Well, another New Year's has come and almost gone. It's kind of sad to note that New Year's in Japan is different from before. It is not as special as before, like maybe 20 or 30 years ago.

Here are my then-and-now comparisons:

- New Year's was the Japan's biggest holiday and national observance. Most shops and businesses closed for almost a week during the year end and New Year's. We had to stock up on food before the holiday started or face holiday  starvation. Now, most stores are open throughout the New Year's holidays, not to mention the ubiquitous 365/24/7 convenience stores.

-  Nengajo or New Year's postcards was once all handwritten before the advent of inkjet printers. People practiced their finest calligraphy with sumi ink and a brush when writing the addressee's name and address. Today, few people use a brush to write nengajo. And many use inkjet printers.

- The news has reported that fewer nengajo are being sent. Many are sending New Year's greetings electronically via email (including cell phone text messages). Many people also think of writing and sending nengajo a big chore.

- Much fewer people wear kimono when going to pray at shrines during New Year's (hatsumode). It's quite rare to find kimono-clad women even on New Year's Day at Tokyo's Meiji Shrine.

 - NHK TV's Kohaku Utagassen Red and White Song Contest aired on New Year's Eve continues to draw fewer viewers. It is no longer a "must-watch" program (for those of us in Japan anyway).

These trends make New Year's feel less special, and it's sad to see another special thing gradually becoming just ordinary.

One of the most iconic images of the Nagasaki atom bomb was of a young mother breastfeeding her dying child as they wait for emergency treatment on the day after the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1941.

The photo was taken by Imperial Army photographer Yamahata Yosuke who was ordered to visit and photograph Nagasaki the day after the bomb dropped.

The woman in the photo was Tanaka Kio (田中キヲ) who has died of pneumonia on Dec. 9, 2006. She was 91. The child in the photo was her 4-month-old second son who died 11 days later. She also lost her eldest son. She and her two sons were in the rice paddy about 2 km from the epicenter.

She led a low-key life, working as a vegetable grower and seller in Nagasaki. She was a sweet and gentle woman. Her passing has been widely reported on national news in Japan.

We offer our deepest condolences to her family.

More photos here:
http://peace-museum.org/galleryJPM/gallery_yamahata/visual-73.htm

In 2005, I did some research about a few people in Yamahata's photographs. Here is the entry for Tanaka Kio. The information is based on NHK TV's program titled, "NHK Special: Nagasaki Eizo no Shogen" (Nagasaki--Testimony of Pictures) (first broadcast in 1995) and NHK's book titled, "Nagasaki Yomigaeru Genbaku Shashin" (Nagasaki--Atomic Bomb Photographs Recalled).

Mother breastfeeding baby

This famous photo shows 30-year-old Kio Tanaka with her four-month-old son Yoshihiro. They were waiting for medical treatment at the first-aid station in front of Michinoo Station. Yamahata took five shots of this mother and child.

She was living 1.8 km north of the hypocenter with her husband and his parents, her three children, and a younger brother. Her husband worked at the Mitsubishi shipyard, but they were a farming family with fields and paddies.
She had a 6-year-old son, 5-year-old daughter, and infant son Yoshihiro.

That morning, her husband and his mother went to a fishing village beyond a mountain while Kio stayed home. After the air raid siren stopped, she and her father-in-law went to weed a paddy 500 meters from the house.

Then there was a yellow flash and they fell to the ground. She ran back to the house to check on the baby. The house was on fire, and she found the baby had been thrown from the entrance foyer to the kitchen. He was badly burned and black.

Her older son, who was catching dragonflies nearby with a friend, suffered burns all over and came home. Her 5-year-old daughter was also playing outside and just arrived home when the bomb exploded. She was also burned badly.

Kio also saw her father-in-law's shirt burning. He put it out, but he then yelled at her that her back was on fire too. She was so busy taking care of the children that she did not notice her back was on fire. They spent the night in the bomb shelter in front of the house.

Her burnt back was so painful that she could not sleep.

