If you’ll allow me to explain a little, it is not as if Noguchi and I were very close while we worked at the factory. What I do remember is that Noguchi, on the day he started working as a mechanic in the Kanagawa factory’s vehicle division in the spring of 1940, had a slightly mischievous sparkle in his eyes, as if he had a dagger concealed in his pocket. But when I remarked to an acquaintance in his division, “That’s quite a guy there,” he replied in a hushed voice, “Better watch what you say. You’ll be accused of discrimination.” Being born and raised in northeast Japan, this was the first time I had ever met someone from a buraku village, one of the segregated areas where members of feudal outcast communities still lived.
Since the garage of the vehicle division was located in the rear of the laboratory building where I worked, I saw Noguchi quite often. Noguchi would always cook potatoes in the ashes of the incinerator that was in the back there, and when I told him it was dangerous because there were chemicals mixed in, he just laughed softly and said, “It’ll disinfect my stomach and do me some good.” He wouldn’t listen to anything I said—he was quite stubborn and hard to deal with—but he was a kind man.
Although Noguchi did not talk much about himself, I heard from other people that he was born on the outskirts of Saitama prefecture and he was the only one in his village to graduate from secondary school. He then moved to Tokyo where, while working as an apprentice at an ironworks in the Arakawa district, he met the former factory manager Yukio Sasahara, who asked him if he would join Hinode. But I also heard that behind this arrangement was Hinode’s plan to acquire a site for construction of their new factory near the village where Noguchi was born, and his employment was a ploy to smooth over their relationship with local tenant farmers who would soon lose their farmland. Hinode had also promised that once the factory was completed on the new site they would hire a few men from the same village, and Noguchi and three other men were sent off to each Hinode factory in advance of this negotiation.
Incidentally, I know that the plan to purchase said site was postponed around 1941, but according to the same self-proclaimed Communist member I mentioned, Hinode withdrew the plan altogether in 1943, and have now already decided on the purchase of a different parcel of land. Moreover, the three men who started working at the company in 1940 with Noguchi were the same three men who were fired from the Kyoto factory for instigating a conflict.
Then, in the spring of 1942, the former factory manager Sasahara suddenly left the factory for personal reasons, but in the afternoon of the day his departure was announced, the usually reticent Noguchi had a word or two to say about it. “My employment has become a problem for the company,” he implied. Five days later, he wandered into my laboratory building and told me that he had submitted a letter of resignation because he was returning home, and that he had already sent his belongings by train. His expression was as obstinate as ever, but just when I thought I saw a hint of torment in his eyes, he said, “What I wouldn’t give for a glass of Hinode beer. Who knows when I’ll have a chance to drink it again,” and laughed softly again.
I took him to the factory, poured some from the storage tank and gave it to him. He drank it down happily and thanked me, and then he left. It was quite a few days later that I learned that he had received his draft papers the day before.
Why did Noguchi submit his resignation before going off to war? I’m sure there are circumstances that I don’t know about, but I can only imagine Noguchi had reached the decision for his own reasons and after much agonizing, and that despite everything, his strong attachment to Hinode made him crave one last glass of Hinode beer. For the briefest of moments, Noguchi—like me and many others—had dreamt of prosperity in a company called Hinode. Ah, the taste of Hinode beer that we were treated to at our farewell party is coming back to me now.
Now, let me address the issue of “last December 15th.” That day, I was visiting a hospital in Tokyo. When I got off the train at Hamamatsucho Station, I had just thought to myself, I’ve seen that man’s face somewhere before, and the man called out my name. It was Katsuichi Noguchi. I asked him what he was doing here, and he responded that he had hurried to Tokyo because there were important meetings taking place in the city, starting that day.
It had been four and a half years since I had last seen Noguchi, and though he was in perfectly good health, he looked quite pale. When the times change as drastically as they have, even the demeanor and expression of the people also change, and it seems as if our voice as the Japanese people has grown louder, but Noguchi was much the same as before. He sat on the bench, quiet and still like a rock. No, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he appeared a little lost or behind the times—like a soldier who had just returned from war—with his cheeks faintly flushed, he was half excited and half stunned.
He told me he had indeed returned to Japan in February and was now working in the mining industry in Hokkaido for Mitsubishi Bibai after answering a call for workers in his prefecture.
“Tokyo’s pretty cold too, isn’t it? These days in the coal mines they give you plenty to eat, if nothing else, so I ought to have energy, but I’m afraid my mind’s
