NikkeiWest--Northern California Japanese American Newspaper

By John Sammon--WATSONVILLE—It’s hard to decide what is more remarkable about Akira Nagamine, the persistent tenacity in life that allowed him to endure the kind of hardships most of us could never imagine, or his repeated hair-breath escapes as a survivalist evading Russian soldiers in Manchuria.

Asked how he managed it all, Nagamine, 85, a retired nurseryman, simply shrugs and says, “I was lucky.”

This is also a story of a World War II theater most Americans have never heard of.

Nagamine was born in the rural farming community of Ibusuki in the Kagoshima Prefecture, a prefecture being the equivalent of a state, on Kyushu Island, the southernmost of the principal Japanese chain. His life could be considered normal until his graduation from high school and the advent of World War II. At the age of 20, he was drafted into the army in February of 1945.

“Before that I had been working as a substitute teacher,” Nagamine recalled. “So many male teachers had been drafted and were already fighting the war, there were none left to teach. There were not enough people.”

Japan at this point was losing the war, and with the Battle of Iwo Jima raging, Nagamine received little military training. Joining the 1.2 million-man “Kwantung Army,” he was hurriedly shunted through Korea northward into Manchuria, a vast, sparsely populated region of windswept plains and timbered mountains roughly the size of Spain and France combined, positioned at the northeast corner of China where it meets the Russian border.

Because of its strategic location and because of its timber resources, rich soil for grain production, coal deposits and mineral wealth, Manchuria had been a sought-after prize. In the 1850s, a weakened Chinese Manchu government was forced to give up parts of the area to Russia, then later to a rapidly modernizing Japan. In the Russo Japanese War of 1905 and afterward, Russia and Japan continually struggled over the area, vying for exploitation rights and a railway leading to the trade center of Harbin and the port of Vladivostok.

The Japanese deposed a ruling warlord and set up a puppet state in 1931. The Russians, now under the communism of Stalin and facing the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany, concluded a nonaggression pact with Japan in 1941 that allowed them to strip their eastern defenses and transfer troops west. However, by 1945, the war in Europe had been won, and Stalin agreed at a conference in Yalta to enter the Pacific War on the side of the United States and England by attacking the Japanese in Manchuria.

Though it was set to expire in 1946, the Russians thus violated the nonaggression pact they had signed.

Nagamine arrived at the village of Pinyang just 15 miles from the Russian border. His unit was unaware that on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, then another on Nagasaki on August 9.

On August 8, the Russians invaded.

“It was quiet when I first arrived,” Nagamine said. “This was an area where the Kwantung Army had some warehouses and I was trained to carry an explosive satchel to blow up tanks, and to operate a light machine gun. We knew the Russians were coming, and locals were told that if they had to, to use kitchen knives to fight them.”

Nagamine and a small force of perhaps 90 men took up positions in the mountains and began sniping at Russian invaders marching through. There was no food.

“We had no radio, no communication,” he said. “I broke my ankle jumping down a hill. We went to a village inhabited by Koreans and were told the war was over.”

An officer in command of the group refused to believe and told the Koreans it was impossible that the war was over. They left the village and while washing up near a cornfield, were surrounded by Russian troops. After a four-hour battle, they made their escape wading through a wetland slough.

His importance as a machine gunner saved Nagamine’s life.

“A patrol with five men was sent out and they said I should stay behind. ‘He’s our gunner’ they said. Later, we found the patrol dead. They had their throats stabbed. The Russian army manual had warned them that Japanese who appeared dead might not be, and might jump up. The men in the patrol had been shot, but then stabbed in the neck to make sure they were dead.”

During a subsequent firefight, as Nagamine was yelling for more shells, a comrade tossed them past him out of reach. He grabbed for them. As he was placing a cartridge clip in the machine gun, he felt a bullet slam into his hand.

“The shell hit the iron clip and splintered,” he said. “I still have the fragment in my body today.”

Nagamine joined a group of five survivors after the battle and took a small rowboat, crossing the Mudanjiang River, today the site of a state park. A comrade who had been shot on the way killed himself. Most of those who weren’t killed were later captured by the Russians and sent to prisons in Siberia.

