Introduction
This article is excerpted from the eleventh edition of "Lushan Literary and Historical Materials" to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression** (published in December 1995), dictated by Yue Yonghan and compiled by Lin Ruiwu, with the original title "I Work as a Coolie in Japan".
Body
My name is Yue Yonghan, my young name is Yue Shan, I am 74 years old this year, and I live in Matangzhuang Village, Malou Township, Lushan County. He was captured by the Japanese army and sent to Nannonowu, Tokyo, Japan, to work as a coolie for ten months. After the surrender of Japan, it returned to its homeland.
I was born in 1921 and grew up farming with my father. In the winter of 1943, I went to Baofeng County to visit relatives, and when I passed by the Haodian River, I was arrested by the 13th Army of the ** Army and became a soldier. The family didn't know about it yet. The soldiers were stationed in the area of Yuncheng and Luohe. In the spring of 1944, when the wheat was about to turn yellow, the troops encountered the Japanese devils outside the south gate of Luohe. The two phases fought for a whole day and a night. The gunfire was tight and loose, I don't know how many devil soldiers were killed, and I don't know how many of my own people were sacrificed, anyway, both sides were not light. On the side of the wall of the east wall of the Luohe River, more than 400 people in this part of me were captured by the Japanese as prisoners. First, he was detained in Yuncheng Prison for four or five months. The guards were all Japanese. Fearing that the captives would revolt, they did not receive food for a week, and the grass and bark in the prison yard were gnawed away, and countless people died of starvation and disease. Later, they boiled rice soup with rice and small millet for drinking, and I barely starved to death. When I was living in Yuncheng Prison, at two or three o'clock in the afternoon, a Japanese man standing guard stabbed him with a bayonet, and stabbed a prisoner in the leg and stomach without warning.
After that, we were taken by train to Xinhua Courtyard in Jinan City, Shandong. In Xinhuayuan, the house is too crowded, so the Japanese use a bamboo pole to let the side sleep, turn over and can't turn over, as soon as the lights are blown out, you have to sleep, open your eyes and play, and you have to line up to relieve your hands. Some of the prisoners had diarrhea, could not hold on, and pulled at the door, and the Japanese gate guard actually let them lick up, and insulted the Chinese in this way. In winter, there is a lot of frost and it is very cold, so I only wear a pair of pants to run and exercise. The guards are very strict.
I lived in Xinhuayuan for about ten days, and then took the train to Qingdao, and then began to take the boat, which was a three-story cabin and a two-story cabin, the place was small, very stuffy, many people were dizzy, and the caretaker did not call out. After two boats had been in the sea for two days, the other, for some unknown reason, sank, and the other boatload died. One of us turned back again, stopped for a day, and walked again, this time, we were at sea for ten days and ten nights, and we arrived in Japan.
He went to two stations directly south of Tokyo, Japan, and worked as a coolie for loading and unloading ships on the wharf. During loading and unloading, they were guarded by the Japanese police, and they were scolded and beaten if they were not careful. There is a shift system. Each shift worked twelve hours a day, and two shifts worked day and night. It rains every day, whenever you see the clouds, and the locals wear a kind of straw screw-through. We can't go back and forth to find that kind of grass, we don't have the technology and time, and we don't have the money to buy it. Only barefoot carries sacks. In winter, it is half a foot deep in snow, and I still work barefoot. Feet are often red and swollen from the cold. Particularly unbearable is the rice of six taels of steamed buns, which are steamed with a mixture of straw, straw, and soybean flour. The soup drunk is fish bone broth, which is the water in which the fish bones are boiled with a la carte. Hungry all day long. Later, it was found that there were corn and soybeans in the unloaded goods, but the police couldn't see them, so they opened them and grabbed them, and then put some in their pockets and kept them for later to eat. However, if you eat less of these raw things, you will still be hungry, and if you eat too much, you will not digest them, and you will have diarrhea. Spent a Chinese New Year in Japan. They also worship God at the end of the year, and they use steamed rice and flour buns to worship God, and the coolies are so hungry that they don't know who stole them, so they let the coolies stand in line, beat them one by one with a flat pole from the head of the platoon, and interrogate them. I'm tall, and I'm the first to stand and hit me first. After hitting three in a row, they couldn't ask who it was because of the hundreds of people, so they just stopped. The coolies were often sick, sick, except for the fellow refugees who took care of each other, no one cared about anything else, and when they died, they burned it with fire, and the urn was filled with things, and after the surrender of Japan, some of the urns they let the coolies bring back, but the dead compatriots, who knows where they were, were thrown into the sea. At that time, I really thought that it would be difficult to come back, and when I was sick and died, it would be good enough to leave an urn.
Except for the policeman who guarded us, almost all of the other Japanese who worked here were women. There was no sign of a man in the house where they lived. The men went to war. The door of the place of residence faces outward, there is no yard, and the design is a pull door, which is opened when the hand is pulled, and then closed again. They don't keep a good eye on the portal. Almost every household has a newspaper ordered, and whoever delivers the newspaper to whom, regardless of whether there is anyone in the house, pulls it in with his hand, and then pulls it and closes it. In order to get news from the outside, as long as we saw that there were no police around, we quickly took out the newspaper and read it. There are many similarities between Japanese and Chinese characters, and at first we couldn't understand them, but the more we read them, the more we understood the meanings. Once we watched it and realized: Chinese coolies are called to work for seven days and then called to return to China, and we are happy, and we think about why this is? There must be something big. Later, when I observed on the dock, I found that the Japanese were acting abnormally and were not as arrogant as before. We discussed it and said we couldn't do it again for a day. Go out for thirty or forty people first, and then come back; Who knew that as soon as these thirty or forty people left, the people behind them couldn't sit still, and they all went out. After going out, we first smashed open the door of their gun warehouse, took machine guns, pistols, and bullets as much as we could, and temporarily elected company commanders, platoon commanders, and commanders-in-chief. It took three days. The locals ran away, and the Japanese police were beaten to the point where they were gone. Later, the American troops came and called my representative, saying that Germany had fallen, Nagasaki and Hiroshima had dropped two atomic bombs, and Japan had surrendered, and they were talking about your return to China, but everything had to be disciplined. And temporarily detained the twenty laborers we had beaten on their chests with signs on their chests. I'm afraid we'll go out again**. Two days later, more than 4,000 Chinese who worked as coolies in Japan returned to China, and we were released and returned with us.
Back in Qingdao, the Kuomintang 94th Army took me up and became a soldier again. I went to Tianjin for a few more years. In the spring of 1949, Fu Zuoyi uprising, the peaceful liberation of Beiping, I thought that I hadn't been home for a few years, I was homesick, I came back to see, once I had a lot of family affairs, I didn't want to go anymore, so I kept farming at home. I'm still thinking about asking the Japanese to compensate me for my losses!
Editor-in-charge: Yuan Zhancai).
Source**: The 11th volume of Lushan Literary and Historical Materials commemorates the 50th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression** (published in December 1995).