing gives me greater happiness than being able to dedicate the essay above to you.

To Mrs. Nishino, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my heartfelt thanks for providing the materials and for your many kindnesses. The memories you shared when we recently visited to offer incense gave rise to this manuscript. Please dedicate it to your husband. We all pray for your continuing good health.

Graduates of Sakai Municipal Tomioka Junior High School, March, Showa 31 (1956):
内山孝治
大浦実夫
芝埼幹男
西田毅
濱野成生 (pen name: Seishu Hamano / 濱野成秋)

Where now are the fields of my hometown? Looking at the houses of Joroku from my parents' burial place:

　　戦負け父母哭き稚児の稲田里
　　　　いま不知火の我勝ちに住み

Online Manyoshu — Seishu Hamano

A fine tanka received from Jogashima, so evocative of Hakushu Kitahara:

　　三崎城の跡地と言はるる学校の
　　　　閉校を聞く真夏日の中

Hakushu Misaki Tanka Society — 三宅尚道

Whatever school one attended, meeting again brings a special joy:

　　朝の空見上げて嬉しや五月晴れ
　　　　三年B組同窓会なり

Manyo Reading Group; Miura Tanka Society — 八潮多可

Thinking deeply of a life so fleeting:

　　病みながら三崎に行くと話されし
　　　　言葉が最後となりたる悲し

Miura Tanka Society; the tanka collections 沖空 and パンの生地 — 大賀正美

Having come as a bride to Misaki and become the proprietress of a boatmen's inn, already in her eighties:

　　嫁ぎしは米二升とぐ大家族
　　　　かまど火絶えて一人食はむ御飯めし

Miura Tanka Society — 加藤由良子

Everyone comes to the end of life while still wandering. Even if we think we have found the place where we will dwell forever, one day we must part from this world and set out.

Surely people everywhere in the world can understand the Japanese feeling of wabi and sabi.

Miura Anjin, who loved the Miura Peninsula so dearly, must have put down enduring roots in this land precisely because he made travel his home.

The feelings of Koizumi Yakumo, who rooted himself in Matsue, were the same. Hakushu too, living in Miura or Odawara, thought of his hometown, Yanagawa.

For me, it is Kawachi in Osaka: Joroku, Noda Village. One day, I too… Will my spirit similarly take flight in the empty sky? To the people of Misaki: thank you for your fine tanka.