by Mariko Nagai
and Asa and I hold
each other tight,
and how I wish Auntie was here.
Then we are pushed
into a warehouse
and then onto a ship.
A whistle blows once,
then twice, and the boat slowly
begins to pull out of port.
“Good-bye, good-bye,”
people wave their arms
as hard as they can.
“Good-bye, good-bye,”
I wave my arms,
in the beat of my heart
but my heart is breaking
once, twice, each time I wave:
Auntie. Tochan. Kachan.
Principal Ohara. Toshio’s mom.
All the settlers who disappeared.
All the kids who went away
with their new Chinese parents.
Horse. My home back north.
The beautiful prairie and the Wall.
Goat and chickens and our farm.
I keep waving my hand.
Asa squeezes my other hand,
once, twice, a Morse code,
and I squeeze her hand.
Message received and understood.
I look ahead into the vast
wide horizon of the ocean,
like the horizon
of the Manchurian prairie,
so flat, so wide. I am going
somewhere at the end
of the prairie of the sea,
where Tochan will come find us.
The ocean ahead is calm.
The horizon flat. I am ready.
AFTERWORD
Every summer starting in 1975 up until the late 1990s, Japanese-Chinese men and women who were abandoned or left in China right after World War II came to Japan to look for their parents and relatives. Almost all of them looked older than their actual age, and almost all of them didn’t speak a word of Japanese.
What they had as proof of their Japanese identity were things that their biological parents—if they were lucky—had left them: clothing and items with their names written on them, perhaps; sometimes, Japanese addresses, but most of the time, they only had pieces of themselves that proved that they were Japanese—their very own names, their parents’ names, or just fragments of memories.
Once these Japanese-Chinese got to Japan, there was hope that blood relatives would come to claim them. However, most of the time, these meetings never took place: no one was looking for them because they had already died, or people wanted to forget what had happened right after the war, or because they were declared dead and no one was searching for them.
Where did these Japanese-Chinese men and women come from? I wondered as I watched the television news. What were Japanese doing in China anyway, and why were they left there? One summer day, as we watched a new set of now-adult Japanese-Chinese orphans entering the airport arrival area with luggage, craning their necks, searching for possible relatives waiting for them, my mother said—her eyes glued to the television—“Our families never had to go to Manchuria, but I could’ve been one of them if they had made a different choice.” That’s when Natsu and her family came to my mind, caught my imagination, and insisted that Natsu’s story be written down.
In 1931, the Japanese government overtook the northern part of China and declared it an independent state called Manchukuo with the last emperor of China—Puyi—as the Kangde Emperor of Manchuria. The government of the newly founded Manchuria created a slogan, “Five Races Under One Union,” and indeed, there were many races living in the country: the Mongolians, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russians (who escaped the Russian Revolution in 1917), and many Europeans. People like Madam Borisovna, a former Russian aristocrat, could live in exile in Harbin because the city was very cosmopolitan.
However, in reality, Manchukuo was a puppet state controlled by the Japanese government.
Japan at that time was suffering from three major issues: overpopulation, bad economy, and lack of natural resources. As a state policy, Japan encouraged its citizens—especially impoverished villages and second and third sons of farmers—to relocate to Manchuria and other occupied territories to provide much needed natural resources for the mainland. With the promise of a better life, men and women, families, uprooted themselves from their homes in Japan to start their lives in the remote areas of the expanding Japanese empire: Saipan, Guam, Taiwan, present-day Korea, Manchuria, Sakhalin Island and four islands north of Hokkaido, and areas that were considered “friendly” to the Japanese: the Philippines, Southeast Asia, parts of China, and the South Pacific islands. Up until 1945, over three million Japanese civilians and nearly the same number of military personnel lived outside of Japan. Natsu’s family was among the two million Japanese civilians living in China and Manchuria.
Sometimes the entire village resettled into areas where former Chinese peasants had lived, ignorant of the fact that the land they tilled had just recently been forcibly taken from the Chinese. The settlers had to endure harsh, long winters in less-than-standard huts made out of clay and straw. They were under constant threat from the elements as well as fear of attacks by bandits and Chinese peasants whose lands had been taken away. Settlements farther away from the urban areas oftentimes had to arm themselves, in some cases build walls around their settlements, because they knew that the help was so many days away if they were attacked. Boys between sixteen and nineteen were sent under the Manchurian Youth Pioneers, trained to fight and farm. During 1939 to 1945, military training was part of the school curriculum, both in Manchuria and Japan—both boys and girls were trained to fight at school. For children living in the settlements far away from Japanese Army garrisons, it was not unusual for them to know how to shoot guns as a way of protecting themselves.