In the morning, they heard that there was a first-aid station at Michinoo Station so she put the children on a cart and the whole family walked to Michinoo Station.

Since all her clothes and shoes were burnt, she was given a kimono from a house that survived the fire and walked barefoot to Michinoo Station 1.8 km away. The ground was hot and her back hurt, but she endured and kept going. Along the road, they had to walk over collapsed homes, headless corpses, and dead horses. They got to Michinoo Station at about noon. The area in front of the station was full of people.

She was put on a straw mat, but people kept coming and crammed in line to wait for treatment. Tanaka mainly wanted her children to be treated rather than her burnt back.

They received riceballs. The baby suckled, but could not drink her milk. He had no strength to suck and drink. And no strength to cry either.

The doctor told her that the baby was half dead. She wondered whether her baby would die soon. That's when Yamahata took her picture (five shots).

She remembers being photographed. He asked her to be photographed. She thinks that she had a child so that's why he was photographing her.

The family went back home without any medicine or treatment method. Three children, Kio, and her father-in-law were badly burnt. The five went into the air raid shelter and remained bedridden in terrible pain.

Her first son couldn't eat or drink and became too weak to eat the fruit her mother-in-law found for him. He died on Aug. 12, three days after the bomb. And baby Yoshihiro only worsened every day and died on Aug. 21.

Her husband and mother-in-law who escaped the bomb, found a board and made a coffin for the two children who were then cremated.

Yamahata's photo was the only photo ever taken of Yoshihiro. But she cannot bear to look at the photo. The memory is too painful.

After the war, she raised four children. Since her husband's income was not enough to make ends meet after losing everything, she continued to grow and sell vegetables. She worked on her vegetable field from 8 am to sunset. During harvest time, she would pick the vegetables and load it onto a cart to sell to people. She was still doing this in 1995 at age 80.

In 1976, an anonymous postcard was received by the Nagasaki City Hall saying that the woman in the picture was still living in Nagasaki. Her address was also written. The picture had been displayed at the Nagasaki atomic bomb museum since 1973.

Gassho,

I finally joined http//mixi.jp in Sept. 2006 just to see what the fuss was about. It just had an IPO, making the founders millionaires/billionaires.

mixi is a social networking site (SNS) all in Japanese. If you don't know what an SNS is, Google it and find out. The most famous one outside Japan is myspace.com.

It is free to join mixi which currently has over 5 million members. This is small compared to myspace, but for Japan it is huge. And it's a closed system, which means you cannot access it unless you are a member. To become a member, you must receive an email invitation from a current member. mixi says that current members can only invite people whom they know personally, and not random strangers like you sending requests for an invitation after reading about it at a BBS. Members must also be at least age 18. However, I don't see any way how mixi can enforce such rules.

When you join, you have to decide on a nickname. It's interesting that your nickname need not be unqiue. There are multiple people with the same mixi nicknames, which can make things confusing.

When you agree to the terms of service, you receive your own profile page and URL. This is where you can set and enter your profile. As little or as much personal info as you want. A small profile image is also displayed. You have to upload your own profile image (up to 3).

When people want to know more about you, they will access your profile page. And when they do so, they leave an automatic "footprint" (ashiato) or a record of their visit. You can see this footprint or profile access log. It shows who came to see your profile and when. It logs the number of visitors to your profile page as well. So whenever you access someone's profile page, that person will know that you've been there. Such a thing cannot happen at myspace since it is an open system where non-members can view profile pages.

Besides your profile page which is accessible by mixi members, you also have your own personal home/top page. This is accessible only by you. When you are logged in, your home/top page is where you can see messages from other members and messages posted at the communities you've joined (more about this later). There is also a box showing graphic icon links to your mixi friends (called "my mixi") and another box showing graphic icon links to the communities you've joined.

If you can read Japanese, you will find the layout and controls, buttons, etc., simple and quite easy to use. You don't have to read the manual to learn how to use mixi. It's quite intuitive and quick to learn.

