"As Ojii-san continued to talk, I wondered if Ojii-san's children even knew much of the information he was now sharing with me about China and about kendo training in WWII in Itoigawa. Or, at least, Ojii-san was trying to share with me these stories on this day during our afternoon tea. I also wondered if his children and grand children even knew any details--at all --about what Ojii-san had thought, felt, and experienced during the last war Japan was involved in, i.e. a half century earlier? In other words, did they know what it was like for him to grow up in 1930s Itoigawa village, i.e. during the militarization of Japan in that decade. Let alone, what could they know of their Ojii-san had done in China during that war?" such questions Kansas asked himself.
"Wakarimashitaka?"
Kendo and all martial arts were banned by the American Occupiers from 1945 to 1947. The U.S. military claimed that they promoted the brand of Japanese militarism that led to WWI.
Ojii-san continued talking as Kansas poured some more tea for themselves. The elder man said something like the following, "I later ... taught kendo up in Shibata City in the northern part of the prefecture before ... before ... returning ... to Itoigawa Town and ... opening up my ... shop ... right downtown.... By that time ... the ... war ... was ... over."
Next, Kansas' thoughts or recollections turned to another different time and places, specifically a different continent, "I recalled that just after the Gulf War in 1991, I was teaching in the small city of Great Bend, Kansas. There I had received a small teaching and research grant to put together an educational slide-program, which included conducting oral interviews with German speaking residents in the Barton County area, where Great Bend City was the county seat. The theme of the slide show and research was about the 'German Speaking Settlers of Barton County'."
"I had chosen this topic because I had already developed a related teaching curriculum for a course I had taken on Kansas History, so I saw the slide program as a way to promote foreign language students' awareness of cultural links to the target language-in this case, the German language. I had discovered doing my research on this curricula that different German groups from all over the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Prussian German Empire had been recruited by railroad lines and land recruiters to settle what became Barton County, Kansas. As a matter of fact, the county had actually had two German language newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s. In conducting subsequent research as part of the teaching mini-grant project, I was eventually able to interview several elderly residents of the county, each who could recall in enormous detail events which had taken place in their lives decades before, i.e. when they had grown up in German speaking communities prior to WWII."
Wishing to point out an important caveat on the topic of conducting oral interviews, Kansas added, "I acknowledge that oral interviewing and drawing out memories of events deep in the past certainly have their limitations. For example, memories change with interpretations based on one's evolving world view, one's age, one's individual and communal experiences, and through adaptations in official narrations in society developed in each era. Moreover, some individuals look at the past with rose-colored glasses while others don't really want to talk about things in the past for either very personal reasons or even due to familial shame. Nonetheless, if one can find corroborating material for what is being shared, oral histories can be extremely useful to researchers who are trying to get beyond the facts and statistics, in order to put flesh-and-bone on the past and how it affects our present."
Kansas continued, "One woman I interviewed in a retirement center in Barton County was 99-years old. She had been born in an Austrian-settled township in the northern part of Barton County and could still speak formal German quite well. One anecdote that has stuck with me was her tragic tale of the first automobile to arrive onto the roads of rural Barton County in around 1901. This elderly life-long county resident explained that a rural doctor further north of her village on the county line had bought a motorized vehicle to make his rounds in the bi-county area at the turn of the century. Upon receiving the new vehicle, that particular rural doctor chose to take it out for a practice spin."
The 99-year old German speaking woman continued, "That day my father happened to be driving a horse-and-buggy on the same road that the rural doctor was driving south on. Sadly, the horses on her father's wagon went into hysteria and started bucking at the sight of a horseless carriage. So, they bolted upon seeing the strange new vehicle. My father was thrown to the ground. He suffered a terrible head wound and passed away a few months later."
Kansas, pondering the importance of memory, added, "I am certain that such tragic events are almost photographic in character. The women had shared the story in English first and had retold it some time later in German. It was essentially the same memorable event regardless of language. Many other memories of this ancient native bilingual speaker of German and English seemed as crystal clear as when they had originally been experienced by her. This is why I am enthralled when people share such memories."
"Wakarimashita?"
As Kansas sat listening to Ojii-san talking away, he mulled over some other earlier-recorded Barton County (narrations or) interviews he had undertaken four years before, i.e. when he had been teaching German language to American high school kids.
Kansas, who was now teaching in a rural-region a continent and many-cultures-away, added, "Another semi-retired resident of Barton County was named Hubert Oches. Hubert described to me not only what his farm and school life had been like for him in a German-speaking immigrant family in rural Kansas during the Depression years of his childhoo, but Hubert , also, gave a fairly good and truthful description in German about what some of his other activities were with the OSS, the forerunner of the current CIA, both at the end of WWII in Germany--and during the Occupation over the subsequent 4 years.
Kansas noted, "Until the occupation began with the invasion of Germany in 1945, Mr. Oches had been the navigator on an air force bomber over Nazi-occupied Europe. However, due to his facility in speaking German so well, Mr. Oches was later assigned in occupied Germany to carrying out many special translation duties, i.e. related to prosecuting war criminals and running the occupation of, in, and around Munich, Bavaria through 1948. In addition, under the auspices of the OSS, Hubert Oches helped contribute to the setting-up of the new international airlines system of modern Europe."
"One of Mr. Oches more troubling duties was when he had to oversee his commanders decision to displace thousand of Germans from their own homes in Munich. This was done in 1945 in order that U.S. officers and other occupying troops and staff could live in them throughout the period of occupation and until appropriate base housing could be constructed. In this way, Oches came to oversee the displacement of a one entire surviving neighborhood of Munich, where several blocks of houses had surprisingly managed to withstand the tremendous Allied bombing of that city."
"Oches was ordered to go into that surviving neighborhood and inform the residents that their homes were being requisitioned for an unknown duration. Next, Officer Oches had to organize the inventory of all these homes for these residents, in order to make certain that American troops and officers (in their desire for post-war souvenirs to be sent back home) did not loot these properties too severely. While this was an unpleasant task, indeed, Ochse noted, 'Some of the residents who had been moved or kicked-out of their own homes were soon allowed back in to oversee their property. However, they did so as hired maids, butlers, or gardeners for the occupying authorities.'"
