Having Fun, wish you were here?
Let's not forget that the Japanese were absolute monsters during WWII. No doubt about it.
Posted on 10/20/2007 12:38:57 PM PDT by BGHater
A postcard that a Japanese soldier mailed from a Southeast Asian battlefront during World War II has reached a recipient in Japan 64 years later, a university whose student helped deliver it said Saturday.
Shizuo Nagano, an 80-year-old retiree in Japan's southwestern state of Kochi, received the card Friday — by way of Nagasaki, Arizona and Hawaii — said a statement from Mukogawa Women's University.
Nagano's former colleague at a retail store, Nobuchika Yamashita mailed the card in 1943 from Burma, now called Myanmar, a year before Yamashita died at war at age 23, the university statement said.
It said the card had initially failed to reach Nagano's address in Nagasaki, and was instead collected there by an American soldier during the U.S. occupation after Japan's 1945 defeat.
The American kept it at his Arizona home until he died 25 years ago and was kept by his son — who moved to the Hawaiian island of Maui and then gave the letter to a Japanese exchange student he met through his wife, who taught her sewing, the statement said.
"I never would have guessed I could see (Yamashita) again this way ... I'm overwhelmed," Nagano said as he was handed the postcard by the student, who spent two years after her return from Maui trying to find Nagano through the government. The student, Yuko Kojima, is now a sophomore at Mukogawa Women's University.
Let's not forget that the Japanese were absolute monsters during WWII. No doubt about it.
Lighten up, Francis. The kid who wrote the postcard has been dead for 63 years.
It said, “Quick! Evacuate Hiroshima!”
Hmmmm. My whole life.
I bet it says “the weather is here, I wish you were nice.”
Sending a memory of a dead soldier to someone who cares is not a bad thing. Nearly 20 years ago my father bought the comtents of a storage unit at an auction. In amongst all the stuff was a scrap book. It was a boys life, from birth on. Baby pictures, school pictures, confirmation, newspaper reports about the JV football game, all the trivia of an ordinary boyhood. I wasn't until you got to the last few pages, and saw the boot camp graduation photo, and post cards from Vietnam (sent, as I had read they were, without postage), that you got idea the guy's whole life, and not just his boyhood, was in the scrap book. It ended with the funeral notice from the local paper.
What to do? That is not the sort of thing you just toss in the trash. This was before the internet, so my father spent several evenings with an atlas, calling information and getting telephone numbers for people with that last name in Oklahoma. He eventually tracked down some family members, and mailed them the scrapbook. If they knew how the scrapbook got into a sotarge unit in South Texas, they never said.
It said the card had initially failed to reach Nagano's address in Nagasaki.
I don't want to sound callous but maybe it wasn't there any more.
Yes - it was the same way stateside at Camp Pendleton; including waiver of any "postage due" fees. You'd just write "free" in the corner where the stamp would have gone.
Guys would regularly receive packages from home with very minimal postage applied, once folks popped wise.
Yes,they were...and the Germans weren't Boy Scouts either.But it must be pointed out that since the end of the war the Japanese have behaved themselves rather admirably which is something that can't be said of the Germans.
I saw part of an interview of an Aussie soldier who was a POW of the Japanese and he said that most of those guarding his group were despicable but there were at least one or two who,at great risk to their own lives,treated the prisoners well and went to great lengths to help them (food,medical care,etc).
I wish your response didn’t make me LOL but, there you are, it did.
Great post. I was just a kid in Mainz Germany some 30 years ago when my Dad was in the 82nd airborne there and upstairs another American kid was my best friend. His mother was German and her father was in the German army in WW2. He wasn’t a nazi, just conscripted in his early 20’s. In 1941 he was taken prisoner by the Russians and relesed in the 50’s. He got to the West through Berlin in the 60’s.
He was a kind and decent man. Even as a teen I could tell this.
I imagine, as Clint Eastwood portrayed in ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’ that there were indeed decent Japs also. :)
Yeah, I know... but I have friends from Nanjing (formerly known as Nanking.)
??? The Germans are the ones who’ve been going around apologizing to the world for 62 years, while the Japanese just looked the other way and busied themselves getting rich.
” The Germans are the ones who’ve been going around apologizing to the world for 62 years, while the Japanese just looked the other way and busied themselves getting rich. “
Maybe the Germans should have spent less time apologizing and more time doing something about the Muslim problem in their country , aand making babies . From Hitler to Muhammad in 62 years . Wow !
Yes, but he also served in Burma. Read up on how they treated POWs there. Read up on how they treated the natives there.
Give the track record of the Japanese army in Burma, I'm willing to presume guilt.
This does not excuse their behavior (the japs), but I read a account years ago by a allied POW who said the Japanese officers and NCO’s were allmost as brutal toward their on men as the POW’s
Talk is cheap.Can you name for me the Japanese equivalent of the Stasi? Can you post photos of Japan's "Berlin Wall"? And can you cite newspaper reports of almost-daily,500,000 strong,demonstrations in major Japanese cities demanding unilateral US disarmament?
Even the Japanese Naval Aviators did not have any respect for the Army due to their “brutish” behavior! That is according to one history book. Interesting!
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