Masaru Nishikura speaks about his experience at a Siberian internment camp, in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, on Oct. 23, 2021 (Mainichi/Ken Aoshima)

       TOKYO -- Ninety-six-year-old Masaru Nishikura became a storyteller about his postwar internment camp experience in Siberia five years ago.

       Nishikura worked as a pension counselor until he was over 90 years old, and when he was thinking of retiring, he visited the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where he was encouraged to tell his story. As he read the materials on display, memories that he had rarely shared even with his family came flooding back.

       In January 1945, at the age of 19, Nishikura was drafted and sent to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, on the border with the former Soviet Union. He was ordered to dig a hole and wait for enemy tanks, but Japan was defeated before the hole was completed.

       Nishikura was taken in a Soviet freight car to the town of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Soviet Far East. It was still early October but children were ice skating on the streets. In the winter, when the temperature dipped to minus 30 degrees Celsius, he was ordered to bury a water pipe in the frozen ground. No matter how many times Nishikura hit the ground with a pickaxe, he could barely scratch the surface. He was so hungry that he had no strength.

       The following summer, Nishikura collapsed with a high fever while weeding and was hospitalized for a month. His fellow workers thought he had died. Nishikura recalled that for three years, he was bound by quotas and "not treated as a human being."

       Over the past five years working as a storyteller, Nishikura has met new people and developed a sense of purpose in life, as well as a sense of mission as a survivor, even though the number of those who experienced internment in Siberia is dwindling.

       "I felt bad that I returned alive (while many others died in Siberia)," the 96-year-old said. Nishikura participated in an event where the names on the list of those who had died in internment were read aloud in turns. He was the oldest person to take part, and he read out the names of each individual on the list as if calling out to them.

       In August this year, he lost his wife, Atsuko, at the age of 92, after her long struggle with illness. He himself battles with chronic nephritis and has to have monthly blood tests. Still, he stands tall and speaks in a loud voice.

       "I have three and a half years left until I turn 100. I want to convey to the younger generation that 'war is not acceptable,' and entrust my thoughts to them," he said.

       (Japanese original by Ken Aoshima, Tokyo City News Department)

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