FOCUS: Tokyo Museum Preserves Memories of Students Killed in War

Tokyo, Sept. 10 (Jiji Press)–In 1944, as World War II entered its final stages, Itaru Maruo was a promising student at an elite university, dreaming of a career in art. Then the Imperial Japanese military called him up. Deployed to China under the wartime student mobilization program, Maruo fell ill and was hospitalized time and again. He is believed to have been caught up in the Soviet invasion and died at an army hospital in Manchuria, in what is now northeastern China, on Aug. 30, 1945, about two weeks after Japan’s surrender. He was 25. His remains have never been returned to Japan. In late July this year, a relative donated some 200 items that once belonged to Maruo, including his memoirs, to the “Wadatsumi no Koe” (Voices of Fallen Student Conscripts) memorial museum in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward, a short walk from the University of Tokyo’s Hongo Campus. The museum holds numerous letters, diaries and other personal effects of students who died in the war, most of them young men sent to the front under the student mobilization program. Their writings speak of the anguish of leaving parents behind for the battlefield, and of the bitter regret of lives, and studies, cut short. Born in Tokyo in 1920, Maruo entered Tokyo Imperial University, the forerunner of the University of Tokyo, in 1942, enrolling in the Department of Aesthetics and Art History in the Faculty of Letters. He studied painting and art history while captaining the university’s hardball baseball team. One baseball magazine of the day called him “the finest talent” the university’s baseball club had produced since its founding. Maruo threw himself into watercolors as a student, and he never put down his brush. Even after he went to war, he kept sketching the daily rhythms of military life. Between January and July this year, Sonoko Hamazaki, 63, the granddaughter of one of Maruo’s cousins, came across picture postcards, notebooks and letters from those years at her parents’ home. In letters to his parents, Maruo asked for art supplies and pressed them to buy him second-hand paperbacks. “Knowledge does not change, even if it comes from a dirty book. I will devote myself to my military duties, looking forward to the day I can read them,” he wrote in one letter, offering a glimpse of his undiminished appetite for learning. Many of the Maruo items now on display at the museum are picture postcards, densely illustrated, that record what life in China looked like to him. Alongside them is a literary anthology he put together with his baseball teammates before the student mobilization–a reminder of the student he was. Maruo also wrote novels and poetry. “If he had lived, he might have achieved something. But his life was cut short by force, and he must have died full of regret,” Hamazaki said. “I donated (the items) because I want people to know what he thought about and what he dreamed of.” The museum will mark the 20th anniversary of its opening in December. Its collection of roughly 2,100 items–letters, diaries and more–records the doubts young men harbored about a war they knew could not be won, and their resignation as they steeled themselves to leave their families forever. “As long as these handwritten documents left by students remain with us, we are driven to keep passing on their memories,” said Fusako Watanabe, 90, chair of the museum’s board. “We must never let a society return that robbed young people of the rich futures ahead of them.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]