Surrendering Ojuzo Beads

A Guest Post by Honua -
Sitting under the large maple tree, Takahashi looked down at the Ojuzo beads in his left hand and sighed. In his right hand, written in blood red ink, was the official government notice of his conscription into the Japanese Army. He glanced over at the temple where he had been studying for the last year. He knew that he would not become the Buddhist monk that he had set out to be. Instead, because he turned nineteen the day before, he would become a soldier in the infantry. He had no doubt that within a few months, he would be in China fighting beside his countrymen in this increasingly terrible war. He shook his head and stood, brushing some maple leaves from his black robe. It was time to go home and bid goodbye to his family. Three years later, Takahashi sat in a Siberian POW camp.

He was one of over 600 thousand Japanese soldiers who were captured in Manchuria at the end of WWII and transported to prisons throughout the Soviet Union. Life in the camps was brutal and the winters harsh. More than half of all Japanese POWs died or disappeared. Some were held captive well into the 1950s before being released over ten years after the war ended. Takahashi was more fortunate. He was held in the Siberian POW camp for five years before finally returning to his life and home in Kanagawa, Japan. Nearly fifty years later, Takahashi related his amazing past to me as I dined with him and his wife in Machida, not far from the Kanagawa house that I rented from them. Thinking to myself that any person who went through such a horrific experience must harbor deep animosity towards his captors. “Takahashi-san, what a terrible thing! How did you handle it? what did you do?” This gentle soul of a man looked at me with a quiet smile and said, “I learned Russian.”

Tagged as: japanese pow, WWII