Mr. Yonezawa's story

Every city where had been drawm into the vortex of war seems to be same.
Tokyo is no different.
During the period of 1945-1950, the goverments' activitiy was slow to respond to the citizens.
Many kids a little bit older than me lived at stations, tunnels and other areas wherever they could refuge.
They had lost their families.

Mr. Yonezawa was one of them. He was about televe years old when he be an orphan.
He lost his entire family on March 10th during a bombardment at Tokyo.
He was in a contryside temple with most of his classmates when the bombing took place.

After the war, Yonezawa had no place to live and scraped a few yen as a shoeshine boy at Ginza.
I saw many GIs let thoes kids to shine their boots. GIs gave the boys sweets as a tip. The attitude of GIs were favorable to them.

One of Yonezawa's customers was Mr.Yoshida, the president of the agency I worked.
He offered Yonezawa a job as a tea service boy in the office.
Yoshida gave him a set of school uniform and payed him going to the night school. He slept in the office at night for a while.
He was intellligent men enought to do regular jobs later.

When I joined the agency in 1967, he was a grey haired, handsome gentlemen alway smiling with a nice family. He had already completed the night course and graduated some years before
I arrived.
He loved working and golfing and from his outlook, no one could have imagined his sad past.

Yonezawa retired some years ago still loves golfing with his wonderful wife.

see, http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/japaneseweapons
if you are interested in the history of Japanese weapons