In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  While colonization left a visible imprint on Northeast cities, the remains of the Millions to Manchuria movement have all but vanished from the countryside. One of the most publicized migrant villages was a branch of the Japanese hamlet of Ohinata founded in 1938 at Sijiafang (Place of Four Families), forty miles northeast of Wasteland.

  A Japanese novelist was paid to document Ohinata’s migration, resulting in a popular newspaper series and a book that spawned a film, plays, and songs. The one schoolchildren sang when sending off the settlers went:

  Just plant one grain of wheat

  And the life in our home will prosper

  Work together until everything is beautiful

  In the paradise we will build

  Oh, Ohinata in Manchuria

  The writer traveled with the settlers. Now I used his novel as a map to search for the village. The train departed at 5:24 a.m., and once again I had an entire hard-seat-class car to myself. Cool morning air blew through the open windows, and the sun, which rose at four in summertime, shone warmly on my face. For two enjoyable hours the train lumbered through rice paddies and birch groves—flushing out the occasional pheasant—past hamlets with post-Liberation monikers such as Restoring Asia.

  Exiting a small blockhouse of a station put me in a broad, empty square. In the Japanese novel, this station was described as being fronted by “four old Manchurian dwellings.” The newly arrived Japanese had constructed “houses for a few hundred households,” in addition to a police station, school, and hospital. “We are looking forward to a brilliant future,” its narrator enthused, “as a medium-sized administrative center.”

  The town, now named Shulan, had become just that, with offices and services clustered around two intersections. The book’s narrator noted the area was already home to four thousand Chinese (“Manchurians”) and two thousand Koreans. Those moved off their land had become corvée labor. “Especially for the construction of the new village they come in very handy,” the novel’s narrator said. “However, for the future I think we have to do some in-depth research about the problem of our leadership of the Manchurian people and our harmonious coexistence.”

  The writer described the settlers’ village as four square miles divided by a river “so clear that you can count the beautiful pebbles at its bottom.” A village named Place of Four Families no longer appeared on maps, but a few miles north of the station, nestled between the mountains and that river, was a hamlet called Four Big Families. Perhaps the name had been changed after Liberation? I boarded a minibus heading in its direction.

  Fifteen minutes later the driver stopped the bus on a two-lane road hugged by verdant green paddies. I squeezed past the passengers standing in the aisle but hesitated at the door, seeing no sign of life to the horizon. As the bus faded from view, I stood alone, looking at the kind of bucolic landscape that inspired the novel’s narrator to say: “I think that we are more than blessed with this settlement place in comparison to other places.”

  A dirt road led across the railroad tracks, past a row of single-story homes that ended at a cornfield. A sign in a neighboring paddy identified the rice as Japonica #1, a variety also grown in Wasteland. I wanted to tell someone this, but my audience was two cows tethered to a gap-toothed wooden fence. Back at the train tracks, a man stepped out of the crossing house and nodded hello.

  “I’m looking for Place of Four Families, where the Japanese farmers lived.”

  The man frowned. “This is Four Big Families.”

  “Where’s Place of Four Families?”

  “Never heard of it. It doesn’t matter anyway: you’re too late. Those little Japs all ran away. I wasn’t born then, but I heard about it. No, nothing remains from that time.”

  I walked eight miles down a poplar-shaded road, encountering no traces of life except for two signs. One announced Big Tree Village, which had no trees. The other urged the prevention of forest fires.

  In the hamlet named Safe and Sound, the lone intersection held only a hand-painted blue plank nailed to a telephone pole, pointing the way to a tiny train station. Its broad plaza was made prettier by the bright green weeds that sprouted between the paving stones. Nothing looked Japanese; the biggest building in town was a Korean-built Christian church and elementary school. Both sat empty on a summer Saturday afternoon.

  On the way back to Shulan and my train to Wasteland, the bus driver went off his route to drop me near a new bridge spanning the river, where owners washed their cars while parked in the shallows.

