Okinawa

This cold/flu has laid me low and I have been missing posts like a crew of landsmen miss stays.
Wednesday I was teaching at Shin-Ikuno, the school that is largely Zainichi Korean. The second years are taking their school trip to Okinawa this year. Before they go on their trip they had a man come in to speak to them about Okinawa. One of the office ladies gave me a newspaper article on him and asked me to come. I was happy to be included, I was also happy that she assumed I could read the newspaper article. I could, for the most part. Apparently Mr. Oshiro was an elementary school student during the American invasion of Okinawa. He was injured in the fighting and a famous photograph was taken of him looking hopeless and covered in blood.

I snuck in late to the speech. Oshiro-san speaks through one of those electronic voice-boxes that replace your vocal chords. There has to be a technical name for those. He was very hard to understand as everything was a monotone. I think that has parents and many of his friends were killed in the battle. I am not sure but it seemed that he was saying that he was hiding with his friends because the Japanese soldiers were telling them to attack the Americans with bamboo poles and they didn't want to. I believe his friend died in this process but I am not sure how. He told the kids that they were lucky today and that they should be happy to have parents and brothers and sisters. The kids took it like teenagers. One row of boys were tearing up pieces of paper and putting them in each other's hair. Or turning around and staring at me. I haven't been at that school long enough to do anything. If it was Mikuni I would have dragged them outside already.

One of the amazing things about living in Japan is you get to hear the people who are still alive form that era tell their stories. In America we get that to some extent, but I don't think we realize how devastating the war was here. Like the one student I had who told me, laughing, that they would try and get fish to eat but the Americans would shoot anybody they saw at the river. And my other student who told me that the first dead bodies he saw were his classmates when the Americans bombed his elementary school. Fuzoku-sho in Miyazaki, if you were wondering.

As I was walking back to the office I ran into Oshiro-san. I was hoping to sneak by, but he shook my hand and said in English, "Thank you. Thank you. Okinawa. America. We're friends. Do you understand." I said to him in Japanese, "Thank you for your speech." And he said, "Thank you for listening." That is all pretty simple and generic but I feel pretty good about my job when I get to do stuff like that as a normal part of my day.