When they turned onto the main road, they saw a number of tire tracks. The two boys began to hurry to the empty lot.
No one else was there yet. Kazuo grabbed Yasuo’s arm and ran around in the pure white snow, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then, when he was tired of running, he made a snowball and threw it far away. He marveled at how his breath was even whiter than yesterday. Soon, Nishino-kun and Minoru showed up. Just like Kazuo and Yasuo, they wore mufflers around their necks and had mittens on.
Nishino-kun looked at Kazuo. “Where’s Takahashi-kun?”
“Last night he came to my place and said they had to go to his relatives’ house. He can’t come today, so he told me to apologize to you two,” Kazuo said.
“Really? That’s too bad.” Minoru pursed his lips.
After that, the four boys made snowmen, had a snowball fight, and used some old boards left in the corner of the lot as sleds. At last, they all knew it was time to go home to get ready for school.
Mother scolded Kazuo and Yasuo when she saw that they were covered with snow. They quickly changed into different clothes. The TV news was reporting that traffic in downtown Tokyo was at a standstill.
“Tokyo really falls apart when it snows,” Father murmured. “I wonder if the trains are stopped, too.”
After he and Mother had both left for work, Kazuo and Yasuo headed to school. A few soft beams of sunlight were beginning to appear through breaks in the clouds.
Mr. Honda arrived thirty minutes later than usual. Kazuo and his classmates played in the schoolyard during that time, making snowmen and having snowball fights. The snow began to grow slightly wet and slushy in their hands.
Before class started, Kazuo told Mr. Honda Nobuo’s news. Mr. Honda smiled cheerfully as always, then said, “Thank you, I understand,” and proceeded to start the lesson.
But during lunch period that day, when Kazuo was plugging his nose and drinking his disgusting miruku, a girl in his class came to tell him that Mr. Honda wanted to see him in the teachers’ room.
“It’s about Takahashi-kun,” said Mr. Honda. “When he mentioned his relatives, did he say which ones they were?”
“I think he said they were going to visit his father’s relatives in the country,” Kazuo answered.
“I see. . . . Thank you very much,” Mr. Honda said politely.
Outside, at recess, any thoughts of snow had vanished from Kazuo’s head. Instead, Mr. Honda’s question about Nobuo weighed heavily on his mind.
After school ended, Kazuo took Nishino-kun and Minoru with him to Takahashi Meats. The melted snow had wet the asphalt, making it look very black.
When they reached Nobuo’s house, the door to the butcher shop was shut. A sheet of paper was taped to the door.
“We have enjoyed your patronage for many years, but today we close our doors. We express our gratitude to the shoppers of West Ito and to all of our neighbors in this commercial district. We hope for the continued prosperity and development of West Ito. Owners, Takahashi Meats, February 3.”
“What’s going on?” Minoru asked anxiously.
“Yesterday, when he talked to you, did Takahashi-kun say anything about this?” Nishino-kun asked Kazuo.
“No, nothing,” Kazuo said. “Just that something had come up and the family was going to his relatives’ house.” Then he happened to remember Nobuo saying he would ask the greengrocer for a tangerine box.
They headed across the street.
“Excuse me, my name is Nakamoto. I’m a classmate of Nobuo, the son of the butcher across the road,” Kazuo told the man who was lining up vegetables with a cigarette in his mouth.
"My name is Nakamoto:" Generally Japanese people introduce themselves by giving their family name only, without any kind of respectful suffix. So Kazuo simply introduces himself as “Nakamoto.” English speakers usually introduce themselves by their first or full names. (In Japan, the family name comes first—Kazuo’s name in Japan is Nakamoto Kazuo—but this book gives the family name last to avoid confusion.)
“Ah, a friend of Nobuo’s, are you?” The vegetable man turned and said, “If you’ve come about the tangerine crates, they’re right over there. You can take as many as you want.”