But what will eat away your hours (or days) are the numerous communities which are special interest groups much like Yahoo Groups. First you will want to browse and search to see what's there. You will soon find out that there is a LOT. Quite overwhelming. There are communities for almost everything.

There are communities for every prefecture, city, town, and village in Japan. And many neighborhoods also have a community. Almost all the primary, junior, and high schools have a community. All the universities have one, as well as their sports clubs and teams.

There seems to be a community for almost all the train and subway stations (and lines) in Japan. They talk about new shops or restaurants which opened near their station, etc., etc. There may even be a community for your local pool, gym, and shopping arcade. The communities also sometimes hold offline meetings (called "off-kai" in Japanese) for face-to-face parties.

It's incredible. Although the largest communities are quite active with frequent posts, many others are pretty inactive with few posts even with hundreds of members. So you should look at the past posts and see how active the community is. If it is too active, your mailbox will be jammed with messages every day.

Any mixi member can start and join a community. A community is essentially a BBS. Member can post messages which will appear on the community's Web page as well as on the home page of all the members. Communities can also be public where any mixi member can join or private where approval is required to join.

Many members tend to join numerous communities, making it impossible to keep up with all the messages. However, your message inbox can be expanded or contracted so it doesn't mess up your home page layout. Instead of joining all the communities I'm interested in, I just bookmark them instead. I join only the most favorite communities.

Having a lot of mixi friends is another ego trip among many members (like at myspace.com). Anybody you invite to join mixi automatically becomes your mixi friend. And anybody who wants to be your friend will send a message and ask you first. You can then either accept or reject the request. Having a lot of friends looks good on your profile page, but it will only increase the number of messages in your inbox. The latest blog entries of all your friends will appear in your inbox. But this is manageable since it does not affect the page layout unless you expand the message list. It will just make it harder to find the most important messages.

Although mixi is free to join, they also offer a "Premium" account for only 315 yen/month. The biggest advantage of this is that you can create your own online photo albums. Your home page will show a box listing your photo albums. And you will also see a "Make photo album" button on your home page. Your photo albums can occupy up to 1 GB of server space. It has a commenting system as well. Your blog will also have 300 MB of space instead of 100 MB. And your mailbox messages will be saved permanently instead of being deleted automatically after 60 days.

The demographics of mixi members seem to average in the low and mid-20s. I have come across many college-age people and many of the communities have been started by college students.

The vast majority of communities are run by amateurs or unofficial people. I don't see mixi communities run by local governments or government agencies and organizations. mixi is really becoming like a second Internet in Japan. There are so many people on it that I don't think local governments and other official people can keep ignoring it. Of course, it took a long time for many local governments just to make their own official Web sites. So I'm wondering how long it will take them to join mixi. I think they would really miss out if they don't have a presence on mixi. Perhaps they hesitate because mixi is a private company. But then, all the utilities in Japan are provided by private companies. So it shouldn't be an issue.

I think the bottleneck is that it is a closed system. Non-members cannot see what the fuss is about. They cannot see how much information is there, the incredible diversity, the community spirit, and the huge numbers, and the opportunities and benefits of the site. People who don't know remain ignorant. I see no reason why it should be a closed system. They should let anybody access and view mixi pages, but only allow members to have a profile page, join communities, and post messages. With a larger audience, the ad revenue would increase, and more people will be enticed to join. I really hope that they decide to open it.

I have also noticed a substantial foreign segment at mixi. Many are outside Japan (many Japanese members are also outside japan). There are a few English communities so they can thrive there if they cannot read/write Japanese. I would think mixi would someday at least provide an English translation of their Terms of Service and other basic info.

I have to conclude that mixi is great. If you are a member, you can find me by searching for philbert or PhotoGuide Japan.

Note that I do not send mixi invitations to strangers. And keep in mind that everything is in Japanese.

On April 20, 2006, a long-lost former Japanese army soldier who was stationed on Russia's Sakhalin island when World War II ended, finally visited his native Iwate Prefecture and was reunited with his kin for the first time since 63 years ago when he went to war in 1943.