  “You’re looking for Place of Four Families, but what few people know around here is that this town used to be called that,” the driver said. “My father was a teacher who grew up here, that’s how I know. The name changed to Shulan after Liberation.” (He proved to be right.) “My father told me that this is where the Japanese village was.” He pointed at a wide new road, lined with wide new government offices. The only sign said, in Chinese and Korean, SECOND RING ROAD. It was empty.

  When the Japanese settlers left for Manchuria, children waved flags, and “the villagers let go of the handkerchiefs and shouted banzai, throwing both hands up in the air” as tears streamed down their cheeks. As their train pulled away from their Japanese home, the settlers heard a farewell song that went:

  The pioneers of our great Japan

  We divided the village of Ohinata

  And went to Sijiafang in Manchuria

  To build the paradise of the imperial way

  We will all march together

  Most of the settlers who woke in the Northeast on August 9, 1945, would not survive the fall of Manchukuo. Many committed suicide, together.

  Although they made up only 17 percent of the 1.5 million Japanese living in Manchukuo, settlers accounted for nearly half its death toll, which equaled that at Nagasaki: out of 270,000 farmers in the Northeast, 80,000—mostly women and children—died at war’s end.

  The Japanese army had abandoned them. The force that invaded northeast China fourteen years earlier had been reduced by the Pacific War, with units transferred south. Settlers took their place; at the end of 1943, 50 percent of farmers had been placed along the Soviet-Manchukuo front line. As Japanese losses mounted in 1944 the army reneged on the draft exemption offered to settlers. It enacted a “bottom-scraping” mobilization in May, calling up all able-bodied men—most without any military training—as Germany surrendered and the Soviet Union turned its forces east. In Manchukuo the army pulled back from their positions vulnerable to the anticipated Soviet advance, leaving three-quarters of the region undefended. No evacuation was planned. A Japanese general bluntly said of the women, children, and elderly left in the settler villages: “Their only alternative is suicide.”

  In February 1945, the Pacific War was about to turn inexorably to the Allies’ favor: after winning Saipan and its airfield, B-29 bombers were in range of Tokyo. The Japanese army continued to draft all age-eligible reinforcements, however. “I had the misfortune of turning twenty that spring,” Akira Nagamine told me. “I knew the red paper was coming, and I was obligated to go.”

  After all of the track I had ridden across the Northeast, and all the museums and colonial buildings I had visited and maps and books I had read, eighty-seven-year-old Akira Nagamine truly brought Manchukuo to life. Shipped from his Japanese hamlet of twenty farming families to defend Manchukuo’s eastern frontier, he ended up trapped after the war in China’s Northeast for eight years.

  “It was my first time out of Japan,” Nagamine said. His bushy black eyebrows rose as his tanned face blossomed with a grin. At the time he was drafted, his parents had worked as rice and potato farmers, while he had become a substitute teacher, because the other male teachers had all been called to war. “There were none left to teach.”

  The army assembled him and other fresh recruits at an inn. “We took off our civilian clothes and put on the army uniform, including cloth farmer shoes, not heavy boots. In February.”

  A ship carried the recruits acr
oss the Sea of Japan. They switched to a train to reach far northeastern Manchukuo. Nagamine and the other conscripts disembarked at the small railroad town of Jixi, then marched to an outlying hamlet whose garrison was the only line of defense between the railroad and the Soviet border, twelve miles east.

  For five months Nagamine trained to defend the outpost: “I was taught how to roll under a tank with explosives and blow myself up.” His only other weapons were a rifle, grenades, and the unit’s light machine gun. “We knew the Russians were coming, and locals were told that if they had to, to use kitchen knives to fight them.”

  Nagamine still could feel the Northeast’s brutal winter. “It was so cold that you had to break the ice on the basin before washing your face,” he said, miming the action. During his training, he had no interaction with ethnic Koreans and Chinese living in the area, and thus no language lessons. He also was not issued a compass.

  The Soviet Union declared war on Japan three days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the same day one obliterated Nagasaki. Commanded by the architect of the Stalingrad counteroffensive, the Soviet’s “Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation”—also known as August Storm—began at the stroke of midnight on August 9.