Nobuo had made a point of asking the greengrocer for the crates. Kazuo suddenly felt like breaking down in tears. “Excuse me, do you know what happened at Takahashi-kun’s place? Did they close up the store?”
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you hear?” the man said. “Seems somebody found out they were mixing cheap rabbit meat with the pork they sold. The fellow who ran it wasn’t a bad sort, but he must have had a weak moment.”
“Do you know when they’ll be coming back?” Minoru asked.
“They probably won’t come back here, son. They cheated their customers.” The man blew smoke toward the sky.
The boys nodded but didn’t say a word. They walked back to the entrance of the shopping area. From there, they had to walk in different directions to go home.
“Nobuo will be back, won’t he?” Minoru said in a small voice.
I bet he never will, Kazuo thought. But somehow he felt that if he said that aloud, Nobuo really would never return.
“Let’s ask Mr. Honda tomorrow about what to do,” Nishino-kun said.
The others nodded. Then, briefly raising their hands in a wave, they walked off in different directions.
Kazuo felt like crying, but no tears fell. He had lost his good friend, the one who could help him figure out how to run like Bob Hayes.
He stared at the snow melting all around him. Then he remembered how happy Nobuo had sounded when Kazuo told him that his family’s croquettes were the best.
Maybe he’d been able to tell himself that his father was not a bad man after all.
March/April
Kazuo’s Journey
In mid-March, Minoru moved away from West Ito like Nobuo before him, and Kazuo lost another friend.
Mr. Honda announced to the fourth-grade class that, due to a repatriation program for North Koreans in Japan, Minoru and his family had decided to return to their home country of North Korea, across the sea to the west. Then Mr. Honda asked Minoru to say a few words of farewell. Minoru looked a little self-conscious, standing up in front of the entire class.
“Everyone in grade four section three, thank you for everything. Even though I am returning to my fatherland, I will never forget West Ito Elementary School. I will be sure to write to everyone when I arrive, so please write to me as well.”
The class applauded for Minoru and sang the West Ito Elementary School song to cheer his departure.
Korean phonetic letters: The official script of North and South Korea, hangul, was created in the mid-15th century. Each hangul character forms a sound.
Not long after that, a single letter arrived from Minoru and was posted on the back wall of the classroom. The name of the sender was written with different characters than Kazuo knew from before, but the handwriting was definitely Minoru’s. The letter said, “Dear Everyone at West Ito Elementary School, how have you been? I am studying very hard every day to contribute to my fatherland.”
Kazuo and Nishino-kun immediately sent a reply to Minoru’s address, which was written in difficult ideographs and Korean phonetic letters that looked like strange symbols. They told Minoru all the news at their school and asked him whether there was sumo wrestling in North Korea. But another reply from Minoru never came.
In April, a new term began, and Kazuo became a fifth grader. He was still in section three of his grade, but his teacher was a woman, Mrs. Yamazaki. Nishino-kun had been placed in section one.
Kazuo sat on a
April: The month when school begins in Japan. Japanese students go to school almost all year round, with a shorter summer vacation and time off at New Year’s. Students also wear uniforms, wool in the winter and cotton in the hotter months.
patch of soft grass in the empty lot, which had finally begun to turn green. He gazed far off over the rooft
ops of nearby houses to a corner of the schoolyard, where a cherry tree was in bloom. Kazuo looked up at the sky. Its clear blue stretched on forever, as far as he could see.
From the autumn of 1965 through the winter months, many of the people closest to him had vanished. Mr. Yoshino’s tofu shop had been turned into a store that sold electric appliances. A new butcher shop had opened up where Nobuo’s family had lived (the croquettes weren’t nearly as good as Nobuo’s family’s). And the house that Minoru had left was still a vacant black skeleton, without any sign of life.
Kazuo spied some white clouds like wisps of cotton candy drifting in from the south. They were moving at a constant, steady pace.
To him, the clouds looked a bit like a camel making a journey through the desert. Astride the camel, between its two humps, sat a young man with a white cloth wrapped around his head in Middle Eastern fashion. No doubt, he had journeyed alone through the desert for many days, making his way to a land far off in the east.