With his broken ankle and shot hand infected with maggots, Nagamine spent six weeks hiking with another man approximately 300 miles, taking food where they could, staying off roads and walking only at night. They reached a house where two old Chinese men, one whose name was Mister Sun, convinced them the war was over.

“The old Chinese men who were friendly took my uniform and gave me Chinese clothes,” Nagamine said. “A mob of villagers nearby wanted to kill me, but Mister Sun befriended me. He prevented it.”

He was brought to a town called Erdaohezi where he was given a job washing dishes for a mess hall that catered to locals and security personnel. The population was an odd mix of one-third Koreans, one-third Russians and a third Chinese. At that point the area was in flux, with little centralized control. In response to the chaos, locals had organized their own defense units to protect themselves from outsiders.

Nagamine had the good fortune to meet a Mister Harada. Harada was a Japanese secret agent working for the government of Manchuria, and had been given the task of infiltrating leftist and resistance groups. He was also a master of disguise.

Chuckling, Nagamine recounted, “When I saw him, he was disguised as an old man. He walked with a slow, faltering gait. He befriended me and taught me all the tricks, how to pass myself off as someone else, for example, how to wash my face to look like I’m Chinese. They wash their face a certain way, and Koreans do it differently.”

This knowledge came in handy. When the Communist 8th Route Army marched into town, the townspeople including Nagamine and Harada fled. Eventually they returned but were asked by the Russians who they were.

“We said we ran away because we thought they were bandits,” Nagamine said. “There were lots of bandits in the countryside then. We looked to them like settlers, not Japanese army. We told them if we’d known they were Russians, we would have stayed. They believed us and gave us potatoes.”

This was the successful outcome of Harada’s earlier coaching, to appear to the Russians to be as “red (communist) as a radish on the outside, but white (noncommunist) underneath.”

Nagamine was sent to work in a lumber mill. He took up farming with Harada and borrowed rice seed from Koreans, growing the crop and paying the Koreans back with rice and also the local Chinese who had loaned them food. It was strictly a barter system. Money was nonexistent.

“I also worked for the Russians milking their cows and moving their hay,” Nagamine said.

Russian communists were stripping everything of value such as train rails and shipping them back to Russia. A group of anti-communist White Russians proposed leaving and setting up their own village. Nagamine and Harada joined them.

“There were 20 Russian families with sheep and horses,” Nagamine said. “They were going to get on a train and head north and find a new place to live. We had no idea where we were going.”

The site chosen for the village was in an area called Kumaton near a village known as Nenjiang. The would-be settlers began construction of log houses and plowing fields. However, a Chinese policeman from Nenjiang who recognized his true nationality told Nagamine that he was in danger and should come back with him. The policeman too thought they were just settlers.

“By this time it was 1948,” Nagamine said, “The policeman said because I was Japanese I shouldn’t be here. It was dangerous. There were Japanese soldiers hiding in the hills after the war. He said he wanted me to help renovate an inn in town where farmers who were bringing produce stayed. We went with the policeman to Nenjiang.”

Nagamine and Harada took the policeman’s advise and for over a year took whatever odd jobs were offered at the inn, including shooing horses away from eating farming produce, and keeping drinking water from freezing up in winter. Then, in a freak accident, Harada, the man who had taught Nagamine how to survive in Manchuria, was killed.

“We were riding separate wagons pulled by two horses each taking hay to the village when the horses pulling Harada’s wagon bolted and he fell off the wagon and it rolled over his middle,” Nagamine said. “He was 44 years old.”

On an island in a river Nagamine made a pyre of logs and burned the body of his benefactor. He retrieved the ashes and put them in a box.

Nagamine had taken to wearing clothing made from animal skins like fox and wolf, as did other locals, protection against snow and winter winds that could reach temperatures of 50 degrees below zero. He continued doing whatever work he could find.

“I made charcoal that was used to run the few cars in the area, and for heating,” he noted. “I was a porter. I sold pig heads for food. I had learned the Chinese language and went partners with some Chinese men. We started lumbering.”

A Japanese veterinarian in town loaned Nagamine some money to buy food, a cow, a saw, and an axe so he could support himself as a lumberjack.