It had been such a long time that he was pronounced officially dead in 2000 and his name was engraved on the family gravestone. For decades, his family in Japan never received any word of his whereabouts until now. His name is Ishinosuke Uwano, now 83 years old and still healthy looking. His younger brother and sisters are still alive and it was certainly a tearful and happy reunion.

Turns out that he had married a Ukrainian and is now living in Ukraine where his wife is from. He has three children and his son accompanied him to Japan.

I just cannot imagine something like this to happen in my family. But the Japanese government estimates that there are still some 400 former Japanese soldiers living in the former Soviet Union. They've identified only about 40 of them. It must be really agonizing for the families in Japan to still have a missing brother or relative and not knowing whether he is still alive or not.

 What actually surprised me more was Mr. Uwano's inability to speak Japanese. At the press conference, he could only speak Russian and spoke through an interpreter. He had lost his native language of Japanese. I'm sure his family doesn't care what language he speaks, as long as they can erase his name from the tombstone. But it must be totally weird to hear him speak a foreign language instead of Japanese.

Mr. Uwano's case proves something which I have always thought to be impossible: Losing your native language. To be sure, language is one of those "use it or lose it" things. This is especially true in the case of a foreign-language or second language. 

While living in Japan all these years, I'm also well aware that we can sometimes forget certain words or phrases in our native language, especially when there are things which we can express better in Japanese.

But I have never believed that you can actually forget your entire native language even after living in a foreign country for many years. The language you learn and grow up with during the first 20 years of your life supposed to remain with you for life. It's almost like a hereditary trait, something that you cannot change for life. Or so I thought.

I've always regarded one's native language as an inherent and inseparable part of one's identity. Until now, I have never heard of anyone to have totally lost his or her native language after living in a foreign country. Uwano's case reminded us of former Japanese soldier Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi who was discovered still hiding on Guam in 1972 thinking the war was not yet over. And also Lt. Hiroo Onoda who was found in the jungle of the Philippines in 1974. Both had lived in the jungles for almost 30 years. But they came back to Japan and still spoke Japanese. They did have war comrades for a time to whom they could speak Japanese. But after their comrades were caught or killed, they lived alone for a good number of years. Still, they never forgot their native language.

Another case is the Japanese abductees in North Korea who returned to Japan in 2002 for the first time after living in North Korea for well over 20 years. One of them, Mrs. Hitomi Soga married to a former American soldier, had trouble speaking Japanese at first. But she soon got back into the groove and her Japanese language ability returned naturally. I knew this would happen since you simply don't lose your native language. Or so I thought.

Now Mr. Uwano's case is apparently much more extreme. He's been away for over 60 years. Probably has had no contact with other Japanese during the past decades.  He probably decided to shed his native identity in order to adapt to his adopted country. He seems to have adapted well to his adopted country. His Russian sounds perfect. I guess with a Ukrainian wife and children, that would do it. After he spends 10 days in Japan (that's how long he'll stay here), I'd like to see another press conference and listen if he has recalled any of his native language.

For me, losing my native or second language ability would be traumatic and devastating. I have become so used to being able to read about and access two different worlds and cultures through English and Japanese that losing either would mean that half my world would be gone.

I'm also happy to note that being from Hawaii, where they speak a dialect called pidgin, I have never ever lost my pidgin English. I do have friends from Hawaii in Japan. My sisters (also born in Hawaii) in Japan can also speak/understand pidgin. They all help me exercise my beloved native language. And I'm always happy to hear from a non-Hawaiian foreign friend in Japan or elsewhere telling me that they recently saw a TV program about Hawaii and thought all those people spoke just like me. Of course, I speak standard English to my non-Hawaiian, non-Japanese friends, but they are still able to distinguish my accent as being different from a Californian or New Yorker.

Well, if you live in a foreign country and don't want to lose your native language, make friends having the same native language as you. Of course, I have no problems with this and the vast majority for foreigners living in Japan do not have this problem either.