The desert traveler probably feared that he would end up a pile of dried skin and bones, such as he had seen here and there along his path. Remembering the warm affection of the people he had left behind, he had to fight the urge to hurry back to the safety of his home. But like a movie hero, he continued his perilous journey. Around him stretched endless dry, cracked earth and craggy mountains. Ahead, he hoped to glimpse a magnificent palace decorated in silver and gold.
Kazuo gazed at the sky and pictured himself as a questing traveler.
Though he imagined that somewhere beyond the sky he could see the landscape of a foreign country, he knew that it was probably very different from the far-off countries shown on TV. In those images, each home had vivid green grass in the yard, a living room with a fireplace and roomy sofa, a private room and a bed for each person, and a huge refrigerator stuffed with more food than you could ever eat. There were jugs of milk so big that you would have to wrap both arms around them to pick them up, skyscrapers so tall that they stuck through the sky, gigantic cars, freeways that went on forever, and the hanbaagaa that Wimpy ate. . . .
But Kazuo was beginning to realize that foreign countries had disturbing as well as beautiful scenery. He thought of Vietnam, where there were air raids almost every day and people were running for their lives; of Africa, where children his own age were starving and dying one after another, their stomachs grossly swollen; and of North Korea, where Minoru had gone with his family, and had mysteriously fallen out of touch. Those were foreign countries, too.
And in those places, it was not true that everything was always pleasant and wonderful. Suffering and sorrow had existed, and probably continued to exist, as daily realities, just like they did in Japan—or even far more than they did here.
Kazuo stood and brushed the seat of his pants, sweeping away moist earth that smelled of new grass. The cloud camel and traveler had passed over his head and at some point had lost their shape. He stared in their direction.
“Someday, I will leave this city and this country. I’ll meet many other people who left the places where they were born, like me.”
Thinking about it made Kazuo’s heart leap a little in his chest.
Maybe by that time, his father would no longer get drunk and tell him to enter a national university, earn a degree at graduate school, and work at a top company. And maybe his mother would no longer say “during the war,” and would have mended her ties with Kazuo’s grandfather. And just maybe, Yasuo would finally be raising the dog he had waited and waited for. And as for Kazuo himself . . .
For now, he still lived in a world called Tokyo.
He looked out at his city. The small houses huddled closely together, like a group of animals still sleeping on a meadow in early spring. Soon, they would feel the warmth of the sun, and they would start their journey toward a new green field.
Kazuo felt he could run as fast as a four-legged animal, perhaps a gazelle. He took a breath of fresh spring air and sprinted off toward the horizon.
Epilogue
An Author’s Note to His Readers
I wrote this book while remembering my own childhood in Tokyo in the 1960s. I knew boys like Kazuo and his friends—the J-Boys—and the area where I lived (and still live) was very much like West Ito in Shinagawa Ward. I wanted to show how Japanese kids were influenced by American culture back then. Even the Beatles were influenced by American rock and roll—Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and of course Elvis.
Everything that happens in this book sort of happened to me—or to my friends, you might say—but not in exactly the way it happens here. Throughout this book, I’ve added some notes and photographs to help you understand what life was like for me and other kids back then.
I remember the tofu shop, the empty lots and the stray dogs, the American cartoons, the TV shows on black and white screens, and all the noise and construction. There are still tofu shops in Tokyo. But the physical look of Tokyo, except for some side streets and quiet neighborhoods, is nothing like what it was when I was growing up. Nowadays, there aren’t so many empty lots. There are no stray dogs, and kids rarely play on side streets (they’re more likely inside on their computers, playing video games, or spending time at after-school cram centers). Yes, things change, and in my imagination they have changed a great deal for Kazuo and his friends, too, although I must emphasize that these J-Boys in particular are largely a work of my imagination.