“I went north to the woods to cut pine trees,” he said. “These woods looked like the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The weather was freezing.”

The Chinese taught him how to lash 90 pine logs together using vines in the Chinese style, by boring a hole through a log and threading the vine through it, lashing the logs together to control them. Sometimes he’d lose his footing riding the log raft and tumble into the river, and have to swim to regain his perch.

“In the spring I would float the logs down to a lumber mill,” Nagamine said. “I did this for two years. This was 1950 through 1952.”

The Chinese Communists were now in firm control of China. Nagamine had no way of communicating with the outside world. However, one day in 1953, he heard that the government was setting up a repatriation program. Former Japanese soldiers stranded by the war could go home.

“I was given a train ticket and headed south,” Nagamine said. “I stayed in transient camps. I wrote a letter home. This was the first time my family heard I was alive. I also brought the box with Harada’s ashes with me.”

Eight years after the end of World War II, Nagamine set foot on Japanese soil at a repatriation center in the port city of Maizuru.

“It was kind of like Ellis Island for immigrants in New York,” he said. “There were desks set up to process people to different prefectures. I took the box with Harada’s ashes and placed it on the desk of his home, Hiroshima Prefecture. Then I went to my own processing desk.”

Nagamine said his father had believed he would return some day, but his mother had given him up for dead. His two brothers journeyed to Maizuru, climbed the second story of the repatriation building and came face to face with him.

“There were no words spoken,” Nagamine recalled. “Just silent tears.”

For three years he did odd jobs around his home, then saw an advertisement in a local newspaper for a farm labor job in Watsonville. This was part of a limited program allowing issuance of 1,000 visas in a relaxing of formerly restrictive legislation that had bared Japanese from immigrating to California in the 1920s and 30s. Laborers were needed for the state’s burgeoning produce empire.

“The ad was from a strawberry grower in Watsonville named Mister Shikuma,” Nagamine said. “I had been earning 360 yen per day, that’s about one dollar. The ad said I could make a dollar an hour in Watsonville.”

But before he could gain a visa, Nagamine had to convince American officials he was loyal.

“They wanted to make sure I was not a red (communist) spy,” he said. “After all, I had lived in Manchuria. I had to write an essay proving I was okay, and I had to be tested for tuberculosis. I also had to show that I was under economic distress. I had no property. I got the visa.”

Nagamine met the woman he would marry, Hideko Fukutome, born in Colorado, but who had returned to Japan as a young girl in 1930. Like her husband-to-be, she applied to return to the U.S. Ironically, while in Japan, Nagamine had done odd jobs around her house, though the two had never seen each other until they arrived in California.

“If you had a sponsor in the country, you could return to the United States,” Hideko Nagamine said. “Akira’s schoolmate was my bother Harry. Our parents in Japan had arranged our marriage, so I knew I was supposed to marry him. We finally met at the San Francisco Airport after I made a 28-hour flight.”

Nagamine said his arrival in the U.S. was like a dream coming true.

“From the time I was in fifth grade, I wanted to come here,” he said. “I used to dream of moving to Hawaii. I couldn’t believe it. The roads were so big and there were so many cars. In Japan there was maybe one car in town, driven by the town’s doctor.”

The couple did farm work in Mountain View, then later acquired property in Watsonville and opened a nursery growing carnations. They had two girls and two boys. Nagamine has since retired and his second son now runs A. Nagamime Nursery Inc. growing organic vegetables and produce.

Nagamine returned to the former Manchuria, now part of China, 11 years ago and again in June and July of 2010 on a more extensive trip. He visited the places where he had fought and suffered.

“The land was the same looking, but the towns have grown,” he said. “They filled in with buildings and people.”

In recalling his adaptability, his wife smiles at him.

“The city boys couldn’t take the kind of hardships they had to face, but Akira could because he was from the country,” she said.

Nagamine downplays his obvious resiliency.

“I’ve really lived a charmed life,” he said. “I’m lucky to be alive. The way I see it, if I die tomorrow, every day I’ve lived has been a gift.”

A website, book and documentary film on Nagamine’s experiences are being planned.