World War II – Hidemi Woods

My great-grandmother was a geisha. She grew up in a remote village surrounded by the mountains and left home for a big city to become a geisha. She had a daughter by a patron and died right after she gave birth. The daughter was my grandmother on my mother’s side. She didn’t remember her mother at all and didn’t know her father, either. No one still knows who her father is, except that he was a rich and powerful name.

　She was taken in and raised by her mother’s parents at their home in the mountains, but for various reasons, she was soon handed over to one relative to another. She lived in countless different homes of her relatives and changed her school for innumerable times in her childhood. At every school she attended, she was the smartest honor student and had never dropped to second.

　One of her relative’s homes where she lived for a while was my grandfather’s. Years after she left, he told his parents that he wanted to marry her. She got married with him at the age of sixteen and moved in his house again as his wife. She settled down and got her family at long last. But only five years later, my grandfather was drafted for World War II and she was left with her two daughters, one of which is my mother, and her in-laws.

　A former prodigy with no home and no parents found herself working hard as a farmer everyday in the fields with her in-laws…

Episode From An Old Tree in Kyoto /Hodemi Woods

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks, 43 available distributors in total

I watched the movie, ‘Flags of Our Fathers’. It reminded me of my late grandfather on my mother’s side. He fought battles in World War II not in Iojima but in China. He was taken to Russia as a POW and was kept captive in the freezing Siberia prisoner’s camp. It was four years after the war when he was released and returned home. He had been away for eight years in total.

　After he came back, he became a locally prominent man, being a mayor and working as a member of a board of education. People looked up to him. I’ve been treated with favor on several occasions as his granddaughter. In his later years though, he suffered from Alzheimer’s and he would shout “There came Russian soldiers!” during the night or even at a restaurant.

　Writing about him recalled a peculiar incident. When I visited his house, I found that he had put up a big picture of the Japanese Emperor in his room. I uttered “You have bad taste!” because I believed in democracy. He replied sadly, “Hidemi, you should not say such a thing.” I’d forgotten the fact that he was one of the war veterans who went to the war for the Emperor. He was always so gentle that he rarely criticized anyone. That was the first and the only time that he reproved me…

Episode From An Old Tree in Kyoto /Hodemi Woods

Audiobook : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks, 43 available distributors in total