In case you’re wondering, Minoru never did write another letter back from North Korea, and no one knows what happened to him or where he is today. I read some newspaper reports of Japanese Koreans who moved to North Korea, as Minoru’s family did. Most of them had hard lives there because Japanese-Koreans are considered the lowest members of their society. Still, I hope that Minoru and his family settled comfortably and are doing okay. As for Keiko Sasaki, I’ll bet she ended up moving to Switzerland with her Swiss husband. She’s probably living a peaceful life with her family in the mountains.
Yasuo had to wait until he grew up and got his own house before he got a dog. And even then it was a small dog, since houses in Japan are still small compared to houses in America. He works for a record company and listens to rock and roll music all day long. Nobuo stayed in the countryside after he and his parents had to leave Tokyo in embarrassment, after a rabbit meat scandal that affected a number of butchers. Once, after Kazuo started working as a businessman at a company, he ran into Nobuo in Osaka. Kazuo took his clients to a sushi bar, and when he saw the short-haired sushi chef, he recognized Nobuo right away. They were both so happy to see each other again. After that, Nobuo married and opened his own sushi bar in Kyushu, southern Japan, where his wife is from. He sends a New Year’s card to Kazuo asking about his family every year.
Yes, that’s right. Kazuo got married and had kids. He lives in Tokyo now, not too far from where he grew up. He and his wife have a boy and a girl, who love spending time with their Uncle Yasuo. Otohsan and Okaasan passed away a while back, but not before they got to see their grandchildren.
And before Kazuo settled down to work in Japan, he really did get to travel around the world, just as he dreamed of doing when he watched the clouds that day in April, and when he told his friends he wanted to be a ship’s captain. He even learned to speak English, and spent some time living in America and England. You remember how he was good at math? Although his father hoped that he would get a Ph.D. in science, Kazuo studied sociology and economics. Of course, his father was disappointed at first, but later managed to satisfy himself that at least Kazuo had gotten into a good college and hadn’t flunked out.
Now, as for Nishino-kun, he never did go to college, although he loved to read and write poetry, and from time to time he would send Kazuo a poem he had written. I’m afraid something very sad happened to Nishino-kun, but Kazuo will always remember him as a good friend who gave him wonderful memories. In one of his letters, Nishino-kun wrote to Kazuo, “Live your life fully enough for the both of us.”
Kazuo now has gra
y hair. He has saved that letter from Nishino-kun, and thinks of the J-Boys often. And, speaking of J-Boys, there was a Japanese rock album in the 1980s with the title J.BOY. Maybe Yasuo even had something to do with it, but I’ll never know for sure.
Shogo OketaniTokyo, 2011
Note: The title J-Boys is inspired by Shogo Hamada’s J.Boy, a Japanese rock album released in 1986.
At j-boysbook.com you can find out more about the world of the J-Boys and the author, and get information about Japan and resources for teachers.
Glossary
Below are brief explanations of Japanese words and cultural references that appear in the text. For more detail, see the sidebar on the page the entry appears.
Aomori: A rural prefecture in northeastern Japan, or Tohoku.
April: The month when school begins in Japan. Japanese students go to school almost all year round, with a shorter summer vacation and time off at New Year’s.
Bathhouse: A public bath, usually in a spacious building with a prominent chimney. Men and women bathe in separate large rooms. Before taking a Japanese bath, you completely wash your body outside the tub, soaping up and scrubbing vigorously, and then rinsing. After that, you go into the tub just to soak.
Bedding: In traditional Japanese homes, people sleep on a futon laid out on the floor. A futon set consists of a bottom mattress (a thick cotton pad) and a top blanket (a bit like a comforter).
Calligraphy: Traditional method of writing Japanese using a brush. There are several different ways of writing words and sounds, including Chinese characters, or kanji, and two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana.
-chan: A friendly and informal suffix used for younger kids or girls.
Christmas cake: A sponge cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries and sometimes chocolates or other fruit. It is usually eaten on Christmas Eve.
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