  “Lightning flashed unexpectedly,” a Soviet general recorded of the evening. “Dazzling streaks split the darkening sky in half. Thunder sounded, becoming yet louder. The taiga sounded still more menacing. The downpours approached. Already the first drops resounded on the leaves. We entered the dugouts—and glanced at our watches. Sixty minutes remained until the attack. Should we delay the attack? No, under no circumstances!”

  The Russians had lost a humiliating war to the Japanese in Manchuria in 1905. Now it would avenge that defeat. August Storm pitted 1.6 million battle-trained Soviet troops against six hundred thousand Japanese, many of whom were green recruits. A pincer movement sent forces pouring into Manchukuo’s west, north, and east—the latter heading for second class private Akira Nagamine.

  “Their planes bombed the warehouses at our camp,” he said. “We had no radio or communications equipment. It was the first time I shot at somebody.” Nagamine’s white hair was close-cropped, and throughout his story’s telling he smiled with his mouth and eyes and gently touched my arm to emphasize his points. “Was I scared? Yes! Everybody was scared.”

  Soviet forces overran Japanese defenses, which held out despite Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast of surrender on August 15. Nagamine and his fellow soldiers did not hear it: by then he and ninety infantry were hiding in the mountains, emerging only to steal ears of ripened corn from local farmers or snipe at the Soviets. Nagamine limped on a broken ankle. His company was pinned down, cut off, and dead to the world.

  On a pitted concrete shore ringed by a rusting fence, I studied the Songhua River. Here it ran muddy and wide, with a quick current that made the expanse of water look more like a malevolent lake. Once this site was a busy dock one hundred miles downriver from Harbin.

  At Manchukuo’s height, the area had been home to Japanese migrants. By 1945, however, their utopian dream had died. Crops failed, false yields were reported, guerrilla attacks increased, and colonial power—forged from native land and labor—ebbed away. A Place of Four Families settler later recalled, “When I first visited Manchuria in 1938, the Manchurians [Chinese] always let us cross the street first. At the train station, we did not have to wait in line at the ticket counter, they let us buy tickets first. . . . When I returned to Manchuria and finally settled in 1943, it was a different story. The Manchurians told me to go to elsewhere because, they said, it was their train station. Looking back, I think they already sensed Japan’s imminent defeat. I said to myself that I had come to the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  On August 10, the day after the Soviets declared war on Japan, the Japanese army evacuated military families from Manchukuo’s capital and ordered the bombing of bridges and the cutting of telegraph lines, further severing settlers from evacuation routes.

  In memoirs with titles such as Tombstones in the Frozen Earth, survivors recounted the horrific journeys made on foot, overcoming starvation, robbery, rape, and revenge killings by the “Manchurians.” Several authors survived collective suicides: one woman wrote of killing both her young children, but was captured before she could turn the gun on herself. Others told of walking for days, only to have their escape route dead-end on a riverbank.

  I stood on the abandoned Songhua River docks on an August day watching my shadow ripple over opaque water that looked deep and dangerous. There were no plaques, no markers on the site, only rusting skiffs and oil drums. An old man carrying a fishing pole appeared from behind a dune and asked what I was staring at.

  “Today’s the anniversary of the date the Japanese pioneer families waited here, hoping a boat would come to pick them up.”

  This was the fisherman’s village; he knew the story, even if he hadn’t yet been born. The Soviet soldiers drew near. Mothers stared upstream and down. No boat came. Hundreds of Japanese women placed their children—some of them just infants—on these docks, stepped off into the current, and disappeared.

  On that date in August 1945, second-class private Akira Nagamine was 125 miles east, retreating on a broken ankle from the Soviet advance. A Korean farmer informed his group that the war was over, but the soldiers could not fathom Japan surrendering. “We were taught that we could never lose,” Nagamine recalled. The group pressed on, wading through chest-deep swamps, dodging Soviet patrols, picking lice from their infested bodies. Men in his company were killed in firefights with Soviets, committed suicide after injury, and splintered from the group in the dark confusion. Nagamine was shot through the hand—a bullet fragment remains embedded, he said, rubbing the spot—and finally escaped across the river. For six weeks, down to a single companion, Nagamine survived on pine seeds and pilfered food.

