 Young men of the Meiji era in Japan were often carried away by the wave
of modernization that was then sweeping the country. Some who came to settle
in Hokkaido became submerged by the tumult of those times. However Chaki
Yozo made his life a success after he came to Kitami as a tonden soldier-pioneer.
In later years, he could reflect on many achievements - breaking in his
own land for cultivation, contributing as a community leader in what is
now Asahimachi - as he looked out over an expanse of rice fields that he
had helped to create. |
| Chaki was born in 1879 in a tiny hamlet deep in the Gokazan mountains of
Toyama Prefecture. It was reachable only by crossing in a basket on a rope
slung over a deep gorge. The name of the place was Inotani in Kamitaira
village in Higashi Tonami County. If he had been born in an earlier era,
he would most likely have spent all his days there in the same humble way
as his ancestors, making paper, subsisting on millet, enjoying the old
kokiriko folk songs and dances on festival days, completely cut off from
the outside world by snow in winter - a life in which there was 'nothing
new under the sun.' |
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| However the wave of Meiji modernization reached even that village, in the form of a travelling school through which he received an elementary education. At the age of 13 he went to work as a migrant worker at the Tochibora silver and lead mine in Gifu Prefecture. That large-scale mine was an early industrial entreprise of the Mitsui Group, which continued operating until 1968 as the Mitsui Kamioka Mine. It achieved notoriety as the cause of an extremely painful illness, known as itaiitaibyo in Japanese, which was brought about by cadmium poisoning and became the focus of a court case which shocked the nation. |
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| Chaki's decision in 1897 at the age of eighteen to become a soldier-pioneer effectively saved him from being poisoned as a mine worker. On 2 June he arrived at Abashiri, the head of a household of six. They stayed several days there at the Jodoshinshu Korinji Temple. On the morning of 7 June, they moved in to quarters obtained by ballot in the settlement of the Second Company of the Second Division, on what is now the land behind the Kitami station locomotive sheds. |
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| Chaki had already started his diary and kept it without fail from then
on. He wrote separate entries for his public and private activities. They
encompassed military duties, farm work and his role as a Nokkeushi divisional
leader. No matter how tired he was, at the end of each day he would sit
down at a small desk in the corner of his room, take up his brush and conscientiously
write up his diary. |
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| The entry for 30 June 1902 in his public activities diary reads as follows:
[Assembly at 7 a.m., rehearsal for firing practice, individual training,
first annual firing exercise, study session, disbandment at 12 p.m.] According
to his farm work diary, the afternoon of that same day was spent ridging
rows of barley and wheat on land allotted to his father, Sakichi. Military
duties in those times ranged from weapons training, stable duty, squad
drill, parades, guard duty, study sessions, lectures and inspections to
cartridge polishing. |
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| His many activities as a subsistence farmer included harrowing, sowing crops - peas, barley, wheat, rye, millet, hemp, potatoes, buckwheat, soya beans and azuki beans, weeding, threshing, cutting grass for horse feed, chopping firewood, pounding millet, grinding buckwheat, making miso, rope making, well digging, stable cleaning and making fowl runs. |
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| Regular attendance at services and lectures at Honkakuji temple in Nokkeushi and Muryojuji temple in Tanno testifies to his pious disposition. |
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| With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Chaki was called up for military duty, first as a guard at the fort on Mt Hakodate. He was soon sent overseas with a force that landed at Seishin (Chonjin) in northern Korea, where he fought in battles at Shotorei( ) and Kainei (Fueryon). He returned home safely at the end of the war. |
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| In 1914 at the age of thirty five, he was elected leader of the Eighth
Division in Nokkeushi. He was kept busy with many tasks, including arranging
relief work spreading gravel on roads, to help farmers afflicted by a poor
harvest the previous year, the result of frost damage. He made evaluations
for local tax assessment and helped organize petitions requesting an upgrade
in the administrative status of Nokkeushi village. |
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| Apart from these community activities, he had a close concern for his family and friends. He made detailed arrangements to meet his elderly mother, Sono, at the Yoshida photographic studio in town, in order to take a photo to commemorate his daughter Yasuko's first day at school, 1 April 1916. A friend who lived in Tanno came and stayed with him so that he could visit the nearby Dake Hospital for treatment. |
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| Chaki was a plain-living and hard-working man, true to the Jodoshinshu Buddhist tradition of his native Hokuriku region. He neither smoked nor drank. |
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| An awareness of the people and activities around him, fostered through his diary writing, evidently helped him to overcome many hardships and he established himself as an independent farmer with a large holding of land. |
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| (from the Kitami City Newsletter, June 1988) |