MEMORIES OF MY FATHER: A JOURNEY TO SIBERIA
My father died on October 21st, 1984.He was sixty-seven. I sat with him to the end in the intensive care unit. He was a mess of tubes. In tears, the nurses began to clean his body. Their tears were a mark of respect for my father's gentleness, and a sign of his power to move people. It was only then that I realized what kind of man he was.
Nobody had told him that his cancer was terminal. But his clothes were neatly folded, and near the bed was a long, handwritten notebook. It turned out to be a memoir of his time as a soldier in Manchuria, and as a prisoner in Siberia after the war.
He was born in a village called Hata, in Kochi Prefecture. He joined the Military Police and, after graduating with first class honors, sailed to Manchuria at the age of twenty. He was stationed on the Soviet border in a village called Futou, and there he rose through the ranks. The notebook records his marriage, his joy at the birth of his eldest son, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war and his being taken prisoner and sent to Siberia. Ten years after he left Japan, he finally returned. Two thirds of the two-hundred page memoir are given over to his life as a POW. Knowing that death was close, my father finished his memoir with these words:
To Photograph "MEMORIES OF MY FATHER: A JOURNEY TO SIBERIA"
a cemetery of Rada canp
Yelabuga
Nahodka