Day 5 of 30-Day Writing Challenge
Photo Credit: U.S. Army
My father was 7 years old when World War II ended.
His parents were farmers living in a village just outskirts of Tokushima City in Shikoku Island, Japan. Unlike some hundreds of thousands of Japanese homes in 66 cities bombed by allies, their family home on the farmland was not burned down.
My father was the fourth oldest of the eight children in the family. The eldest brother was five years older than him, the youngest was soon to be born. His father was not drafted. I don’t know the statistics, but his family might have been one of the lucky minorities back then.
My father told me the following story only once.
“Soon after the war was over, a group of American soldiers came stationed in our village. It became my chore to visit their camp once in a while.
My chore was to get their human waste from their outhouse. We would later use it as fertilizer in our farm.
Their waste was so fertile that I used to wonder what they were eating.”
One of the overly used video footages on TV in Japan depicting right after the war, was a scene of bunch of Japanese children running after the GI’s Geep, shouting “give me chocolates.” The GIs on the Geep would throw out candies, and the children would frantically chase the small packages and pick them up fallen on the street.
I never asked my father if he ever chased GIs for chocolates like that video footage.
Somehow I want to believe that his pride would never have allowed him to put that chocolate in his mouth.