Old man

This morning I decided to leave early and spend some time at the little park near work. I haven't quite recovered from this cold, and I thought some fresh air and sunshine might be just the thing. I took some bread, to feed the pigeons, and on the way bought a bottle of Oolong tea from a vending machine, for me.

The pigeons were quickly won over, but I didn't get a chance to take any photos. While I was holding a piece of bread out in front of me and several pigeons were greedily tearing at it, a very old man, who had been sitting at the next bench, got up and moved onto the other end of my bench. He watched the birds very seriously, and after a while I gave him a piece of bread as well. He held it out, and the birds eyed him warily. After a few moments the first brave bird pecked at his bread, and before long he had his own little crowd of fans. His face wrinkled up into a smile as the birds pecked at the bread.

"It feels funny," he said, and I agreed. We grinned at each other.

He asked me where I was from. I told him I was from New Zealand, and he wanted to know where that was. He'd never heard of it.

"I've lived around here all my life," he told me. "I've never been anywhere else. Amagasaki is my home."

"It must have changed a lot over the years," I said.

"Oh yes," he replied, and went on to tell me how it was in the war years. He told me things I'd never associated with Amagasaki before, although I should have, if I'd thought about it. Amagasaki is an industrial city, so it was the target of heavy bombing. The old man told me that he used to see the American planes coming over, and sometimes the Japanese planes went up and fought them in the air, and he could see them chasing each other and turning in the air.

"I remember one time there was just one American plane," he said, "So six Japanese planes went up after it, and then suddenly lots and lots more American planes appeared. The sky was full of planes. It was terrible! And then the bombs... everything was destroyed. The shouidan!" he said, and paused. "Do you know shouidan, I wonder... people don't know this word these days..."

"No, I don't know what that means," I said.

"It's a kind of bomb," he said, "With something like oil, that burned..."

I pulled out my little electronic dictionary and looked it up.

"Incendiary bombs," I told him, "Napalm...?" I showed him the entry in the dictionary.

"That's it," he said. "When the shouidan fell on their noses the oil came out the other end and went a long way, and burned everything around. Terrible, terrible... But when they fell sideways sometimes they didn't explode, and then they were very dangerous, because they might explode later, if you touched them..."

"That must have been very dangerous for children," I said.

"Yes, it was," he said, "But the children were mostly sent away to the country. This school," he waved his hand to the elementary school behind the park, "This was my school. It closed, because there weren't enough children. But I stayed. I had to work. Oh, it was so dangerous. And we didn't know where our next meal was coming from. We were always hungry..."

He sighed.

I wished my Japanese was better. I was understanding about sixty percent of what he was saying, and I missed something around there because suddenly he was talking about the end of the war, and the time after that. He also said something about Japan's ambition to colonise Asia, and while I don't think he was saying it was a good thing, he said he couldn't understand why it made the western countries so angry.

"That's what America and England and other countries did," he said. "Of course we wanted to do it, too. We thought that's how you become rich and powerful. We wanted to be like the great western countries. They didn't stay in their own lands. They had power everywhere."

But he didn't seem bitter. He started talking about the American army bases, and the soldiers everywhere. "They came from America and Hawaii and Alaska," he told me, and I wondered if he thought these were three different countries. "They looked so smart and well-fed, and we were so poor. Even the roads were destroyed. Great big holes all over the place, and everything burned to the ground..."

Then he laughed. "But you know, after the war Japanese men were very happy, because there were fifty women for every man! It's different these days. Now there are forty-nine women for every fifty men. I read it in the newspaper. And half the women don't want to get married anyway. Fifty women for every man! Can you imagine?"

He chuckled long and loud at that one, and then became serious. "But that was because all the young men were dead," he added.

We sat in silence for a while longer. All the bread was gone, and the pigeons were now bathing in the little artificial stream. Leaves rustled in the trees overhead, the sun was shining, and we could hear children playing in the school grounds behind the park. War and bombs, fire and destruction - it all seemed far, far away, in another lifetime, another country. It couldn't happen here, I thought. But it did.

After a while I told the old man I had to go to work.

"Thank you for talking to me," I said. "I enjoyed it very much. Maybe we'll meet here again."

He waved as I cycled off.

In class I asked my students if they knew that incendiary bombs had been dropped on Amagasaki during the war. But even when I used the Japanese word, none of them knew what an incendiary bomb was. And the only hunger they know is the hunger of dieting.



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