“As I’m sure you all know, across the biggest railway bridge in the Orient is Manchuria’s Andong county. On a Sunday or warm afternoon, one can take a stroll all the way across ... I’ve reminisced about my old schooldays whilst standing on top of the railway bridge. Back then we often used to sing along to “The bor-der of Chi-na and Ko-re-a.” Now, standing in the very place from that song myself, I feel that our paths in life are truly strange.”
— Mitsuki Noda, 1926, writing from Sinŭiju
This was a story that I really wanted to tell. While doing research for the project that became my first book, I found the published letters of women from Yanagawa Girls’ High School in their alumnae magazine, sending back news to their former classmates from across Japan and its empire. I knew that this wasn’t going to be able to fit into my main project. Instead I published an article on what we can learn from their accounts, with lengthy translations of the letters themselves, in History Today, the London-based history magazine.
