J-Boys Read online

  Even Kazuo, at the top of the hill, could see that the cart, loaded with newspapers, was hindering the man’s progress. For every step he took up the hill, the cart seemed to pull him a half step back down.

  That’s got to be hard, thought Kazuo. A moment later he realized there was someone else behind the cart.

  That person was pressing both hands against the back of the cart and digging into the ground with both legs. His face was hidden behind the mountains of old newspapers. But with every step he took, his head—wrapped, like the scrap man’s, in a towel made into a headband—bobbed up and down like a buoy.

  After the two people had climbed slowly for a while, they stopped next to a telephone pole. They removed the towels from their heads and wiped the sweat from their faces.

  Minoru was a Korean: Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945. During World War II the Japanese government forcibly moved many Koreans to Japan to work in factories and mines. Currently about 600,000 ethnic Koreans, second-, third-, and fourth-generation residents, live in Japan.

  Kazuo gasped in surprise. The scrap man’s helper was his own classmate, Minoru. Kazuo instinctively ducked behind another telephone pole, hiding himself.

  Minoru was a Korean who had grown up in Japan and lived in a neighborhood of shacks with tin roofs. It was the Korean quarter, located down the Haneto River, with its many small and medium-sized factories.

  Minoru was completely hopeless at studying, but he was the biggest boy in fourth grade and so good at sumo that no one could defeat him. That had bothered Yukichi, the toughest kid in Kazuo’s class. So one time, Yukichi had invited Minoru over to the sandbox during lunch recess. Yukichi’s older brother Masato, a very large fifth grader, had been waiting there.

  Sumo: A Japanese sport where a wrestler (rikishi) tries to push another wrestler out of the ring (dohyo). Sumo has many ancient traditions, and some of its rituals (like throwing salt before a match) come from the Shinto religion. Sumo wrestlers may be huge, but they are more muscle than fat. They eat special foods to make them gain weight.

  “Hey, Minoru! I hear you said you never lose at sumo,” Masato said, giving Minoru a hard stare.

  “I didn’t say I never lose. I said I was good at sumo, that’s all.” Minoru hunched his shoulders tensely on either side of his round, plump face.

  At the start of fourth grade, Kazuo’s teacher, Mr. Honda, had said, “For the next year, you and I will be studying together. So I would like to get to know each of you well. To help me with that, please tell me something you are good at. Maybe you are good at drawing comics, or you’re an expert on baseball players—it can be anything at all.”

  At that time, Minoru had answered that he was good at sumo. Now Yukichi and Masato were using Minoru’s answer as an excuse to bully him.

  “If you’re so good at sumo,” Masato went on, “why don’t you and I have a match right here? I’ll help you find out just how strong you are.”

  In a corner of the sandbox, Masato began to warm up like a professional sumo wrestler. He stood with his legs apart and bent his knees. Then he lifted one leg at a time out to the side, his hands on his thighs.

  Kids began to gather around.

  Yukichi smiled slyly, putting an arm around Minoru’s shoulders as if they were the best of pals. “How about it, Minoru? If you’re so good at sumo, have a go with my brother.”

  Minoru twisted his lip and answered in a shaky voice. “Well, okay, but just once.”

  “Face your opponent!” At the command of Yukichi, who had assumed the role of referee, the two boys crouched in starting positions and touched the ground with their fingertips. Masato instantly leaped up and charged into Minoru. He grabbed Minoru’s belt with his right hand, trying to knock him over.

  “Uh oh, Minoru’s going down!” everyone thought.

  But a second later, the boy who hit the sand was not Minoru. It was Masato.

  Minoru had waited until Masato was off-balance from trying to push him over. Then he’d thrown down the older boy.

  Masato got to his feet, his entire back covered in sand. “I wasn’t ready. One more round.”

  Masato again prepared to fight. This time he charged at Minoru while pushing at him in various places with his hands. But without retreating even one step, Minoru took the pushes in stride and grabbed Masato’s body. As before, Masato ended up on his back in the center of the sandbox.

