Lady Joker, Volume 1, Kaoru Takamura [best affordable ebook reader TXT] 📗

great happiness to those of us who remained. Since raw materials were controlled, in reality we could not hope to produce the quality we wanted, but every time I saw people enjoying rationed Hinode beer in beer halls and restaurants around town, I felt glad that I had decided to work for Hinode Beer. Hinode was the kind of company that inspired employees to feel this way.

I went to the front in 1942 so I have no knowledge of further hardships in Japan after that. I did not know that the Hinode trademark disappeared from our products once they became controlled goods, or about the air raid at the Kanagawa factory. Perhaps I was among the lucky ones, in that while stationed on an island in the South Seas, from time to time I was able to distract myself with daydreams of the boiling iron pot or the fermented beer storage tank at the Kanagawa factory, hoping only to return home even a day sooner.

When I was discharged at Yokohama port in November of 1945, I could hardly believe my own eyes at the sight of the burnt-out city. The first thing I did was head straight for the factory. The fact was I had no other place to go, being a bachelor with no relatives in the Kantō region. I cannot aptly describe how I felt as the familiar factory upon the hilltop of Hodogaya came into view. I don’t know if in that moment my body finally accepted that the last three years at the front had been hell or if my mind could hardly keep up with the sensation of being alive, but more than relief, I think what I felt was a type of despondency, as if my body were breaking into pieces and I was on the verge of collapsing.

Reading this, no doubt you would feel compelled to point out that I had only been an employee of Hinode for a mere five years, but it is no wonder that a young man returning from that war felt as though Hinode were his only refuge in this country. A family or hometown might provide that kind of sanctuary, but an adopted son like me had nothing. No, I can declare that—not only for myself but for every employee who left Hinode to go to war—our former factory was our only refuge in those days. That is the nature of a company. It would have been the same for Katsuichi Noguchi had he not quit working there. That would have been true even as a former employee who had only been at the factory for two years.

Looking up at the hilltop of Hodogaya, I had tears in my eyes. As I got closer, I saw that the factory I had imagined remained standing was, in fact, not; the roof of the main building had burned and fallen down, most of the facilities had been destroyed, the warehouse and the laboratory building had been reduced to a mountain of rubble, there was no trace of the employee apartments at all, and only part of the cafeteria had been spared. Nevertheless, instead of despairing I could not help but put my hands together in a show of gratitude toward the factory. Please know that this is how happy I was. A notebook had been placed on a desk at the entrance of what remained of the cafeteria, along with a sign instructing demobilized soldiers to write down the date, their name, and contact information, and to wait for word. There were about a hundred names listed already, and among them I found a few colleagues I knew. I believe there was also information about temporary allowances for demobilized soldiers, distribution of socks, cotton cloth, light bulbs, and such for employees, free medical treatment and welfare counseling, and missing persons notices. In that moment, standing before that desk, I know I could not have been the only one whose legs trembled with the realization that I had been welcomed back by my family, and that I had finally returned home.

For a while after that, a third of the factory site was transformed into farmland, and employees whose houses had burned down lived in barracks that they had built there. Even under such circumstances, the company swiftly announced plans to rebuild the factory and, while nothing was yet in production, they distributed a base salary despite repeated delays, so one hardly needs to make comparisons with other companies to say that the employees of Hinode were unmistakably blessed. Of course, considering the absurd inflation of recent years I would be lying if I said I never wondered how one could live on a mere two or three hundred yen, but if I take a moment to calmly consider how the beer industry was also responsible for the livelihood of distributors and general retail shops all over the country, I know I am being ungrateful for this extravagance.

In order to respond to the company’s endeavors, the employees spared no efforts themselves. Hoping to resume operations as soon as possible, the maintenance engineers conducted emergency repairs on broken equipment while the sales staff visited distributors every day, and I did my small part by borrowing some preserved yeast from the Sendai factory and working to cultivate it. Looking back, I think it was an extraordinary feat how we managed to restore part of the production line at the temporary factory as early as the spring of 1946. Doesn’t the fact that, even though it was only a year ago, I cannot remember the details of what I ate, wore, or thought about during those entire six months of rebuilding suggest that I worked so hard as if I had been bewitched? Naturally, had I not labored so hard, there would have been nothing to fill this gaping emptiness that I appeared to suffer from and, seized by a sense of lethargy and helplessness that made even walking appear tiresome, I would have