In Manchuria (32 page)

“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 across 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.”

Across Manchukuo, the majority of surviving settlers—
61
percent—waited a year in Soviet-run refugee camps (where many were forced to become “comfort women”) and returned to Japan on loaned American ships. The other
39
percent went missing, ended up in Siberia, or waited until
1953
, when China began sending them home—a program that continued until recently. Thirty thousand settlers still remained in China when it normalized diplomatic relations with Japan in
1972
.

An estimated ten thousand Japanese settlers had lived in the area around this cemetery, in a county called Fangzheng,
260
miles northeast of Wasteland. Of the survivors,
2
,
300
women—facing no other choice—married local men, and
1
,
120
children—including those left on the riverbank—were adopted by local families. Their legacy was still seen on the streets of Fangzheng town, where shop signs displayed Chinese and Japanese characters, and there were more Japanese-language tutoring centers than ones teaching English. According to the county government, one-fifth of its
230
,
000
residents had lived or worked in Japan. Descendants of Japanese settlers made annual pilgrimages here each August, during Obon, the grave-sweeping festival.

The cemetery's roots date to
1963
, when a Japanese “remaining wife,” as women who married Chinese men were called, struck bones while plowing a field. An excavation unearthed the remains of an estimated
4
,
500
refugees who had died from suicide or starvation. For three days, on a gasoline-fueled fire, locals cremated their remains. Even though China classified the settlers as “exploitation regiments,” in
1963
a monument sanctioned by Premier Zhou Enlai was erected at the tomb containing their ashes. “The people of Japan and the settlers,” Zhou said, “were also victims of Japanese imperialism.”