Thank you for your Okikamuro.com messages. I always enjoy reading essays.
This is my recent event. Few days ago (June 19), I came back to Kamuro and closed my grave site. Rev. Niiyama prayed very carefully to close my gravesite.
It has been 64 years after I left Okikamuro. I had been home village every year before my mother died at 2011. I can’t drive car to visit Okikamuro because my wife worry about my age driving accident. Now, there is no relative in Okikamuro. It’s difficult to visit my family gravesite. There was my house ‘Shimotaya’ in Subana (Susaki). Recent years, many disaster weather attack everywhere in Japan. It will be very trouble for neighbors if my house fall down by hard weather. It’s hard to contact to me without knowing my address. I demolished the house.
Even I lost my house and grave site, I cannot forget Okikamuro. After the war, at the age of poor food supply, our family 5 people returned to Okikamuro from Korea. I could graduate junior high school because of many helps from my parents and many relatives and many people in the village. Because of my father’s job and child education, our family moved to Yanai city. My father returned to Okikamuro after retirement and started good living with people of the village. He enjoyed fishing very much but he was lost in sea accident at Showa 56(1981). People of Okikamuro and neighbor villages searched him intensively but we couldn’t find him. I think it was after about a week searching, ‘I feel very sorry to everyone for searching without doing their job.‘ I asked fisheries union president to stop the searching.
I got job of construction company in Tokyo at Showa 34(1959). I brought one yanagikori trunk and one futon mat bag using JR ticket. There were not so many people to get job in Tokyo. Most people got job at Hiroshima and Osaka. At vacation period like New year and summer bon, I very much wished to get the ticket for the blue train ‘Saikaigo’ which stated evening at Tokyo and arrived early morning at Yanai. But I couldn’t get the ticket. There was no bullet train at that time.
There was no office site change in 42 years after stared working for the construction company in Tokyo, I involved in mainly building constructions in Tokyo while working in Tokyo office. I could contribute to the construction’s busiest age like Tokyo Olympic and Osaka Expo after Kakuei Tanaka’s policy of rebuilding the Japan islands.
‘Tokyo International convention hall’ has been completed at July Heisei 7(1997). Name after completion of the building became ‘Tokyo Big Site’. I have guided Suzuki governor of Tokyo at starting ceremony for pushing switch to lift up whole building up to top. Lift up construction method was new technology and it pushed up whole reversed triangle shape building body by 280 units of 6000 ton oil jack. I believe that that age was the most gorgeous time for construction man.
I’m not sure when Corona virus problem end and when I can travel freely. I like to return to Kamuro when that time come. I appreciate Rev. Niiyama very much for everything.
Yoshimi Furutani
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