A Japanese Nurse Talks of Two Wars

Ms.H.K.is an 88 year-old Japanese woman. In her younger days she experienced two wars of entirely different nature. She was even about to join in a third one, but was fortunately prevented from doing so. I have attended a public lecture she has given recently on her life.
She was born in 1924 in a farming family. She went to high school which was not very common at the time. As the war became intensified she went to a nurse-training school and got qualified as a nurse. She was drafted as a nurse and sent to an Army hospital near the Great Wall in the Northeast China in 1944. It was a two-year contract. But in reality she was in China for 14 years until her return to Japan in 1958.
She heard the news of Japan's defeat while working in the above hospital. She and the whole hospital were in the process of regrouping, when they were suddenly surrounded by the Eighth-Route Army of the Chinese Communists. There she and several others were attached to the Eighth Route.
From then on they kept marching(sometimes retreating from the Nationalist Army) almost day and night. One of the things she saw on the way was a people's court where landlords were being shouted at by their former tenants. With the Eighth Route she studied mutual criticism and self criticism. She noticed that the Communist Party members in the Army were taken into confidence, but casualties among them were also high. There were many severely injured anyway, and she used to nurse them for a month or so without changing her clothes.
They crossed the Wall into the mainland. She noticed that those soldiers who had been given a plot of land in the revolution now demanded that they be allowed to go home, as there is nobody to cultivate the newly acquired plot.
South of the Wall, she noticed the fertility of the Yellow River area which she did not see in the Northeast. The climate is different, and there were also different diseases like malaria. It was strange to see people keeping water in a big pot with fish in it. If the fish was swimming they say the water is fresh. The language is also different.
She and the troops have gone as far as Quilin, famous for its beautiful natural scenery, when the People's Republic was declared to be established. By this time she had also been qualified as a doctor.
Very soon the Korean War broke out. She with many other volunteers moved as fast as possible day and night to the North Korean border and changed into Korean uniforms. But at the very last moment the Japanese nationals were ordered not to cross the river. Bidding farewell to her associates of many years, she came back to the South again, where she continued to work as a doctor-cum-nurse till the time she returned home.