  Furious to have lost twice in a row to a younger kid, Masato’s face turned bright red. “One more round,” he shouted, charging at Minoru. But the result was the same. In an instant, Masato went sprawling in the sand.

  Everyone in Kazuo’s class, except Yukichi and a few of his friends, applauded for Minoru, who had defeated a fifth-grader three times. But being beaten so easily by a fourth-grader was more than the giant Masato could take.

  Standing up slowly, Masato spit in the sand. “Stupid Korean! He stinks so much of garlic, you can’t even wrestle him.”

  Minoru’s round face, which always smiled good-naturedly and never showed anger, suddenly turned fierce. Then as Minoru clenched his jaw and glared at Masato, his face slowly crumpled. Standing there in the middle of the sandbox, he hid his face in the crook of his right arm.

  He’s crying, Kazuo realized.

  Masato started mocking him again. “Korean pig. Korean pig!”

  “Shut your trap, you jerk! What did Koreans ever do to you?”

  A girl suddenly came flying out of the group gathered around the sandbox and went toward Masato. It was Hanae Yanagi, a realtor’s daughter, and one of the top students in Kazuo’s class.

  But before she could reach the fifth-grader, a furious voice boomed across the playground.

  “What are you doing over there?”

  Everybody turned toward the voice. Mr. Honda was sprinting toward them with his hair flying up.

  Kazuo could not remember Mr. Honda ever looking angry before. But at that moment, his face looked as scary as a demon’s. He ran up at full speed and planted himself before Masato.

  “What did you just say to Minoru Kaneda?”

  “I called him a Korean pig,” Masato answered without a sign of remorse. “He’s a Korean, so I called him one. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The next moment, an unbelievable scene unfolded before Kazuo’s eyes.

  Mr. Honda’s pale hand came down hard on Masato’s cheek, as if in slow motion. Mild-mannered Mr. Honda had hit a student! Everyone fell silent in shock. Even Yukichi, the ringleader of the incident, and Minoru, who had been crying, grew quiet and stared in disbelief.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself as a human being,” Mr. Honda continued. “You’re a fifth-grader, yet you lose at sumo and have to go picking on a fourth-grader? Do you find that enjoyable? And have you no idea how shameful it is to discriminate against another person?”

  The teacher seized Masato by the arm and marched him off to the office. Kazuo and the rest of his classmates, including Yukichi, remained silent, as if they were the ones being punished. They stayed that way even after they had returned to their classroom. Saying nothing, they waited quietly in their seats.

  Soon Mr. Honda came in. His face was pale as he looked around at all of the students in the class. “First of all, I need to apologize. Today during lunch recess, when a fifth-grade student insulted Kaneda-kun, I grew very angry and hit that student. Using violence against other people is unacceptable under any circumstances. I was wrong to do what I did, and I would like to apologize to you.”

  The teacher bowed low before the class.

  “I would, however, like everyone to understand why I got upset,” Mr. Honda said, then wrote some characters on the chalkboard.

  “These characters are read sabetsu, which means discrimination. This is making fun of, or looking down on, people because of the color of their skin, their nationality, or the way they look. It is a shameful practice, the one thing people should avoid doing at all costs. The reason I got upset today was because the olde
r student made fun of Kaneda-kun’s Korean nationality. There are other students besides Kaneda-kun in this school who are nationals of North Korea or South Korea.”

  Mr. Honda is talking about Hanae, Kazuo realized. When Minoru began to cry, she alone had confronted Masato. Kazuo was impressed that she had tried to take him on, even though she was a girl.

  “Now why are there residents of Japan who have North Korean and South Korean nationality? They are known as zainichi, or resident, Koreans.”

  Kazuo listened as Mr. Honda explained that before World War II, Korea had been colonized by the Japanese. The people in Korea were forbidden to use their native language or their real names and were put to work like servants. Later on, during the war, when the male adults of Japan were off fighting as soldiers and there was a shortage of workers in coal mines and factories, many people from Korea and China were forcibly brought to Japan and made to work like slaves, without even getting enough to eat.

  “So the Koreans living in Japan had their homes and livelihoods taken from them,” Mr. Honda explained.

