ShareThisBy ALI SEITZ
Toledo Blade
Friday, July 06, 2007
As Dr. Yasuhiko Kaji shuffled through the boxes of flags, senninbari, diaries, and pictures that he has collected over the past 30 years, he came across a lushly illustrated Japanese flag.
The Buddhist goddess Kannon sat midway up the right side, her features inked into the fabric with the strong black strokes of a sophisticated artist. Daruma rolled across the bottom and up the left side of the flag. Daruma was a sage, explained Dr. Kaji, who meditated for seven years (or nine, according to some) while his legs atrophied, withered, and fell off. His rolling image means that a person can roll seven times, but will get up on the eighth.
Kaji, a retired physician who moved to Toledo as an obstetrics and gynecology intern in 1968, has sent this flag's photograph twice to the government of Japan.
The government still has a department for war victims, but it has yet to find the soldier who owned this flag -- or his family.
. Kaji, 73, amassed his entire collection of Japanese artifacts from World War II in the hopes of returning the long-lost relics to the original owners or their families.
He began his slow endeavor when a friend of his wife wanted to return a worn, stained Japanese album from World War II to the family of the soldier to whom it belonged.
Without any experience in the art of object return, Kaji sent the album directly to his hometown newspaper in Nagoya, Japan. After a bit of work and luck, the newspaper found the family of the soldier. After returning the album, he found a Japanese military sword at an estate sale and bought it immediately, hoping to return it as well. He also discovered a senninbari, a wide piece of cloth worn around the waist by a Japanese soldier. Senninbari means "thousand-person-stitches;" the 1,000 stitches are each placed by a different person.
Kaji, a native of Japan who grew up there during War War II, remembers his grandmother going from house to house, asking people to stitch.
"When they go to war, they have it so that they feel protected," he said.
Although a senninbari is an extremely personal gift from a soldier's family, they are unsigned. It is impossible to identify the soldier who carried one. Most of the artifacts that Kaji has managed to return have been flags. Called "nisshoki," or, more colloquially, "hata," the flags are usually signed by family members and friends with messages like "Long live," or "Please take care of yourself. Come back alive." Most soldiers would carry a signed flag in a pocket, close to their bodies.
Even when the flag has a name, it can be difficult to trace because 5 million to 7 million Japanese soldiers were drafted and the ministry will sometimes find six or seven soldiers with the same name. Sometimes Kaji can give the ministry information about where the flag was obtained, but most of the time he does not know.
The soldiers themselves are not usually alive to accept the flags.
"These days, if someone knows, it is inherited," he said.
Although the ministry does the best it can with the photographs that Kaji sends, he recently began to use the Internet as a second avenue, along with help from a high school classmate, Kiyoshi Nishiha. Visitors to the Web site can send Nishiha a photograph and a description of a World War II item that they would like to return to the soldier or his family.
Because the Web site requires the chance convergence of the party with the artifact and the party who wants the artifact back, it is an uncertain means. The Web site's flags, helmets, swords, notebooks, and photographs read like a catalog chronicling only tiny snippets of the anonymous soldiers' lives, but those snippets can become invaluable to families who manage to reclaim them.
Barbara Dresslar, of Sonora, Calif., had planned to write a family history with her father, Frank Dresslar, when she visited him at his home in Mexico, but she ended up writing his war memoirs instead. Sifting through boxes of his old belongings from his time flying C-47 and C-46 transports for the U.S. during World War II, she came across an old, signed Japanese flag.
She lived in Japan briefly, so she realized the flag probably had some personal significance.
After searching for information online, she located Kaji and became the first person to reach him directly about a flag to return.
Kaji sent a photograph of the flag to the ministry. After 30 years of receiving his mail, the staff at the ministry knows his name and pays close attention to his photographs.
A year passed before Kaji was able to tell Dresslar the ministry had just located the family of Yoshio Tokumoto, a soldier who died in the Philippines.
His only son, Kenji Tokumoto, had been raised believing his grandfather was his real father. So when the Dresslars returned the flag, they were told that it became the only tangible link he had to his real father.
Through a translator, Yoshio Tokumoto's sister, Machiko Ohkawa, sent her thanks to Dresslar.
"The time of 62 years has past since our family had got nothing which could be called as his relic or proof of Yoshio's death. Kenji could also have such wonderful an opportunity this time to know about his own father and to feel his warmth," she wrote.
Now, Dresslar has almost weekly contact with Yoshio Tokumoto's family. "I think there is still a lot of healing to be done between the two countries," she said.
On the Web:
www.rose.sannet.ne.jp/nishiha/iryuhin/english.htm