The Japanese settlers migrated to these unfamiliar lands out of patriotism, believing that what they were doing was for the good of the nation, and that they were living in harmony with other races. Meanwhile, as World War II thickened and Japan was losing the war from 1942 on, Manchuria remained somewhat unscathed. Propaganda by the Imperial General Headquarters of Japan ensured that the news of Japan losing battles was never made public, so when the Soviet Armed Forces broke into the Manchurian border on August 9, 1945, it came as a surprise to the settlers.
Out of thousands of settlements of various sizes spread over Manchuria, and with most men drafted at the last minute, these settlements were left with elderly men, teenagers, women, and children who had to evacuate to safety without soldiers to protect them. Little did they know that their fathers and sons were left to protect the Manchurian-Soviet border by themselves with only the most basic weapons. They also did not know that the Japanese Imperial Army had already retreated, and with railways unmanned and no accessible automobiles, people had to evacuate by foot. Some villages chose to die as a group when they knew that they could not get away, to die honorably rather than “to live the life of shame,” which was taught at school; some were abandoned and left to die on their trek to safety; some, after making it to the major cities where refugee stations were set up, died from malnutrition and below-freezing temperatures. Some parents gave up their children to the Chinese civilians, thinking that with so many people dying of starvation and diseases in refugee camps, they would be saving their lives.
Chinese people, traditionally, put emphasis on keeping the family line going; many childless couples took in orphaned children and raised them as their own. Yeeshan Chan, the author of Abandoned Japanese in Postwar Manchuria: The Lives of War Orphans and Wives in Two Countries (2011), pointed out to me, while discussing this manuscript, “The Chinese families that adopted Japanese orphans had faced political punishment. But still, they were willing to take the risk. The infant mortality was very high in Northeast China (Manchuria) during those years. As the demand for adoptive children was very high, there were brokers who bought Japanese orphans and sold them to rural families. It can be concluded, thanks to the market demand for adoptive childr
en, many Japanese children were able to survive in the rural Chinese families.” Many of these Japanese orphans raised by their adoptive Chinese parents say that they are grateful for the kindness and bravery of these parents who raised and protected them through this turbulent period of Chinese history: the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
There are said to be 2,700 recognized Japanese-Chinese children (2013), yet this number does not include children over thirteen years old at the time of the end of war: the Japanese government considers anyone over thirteen who remained in China as having chosen to do so on their own. This 2,700 figure also does not include teenage girls who had no choice but to work as maids in Chinese households or marry themselves off for survival.
Though it is not clear how many people died in total, about 250,000 are said to have lost their lives before they reached Japan in August 1946. Dysentery, which is a curable illness for a healthy person with access to modern medical facilities, claimed many lives, as did starvation and hypothermia; these evacuees, having to live in very unhygienic and cramped situations, who were already undernourished and exhausted, lived in constant fear of illness and death. Those who survived the ordeal did not fare well even when they returned to Japan. Having lost everything—the land, livestock, property, family members, savings—in Manchuria, they had to rebuild their lives from scratch.
Natsu’s story is just one of many, and she is one of the luckier ones who came out alive, and somehow made it back to Japan. You may wonder if Tochan ever made it home. Just as in the novel, men were conscripted to the Japanese Imperial Army a couple of weeks before the Surrender on August 15, 1945, from the Manchurian settlements; though the number is contested, about 600,000 Japanese men are said to have been captured by the Soviet Army and sent to gulags in Siberia and former Soviet territories. The working conditions were severe: lack of food plagued them as well as the subzero temperatures, long working hours, poor living situations, and unclean water. Many men died, and those who survived this experience were never the same. One of my uncles, who grew up in Sakhalin (a former Japanese territory, and now part of Russia), was drafted in July of 1945, sent to the Soviet border, and was captured by the Soviets around August 9, 1945; he was sent to a Siberian gulag, and had to endure five years of manual labor in Kazakhstan as a prisoner of war. He says that he lost so many of his friends there, and it was only through great luck that he survived. He was not yet twenty when he was drafted. I’d like to believe that Tochan came back to Japan and found Natsu and Asa, but the historical facts make me also believe that Tochan, with his kind-heartedness and his sense of rightness, probably did not survive the gulag.
As someone who grew up in three countries (Japan, Belgium, and the US) in the first eight years of my life, having had to learn a new language every time our family moved, being displaced from my home has been a lifelong interest. My story is so different from Natsu’s story—because my father worked for a Japanese company, we were protected by the company and the government, unlike Natsu and other settlers in Manchuria (and other territories Japan held until August 1945). Whenever there were battles and wars, his company protocol was—and still is—to evacuate employees and their families as quickly as they can.