  Kazuo listened uneasily. He had heard from his parents that during the war there were air raids almost every day, that life had been hard because food was scarce, and so on. He had been told that many people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the firebombings of Tokyo. He knew that war was very bad, bringing misery to many people.

  But Mr. Honda had just said that the Japanese had ruled over Minoru and Hanae’s parents, and grandparents, and their friends, and treated them like slaves. Everything the teacher had talked about, all those terrible things, had been done by people connected with Kazuo.

  That day his discomfort made him decide one thing: from then on he would be kinder to Minoru and Hanae.

  Now, as he stood on the hill behind the telephone pole, listening to the labored breathing of Minoru and his father, Kazuo wondered why he had jumped out of sight so quickly. He thought it was because Minoru might feel embarrassed to be seen pushing his scrap man father’s cart. If it were Kazuo, he would feel shame, as if a dark secret had been revealed.

  But Kazuo also wondered if his act might be called discrimination. Maybe Kazuo was looking down on the work that Minoru’s father did, judging it as dirty and shameful. Kazuo felt a heavy lump deep down in his chest. Minoru and his father began to move the cart forward again. Soon Kazuo could hear Minoru’s father shouting, “Scrap man, will haul!”

  Kazuo knew he could still call out, “Minoru, how’s it going?” And sturdy Minoru would probably just crinkle his round face into a smile and wave back.

  But that is not what Kazuo did.

  The sounds of the bell on the cart’s handle and of Minoru’s father calling out, “Scrap man! Will haul!” gradually moved away through the quiet town as sunlight flooded its streets.

  Kazuo, still hidden in the shadow of the telephone pole, stood as if frozen, listening intently to those two sounds.

  NISHINO-KUN’S HOUSE OF BOOKS

  The other friend that Kazuo made in November was Akira Nishino. Nobuo and Minoru usually called him just Akira or by the nickname Nishiyan. But Kazuo eventually started to call him Nishino-kun out of respect.

  -kun: A suffix often used when speaking to boys in a respectful way. (It is never used with girls.) Kazuo calls Akira “Nishino-kun,” using his friend’s last name with the suffix, to express his respect for his friend’s intelligence.

  Akira’s father was a university professor, and his mother was an elementary school teacher. Not one other student in Kazuo’s grade had a parent who was a teacher, and only a few students had a parent with a university degree. Most parents, like Kazuo’s father, had gone straight to work after finishing their compulsory education.

  Akira was polite to everyone, as well as kind. But when it came to his grades in school, he definitely did not fit Kazuo’s expectations of a child of two teachers.

  That was because Akira spent a lot of time absentmindedly staring out the window. When he wasn’t staring out the window, he seemed to be thinking about something completely different from what was being written on the chalkboard or explained by the teacher. When Mr. Honda pointed at him to answer a question, he would often give an answer that made no sense, making the kind teacher smile wryly. Akira seemed to have an especially hard time with math. He still made mistakes, even though he was in fourth grade now.

  Still, Akira appeared to be acting a little more lively in school these days. Last year, with Mr. Tanaka, who was strict and lost his temper at the drop of a hat, Akira had gotten a scolding nearly every day. When he gave a wrong answer or made a mistake at math, Mr. Tanaka would say, “If you can’t even handle this problem, don’t you think your parents will be disappointed in you?”

  And Akira would press his lips together and nod, his face the saddest in the entire world.

  But one day in April, Kazuo had changed his opinion of his classmate.

  During science, Mr. Honda had been talking about pistils and stamens in flowers, explaining that the reason flowers bloom on plants and trees is to produce seeds and fruit. Then he asked a question of Akira, calling him by his family name.

  “Nishino-kun, why is it that flowers bloom on plants and trees?”

  Akira, who had been staring out the window, turned red in the face. He remained silent, crossing his long, thin arms awkwardly in front of his body.

  “You must not have heard my question,” Mr. Honda said gently. “Very well, I will ask you again. Why is it that flowers bloom on plants and trees?”

  Akira stared silently at the ceiling.

  “How about it, did you think of something?” Mr. Honda prodded him.

  “Perhaps . . . ” he said in a small voice.

