Here, I will briefly describe where a person such as I was born, how I was raised, and how I find myself where I am. Memories of my home have recently been welling up inside me as if to stir my entire being, but in contrast to my feelings, the lackluster words that surface make me sound rather detached. Perhaps my sense of reason bottles them up to keep me from losing my mind.
I was born in 1915 in the village of Herai in Aomori prefecture. My family home was in the Tamodai district of that same village. In addition to working as tenant farmers on about an acre of land, my family kept a broodmare offered on loan by the landowner. Since it was difficult to feed a family of eight by these means alone, my parents also assisted charcoal burners, though they were not part of the district’s Kita-Kawame union of charcoal burners. The reason for this was that in my family there was no money to purchase lumber for burning coal nor the luxury to hire men to help with logging.
As is well known, the Tohoku region suffers from poor harvests once every three years or so, but the years 1931, 1934, and 1935 were especially hard hit with severe, continuous famine. Out of the four children in my family my elder brother did not attend school and, being the second eldest son, before I reached school age I was adopted by the family who operated Okamura Merchants Wholesale Seafood in Hachinohe, while my younger sister, at fourteen and not even halfway through her studies at Kawadai Secondary School, was employed at the Fuji Spinning Mill in Kawasaki. And my younger brother, who had a minor disability in his left eye, became an apprentice at the Kanemoto Foundry in Hachinohe when he was twelve. The truth was, since my birth family never owned any paddy fields in the first place, I doubt our situation would have been very different whether there was a famine or not.
Furthermore, my older brother was drafted in 1937. He was assigned to the 108th Division and was killed in the Shanxi province of China in May of 1939. When his draft papers had arrived, my birth family was impoverished because of the stillbirth of a colt for the second year in a row, but I heard that before leaving for war, my brother asked them not to part with the mare until his return. I can only narrate these things through hearsay, of course, since by that time I belonged to a different family.
Although I have always been scrawny in stature and was never a very active child, in the Okamura family I was cherished as their heir. However, life does not work out so easily. After the sudden passing of my adoptive mother, Ikuko Okamura, in 1929, my adoptive father, Yaichiro, remarried and immediately had a son, and there was no longer a place for me. Nevertheless, thanks to this turn of events I was given permission to focus on my education, which I liked very much. After graduating from Hachinohe Middle School and Daini High School, I enrolled in the department of science at Tohoku Imperial University, and during the time I was living in Sendai, the destitution of my birth home was already a distant memory.
As I write this, I realize it may seem as if my life to this point had been rather blessed, but in two ways, this was not the case. First, my body always remembered poverty—the life of a prosperous merchant family never sunk in physically. Second, no matter whether I was in the village of Herai or the town of Hachinohe, to my eyes it all appeared as a frigid scene where the cold wind from the Pacific blew ceaselessly. When I returned to Hachinohe in 1942 after being called to war, activity was bustling all around. The people going to work on the construction of the Takadate airfield marched in line like ants along the bridge over Mabechi River, while on the embankment the factories of Nitto Chemical and Nihon Mineral belched out black smoke day and night, and the sounds of hammering echoed from the dockyards of Samé harbor and the Minato River as ships were hastily built. But neither this Hachinohe nor the briny, idyllic version from the past belonged to me in the first place. Memories of the village may have been stripped away from me once before, but now it is nothing but the gut-wrenching smells and sounds of my family home that return to me. Even just now, as I write this, the smell of the mare’s ass has risen in my throat. It is the smell of dung and urine mixed into straw on the earthen floor.
I should add that where I come from, humans and horses slept under the same roof. There were no tatami mats—we usually spread straw or woven mats over the dirt floor. A home like this was called a rag house.
By the way, Herai is a village where countless streams ebb and flow, originating in the mountains of Towada and carving the shape of the river, so it is not as if there are no paddy fields there. The gently sloping mountain terrain where the outline of Mount Hakkoda is visible on clear days is rich with green pastures, and since the late nineteenth century, the vast meadows of an army horse ranch have stretched over the entire forest region of Okuromori. It seems that even my birth family, in my grandfather’s time, managed to put up several horses that were procured for the military in the auction held in Gonohe. Not only
