(8) Dramatic Changes after Coming Back to Japan

As for me, the first biggest change was a tender atmosphere and gentle wind in October, not the piercing one in Chinnampo. The village was covered with golden air reflected by wide-spread ripen ears of rice under the red sunset. The temperature was plus ten Celsius, not minus 23 as over there, and I felt     I was wrapped with warm coloured air, not cold one.

Even in winter, I saw lots of green grasses and green mountains, not cold white or grey snow as all around  that town.

The language was quite different from what we had been talking till then. I couldn't catch the meaning of my cousins' talking.  I had heard Korean, Russian, Chinese and some Japanese dialects, and had often imitated them   in Chinnampo.  But I was unable to follow as my cousins' words.

'Ahchan' means Brother, 'Koraetenyo' equals I'm sorry', and 'Bokkee, Gyousan, Mongee'  were all the same as 'very much or terribly or extremely'.  All those words my brothers learned from their friends, and were repeating them after coming home. I secretly collected them in my mind, but never uttered a word. The people around us usually added such pieces of words as '--jaken, --ja', at the end of a sentence.

I sometimes wanted to eat kimchi or mentaiko (=salted cod roe spiced with red pepper) which I had eaten almost everyday in Chinnampo. Here we seldom have those food or such smell as garlic as before.

In November, Ryohei began to attend to Kurashiki Industrial High School, and Reiko was placed in a sixth grader, and Hiroshi a fourth grader of Obie Elementary School. I should be in a first grader, but in Chinnampo, all the schools were closed just after the war was over, and I had never started school there.

So my grandfather put me on the back of his bicycle, and took me to the Nursery School next to Obie Elementary School. He was a celebrity in the village as a member of Obie Village Assembly. The director of the kindergarten made bows to him repeatedly.

When she opened the door of the classroom, a crowd of children rushed and gathered around me, I felt horrified and hid behind Grandfather's Inverness coat. I had never played with the same aged children till then.

In the end, I could not enter the kindergarten. However hard Grandfather tried to route me to enter it, I had nothing with me then such things as clothes for the winter, shoes, a bag and Japanese socks (=tabi).

I wonder how my sister and brothers attended schools without those things like me. Or my parents might have tried very hard to prepare things for them.

That was why I had to be at home until the end of March. Meanwhile I was learning letters, 'hiragana' and 'katakana'.  My sister Reiko made a model handwriting of Japanese letters 'aiueo.'  She was very good at writing letters beautifully, and I copied the examples every day. Before I became a first-grader of Obie Elementary school,  I was able to read picture books of neighbours.