  “Perhaps what?”

  “Perhaps flowers bloom to get attention from people and insects and animals,” Akira finally said.

  Half of the students tittered. His answer was just too strange—as if plants and trees would flower for the same reason people get dressed up, to get attention.

  “Everyone, please be quiet.” The teacher silenced the laughter. “So, Nishino-kun, why do you think that is?”

  Akira still spoke softly. “When flowers are in bloom, people and insects and animals are attracted to their colors and smells and go over to them. That probably makes it easier for the pollen to scatter, and easier to produce seeds and fruit.”

  Mr. Honda nodded vigorously several times, grinning broadly. And this time nobody laughed.

  “Nishino-kun’s response was an extremely good one,” Mr. Honda said. Then he motioned for Akira to sit down. “Nishino-kun focused on the beauty and scent of flowers, and considered them within all of nature. It is exactly as Nishino-kun has explained: flowers’ beauty brings insects and animals closer, and makes the pollen on the stamens easier to scatter. This way the plants do not have to rely only on the wind to get the pollen to the pistils.”

  Listening to Mr. Honda, Kazuo began wondering about Akira, who had always seemed so absent-minded and slow to find the right answer. Maybe he was more interesting than Kazuo had realized. Maybe he had even more mysterious ideas inside his head. After this, Kazuo himself began to add the suffix “-kun” to Akira’s family name as a sign of respect.

  After Nishino-kun and Minoru ended up in the same group as Kazuo, the three of them often walked home together. Nobuo, and sometimes Yasuo, joined them, making them a group of five—the J-Boys. The boys said if they ever had a rock band, that was what they’d call themselves. In their own language they were nihonjin, but to Americans, they were “Japanese boys.” That’s what Nishino-kun had said, anyway, and the name just stuck.

  Nihonjin: The Japanese word for “Japan” is nihon, written with the characters ni for “sun” and hon for “root.” This is why Japan is sometimes called the Land of the Rising Sun. The character jin means “person.” So a Japanese person is a, or nihonjin.

  On the days when the weather was fine, they always went to the empty lot. Nobuo and Kazuo
had not yet given up on their Bob Hayes program. As soon as they got to the lot, they began talking back and forth about Bob Hayes. Then they practiced starting low to the ground and charging into a sprint as they took off running.

  Nishino-kun and Minoru sat on the wilted grass and watched them. Neither had ever heard of the great sprinter Bob Hayes from the Tokyo Olympics. Plus, Nishino-kun had absolutely no interest in sports, while Minoru knew the names of sumo wrestlers but nothing about the other sports.

  Today, after Kazuo and Nobuo grew tired of their efforts, the four friends sat talking.

  “What do you want to be in the future?” Nobuo asked suddenly. He was sprawled on the ground, his chin resting in his hand, which was propped up by one elbow.

  “A sumo wrestler, of course.” Minoru jumped up and got into the squat that wrestlers assume before a match, spreading his arms out wide. “I’m going to reach the yokozuna rank, live in a huge house, and eat good food every day until I’m bursting.”

  Yokozuna: Grand master or grand champion, the highest rank in professional sumo wrestling. Once a wrestler reaches this rank he is expected to win most of his tournaments. There can be more than one yokozuna at a time.

  Nobuo grinned. “You’re an eater, aren’t you, Minoru!”

  Minoru laughed self-consciously.

  “I’m going to be a runner,” Nobuo said, brimming with confidence. “I’m going to compete at the Olympics and win the gold medal. I’ll run the hundred meters in one burst, just like Bob Hayes. But my time is going to be nine seconds flat, a new world record. How about that—impressive, huh?”

  Watching Nobuo as he flared his nostrils and spoke with gusto, Kazuo felt that one day his friend just might make his dream come true. Nobuo had been growing a lot recently and was now quite tall.

  “And what do you want to be, Nishiyan?” Minoru asked. Nishino-kun had been listening to the other two with a quiet smile.

  “I bet you’ll be a college professor like your father,” Nobuo interrupted before Nishino-kun could answer. “With all those books, it would be a waste if you didn’t become one!”