Akira & Virginia Trip to Japan
In May 1998, Akra and Virgina Furutani of Winnipeg Manitoba went to Japan to find Akira’s family roots. We took it on as an adventure since we had no contact person in Japan and my Japanese was limited but my literacy was non-existent. We only had the map of the island and the 1985 tracing of the “mon” that Shizuko Kawata had made. We had one free day when we were in the city of Hiroshima, which was the closest city to the remote island of Okikamuro where my parents were born. All the people we asked about Okikamuro never heard of the place. No wonder, since the island is only one and half km. long and about half km wide and is just off of another island. Fortunately the travel agent in New York City had mentioned a small rural bus service called “Boucho Bus line”. The concierge at the hotel we were staying at phoned Boucho Bus Lines to help us arrange getting to the island and then returning in the same day. The concierge was on logn distance for about half and hour and finally arranged a return trip a different way from the island. After taking a local train and two different buses we made it to the island.
3 Furutani’s in a row, note “mon” on |
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Our next job was to find the graveyard. I had announced to everyone on the bus (about 15 passengers) that we were looking for the graveyard. And old woman with a walker volunteered to help us as it was on her way home. As we walked along the road with the old woman I was very conscience of that fact that both mon and dad as children had probably waked this same road and saw this sea and these same hills (mountains) a hundred years ago. In fact mother’s family owned one of these mountains at that time. As we approached her home she kept pointing to a nearby hillside. There we saw the graveyard. Once at the gravesite we quickly realized that finding the “mon” on a tombstone would take days, among thousand there. The old woman with the walker had phoned ahead to the Buddhist Temple that we were here to find our ancestral tombstone. An old man in his late sixties or early seventies came up to see us and invited me to his office. There in the office I met Buddhist Bishop and his wife both in their forties. Their English vocabulary was about one or two hundred words. After about two hours we found the old document with all the information we wanted. On the next page is a photocopy of the document. Then we walked directly to the tombstones where there in a row Furutanis tombstones were. The Bishop had changed into his ceremonial robe and performed a prayer and chant (complete with incense burning, tinkling of the bells and water pouring over the tombstone) for our forefathers. I gave a generous donation feeling very happy and successful.
Error in the above photograph it should state “The record is read right to left.”
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