  In September, in the mountains, the pair spied a house with smoke wafting from the chimney. Its inhabitant, a Chinese man named Mr. Sun, convinced them that Japan had lost the war. He gave them Chinese clothing and sliced the bills off their army caps. The man led the Japanese to a village—talking a mob out of killing them along the way—and turned them over to the local militia. It put Nagamine to work at a canteen.

  In the first year after surrender, an estimated sixty-six thousand Japanese soldiers died from exposure, cholera, or other diseases in Manchuria. An equal number was press-ganged into work by the two sides of China’s coming civil war. The Soviets had turned over captured Japanese weapons to the Communists, doubling their number of rifles and tripling their artillery. Still, control of the Northeast ebbed between armies. Nagamine’s partner was conscripted by Chinese Nationalists, while he, still recovering from injuries, was left behind.

  A Japanese man, also on the run, clandestinely introduced himself as a former Manchukuo secret agent who once specialized in infiltrating the resistance. He told Nagamine their cover story: they were pioneer farmers abandoned by the army. “He was disguised as an old man,” Nagamine said. “He taught me all the tricks, how to pass myself off as someone else.”

  The men worked at a sawmill, bartering for rice seed with Koreans and trading with Chinese. Later, Nagamine milked cows and baled hay for a family of White Russians who had fled the October Revolution. Nearly three years passed until, in 1948, the homesteaders—seeing Soviet troops looting the railroad, even shipping some tracks back home—decided to stay a step ahead and migrated to Manchuria’s wide-open west. “We put everything on the train, even the cows and hay,” Nagamine told me with a smile.

  The homesteaders began anew, building log houses and cultivating fields north of Qiqihar city before a Chinese policeman “invited” Nagamine and his erstwhile secret agent friend to town to renovate a city inn. Nagamine became a porter, learning Chinese. His companion was killed when a loaded hay wagon overturned.

  In 1950, Nagamine tramped further north to work as a lumberjack, floating logs downriver for two years.
He hid in plain sight alongside Chinese coworkers, never daring to attempt sending a letter home.

  The Chinese civil war ended in 1949, and within a year China entered the Korean War, delaying government repatriation of stranded Japanese. Not until 1953, eight years after arriving in China, did Nagamine admit his true identity to officials, who handed him a ticket for a train and ship. In Japan, his parents waited for him at the pier. At first no words were spoken. They welcomed him home with silent tears.

  In 1956, Nagamine answered an ad in a Japanese newspaper seeking strawberry pickers for California fields. The state needed farmworkers, and—contravening previous immigration restrictions—one thousand visas were made available. The strawberry farm’s hourly wage paid what Nagamine earned for a day’s work in Japan. One obstacle remained: after eight years in Manchuria, he had to write an essay for the American visa officer stating that he was not a Communist spy. In fact, Nagamine had wanted to move to the United States since fifth grade. I talked to him—of all places—at a Starbucks near my grandmother’s house in Santa Cruz County, where he owned a five-acre organic produce farm located on Freedom Boulevard.

  Nagamine had returned to China twice, retracing his journey at the urging of his physician daughter, who had grown up hearing only snippets of his story. “It is a miracle,” she said, sitting outside at Starbucks. Her father grinned, touched my arm gently, and repeated the Chinese term that meant nothing and everything at once: Mei guanxi. It doesn’t matter. Mei guanxi. All is well. Mei guanxi. Never mind.

  On the pitted cement docks along the Songhua River, the fisherman watched the eddies and announced, “This is a bad spot.” He pulled up his line, retreated to the shallows, and tried his luck there. I followed the one-lane dirt road that wound through a run-down hamlet of redbrick homes and under a new expressway. Four miles from the riverbank, past the Red Banner reservoir, at the end of a dead-end street, stood a gated grove of birch and pines. It was the only memorial of its kind. The characters on the entrance gate read: SINO-JAPANESE FRIENDSHIP GARDEN. The cemetery held the cremated remains of thousands of Japanese “pioneer farmers.”