HAMAMATSU - Eighty-one years after the end of World War II, a newly donated book and the testimony of a man who moved to Manchuria as a child are preserving the history of a Japanese settlement known as Hamamatsu Village, whose residents fled advancing Soviet forces after years spent pursuing the promise of a more prosperous life.
"We left Hamamatsu Village after abandoning all of our possessions when Japan lost the war and Soviet forces poured into Manchuria on August 9, 1945," said Kosuke Shibata, a former superintendent of education in the former town of Inasa in Shizuoka Prefecture.
Shibata wrote The Story of Miyakoda Paitanshao Manchurian Pioneer Village, a book recently donated to Hamamatsu Keiyo High School on the Mikatahara Plateau in an effort to help students learn about the area's history.
The book recounts the history of the Hamamatsu pioneer group, whose members moved to Manchuria under a government-backed colonization program, as well as their desperate flight from Soviet forces in the closing days of the war.
In 1932, Japan established the state of Manchukuo in Manchuria in northeastern China. Japanese military authorities promoted migration to the region as a national policy intended to increase food production and secure resources.
Hamamatsu City also strongly encouraged settlement in Manchuria. Contemporary documents called for cooperation with the national policy of sending 1 million farming households to Manchuria and proposed establishing a 300-household Hamamatsu settlement there.
In Miyakoda, Hamamatsu, an area known as Hakusho was named after Paitanshao, the place in Manchuria where settlers from Hamamatsu established their community.
Toshio Takei, 91, moved to Manchuria at the age of 7 with his parents and six siblings.
"The farmland just stretched on and on," Takei recalled. "There was food, and we raised pigs ourselves and ate meat. At that time, you couldn't eat like that in Japan."
Takei attended a Japanese school and said his family enjoyed a more comfortable life on the vast land than they had in Japan.
That life changed abruptly six days before the war ended, when Soviet forces invaded Manchuria.
"The group talked about gathering in one village, fighting as long as we had bullets and then all dying together," Takei said. "Potassium cyanide had already been handed out to our parents, and even though people talked about bullets, there really weren't many. Even as children, we understood that we were going to gather together, fight and die."
The settlers eventually fled to Xinjing, the capital of Manchukuo, where winter temperatures fell to around minus 20 degrees Celsius.
"Typhus and cholera were spreading, and people were dying one after another because of the cold and because they had hardly anything proper to eat," Takei said. "Every morning, I watched bodies being carried away by horse-drawn carts."
Takei's father, Hitoshi, died of illness at the age of 42.
When the family prepared to return to Japan, Takei was the one who dug up his father's remains.
"It wasn't difficult to dig up my father's body," Takei said. "We laid down railroad ties, arranged coal, placed my father on top, poured oil over him and set it on fire so we could bring back his bones. I wasn't even that sad. People themselves had become strange."
Asked why, Takei replied, "It was the war, I suppose. That's what happens to the country that loses."
After returning to Japan, Takei and other surviving members of the pioneer group helped cultivate part of the Mikatahara Plateau, transforming what had once been wasteland.
Hirofumi Oba, a teacher at Hamamatsu Keiyo High School, said the site where the school now stands was originally barren land before the returning settlers developed it.
"The people who pioneered the land came here, and in the end it became the rich area it is today," Oba said.
Students at the school are now studying the book as a way of connecting the area's present-day landscape with its wartime past.
"I want to read it while comparing it with the history I have learned up to now," one first-year student said. "I think passing these stories on is something today's students should do."
Another first-year student said, "I hope we can pass this book on to the next generation as a way of showing our gratitude to the people who came back from Manchuria and built up Hamamatsu."
Eighty-one years after the war ended, the book is helping preserve memories of the brutality of war while carrying forward the survivors' hopes for peace.
Source: SBSnews6