When the First Gulf War broke out in 1990, my father was on the team to strategize logistics of evacuating the employees and their families overland if the civilian evacuation flights could not be secured. He told me that he thought of the Manchurian evacuees when he was tasked to come up with the worst-case overland plan: to calculate how long it would take for people to walk from Kuwait City to Saudi Arabia, with only a few able men, no arms to protect them, across a hostile landscape by foot. I still remember him saying, “Do you know how hard it is to tell people that they are on their own until they reach the border, with the Iraqi Army chasing after them?” He said that he was glad his team was able to put the employees and their families on the last civilian plane leaving Kuwait after many uncertain days of waiting at the airport.
This story may feel as if it is a story taking place in the past in a faraway country, but it has repeated many times over—for instance, after the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees got on small fishing boats to brave the long journey over treacherous ocean to Thailand or Australia; in the early ’90s, Hutu refugees trekked through murderous Rwandan land to reach the neighboring borders of Uganda, Zaire, and other African Great Lakes Region nations; people in Chernobyl had to flee the city they loved because of the nuclear power plant meltdown and were told to pack three days’ worth of luggage and food, though the journey turned into decades-long exile; Syrian refugees running away from the military to Turkey and other neighboring countries (2013–present); Japanese people who lived within the twenty-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (2011–present); Rohingyas, the minority Muslim population in Myanmar, fleeing to Bangladesh (2017–present); people making the arduous trek from Central American countries to the southern border of the US, fleeing from unstable and dangerous countries (2014–present). For them, staying home is not an option—leaving home is safer—and it takes so much courage and bravery to leave behind everything you know to reach safety. There are, as of 2018, 65.8 million people who have been driven from home.
Next time you see refugees on the television, put yourself in their shoes: they have left everything they knew and loved to reach a place of safety. Nobody chooses to be a refugee.
The author as a child in Japan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No novel is written in a vacuum. It is a communal effort, though most of the time, the people involved do not know that they are helping a writer as she struggles behind a closed door with the story.
I’d like to thank the nameless woman I met at a temporary housing neighborhood in Fukushima in 2012 when I was doing fieldwork for another book. She sat on her small front step, tending to her flowers. We started talking and she told me that she was a dairy farmer; she told me that when the earthquake and tsunami hit the northeastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, her house was too inland to be affected until a few weeks later, when she found out that the radiation plume from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had irradiated the cattle feed, and she and her family were ordered to slaughter the affected dairy cows that she had raised like they were her own children. And a few days later, she and her family were forcibly evacuated from the polluted village. She took a deep breath and looked toward the far beautiful mountain ranges of Fukushima, and then whispered, “This isn’t the first time I lost my home—I lost my family and my home in Manchuria.” She told me about her experience of a harrowing trek across Manchuria with her mother and her siblings, and how she lost her mother and most of her siblings at the refugee camp. By the time she reached Japan, only she and one of her sisters had survived. She was only fifteen years old. As we were saying good-bye, she looked at me and said, “As long as you are alive, you can start all over again.” And I saw this elderly woman as she must have looked when she was fifteen years old, and I also saw Natsu, who I had imagined and seen in my dreams for many years, as a real person in this elderly woman.
One big bear hug goes to Jonathan Wu, who is the biggest fan of Asa (who used to be Cricket), who believed in Natsu and this novel from the start, and who kept asking me about Asa and Natsu over dinners—you are the best friend anyone could have.
A very big thank-you to Christy Ottaviano, my wonderful editor and publisher: our relationship started more than twenty years ago, when she hired me as a summer intern as I was trying to figure out what to do, now that I was done with schooling. Her passion for children’s literature was infectious—I still have the fever, two decades later. It took me twenty years to learn how to write for children. Thank you for publishing this book, and thank you for teaching me, that summer a long time ago, the beauty and power of children’s books.
Also thank you to the following people who have been my road s
igns on an unmapped journey of writing this book: Yeeshan Chan for thoughtfully reading over the manuscript (I was so relieved when you wrote back to tell me that I got the historical parts right); women and men (who shall remain anonymous here) who shared their stories with me about being zanryu koji (Japanese children abandoned in China); and Temple University Japan Campus, my home for the last two decades.
And of course, every book I write is written over many, many conversations with my mother, who is my true north. She may not understand what I do when I disappear to do fieldwork, and she cannot read the books I write—just like Auntie—but she tells me, “Eat, eat,” as a way to urge me forward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIKO NAGAI is the author Dust of Eden and several books of poetry and fiction for adults. She has received the Pushcart Prize in both poetry and fiction, as well as many other accolades. She is an associate professor of creative writing and Japanese literature at Temple University, Japan Campus, in Tokyo, where she is also the director of research. mariko-nagai.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One: Summer
Part Two: Late Summer
Part Three: End of Summer
Part Four: Beginning of Autumn
Part Five: Late Autumn
Part Six: Depth of Winter
Part Seven: End of Winter