The Recollections of Tetsu: A Translation of Her Testimonial Narrative with Commentary

Abstract

Introduction In 1906, at the height of the Tōhoku famine in Japan, four-year-old Tetsu1 was abruptly swept off the street by volunteer relief workers from the Okayama Orphanage with nothing but the clothes on her back. As she later recalled, “One day two men came by just as the streetcar pulled up and said ‘We’re taking you with us,’ and they grabbed me up.”2 Although Tetsu had a mother, stepfather, and seven siblings, because of her malnourished condition and impoverished status the Okayama Orphanage targeted her, with the approval of local authorities, as a child who needed saving. With the exception of her older brother Kichiya, who was also collected by orphanage volunteers and sent to Okayama, Tetsu was instantly severed from her family and would not reunite with any living relatives until adulthood. As is evident in her testimony translated below, this first encounter with the institutional power of the Okayama Orphanage, though perhaps the most dramatic, was only the first of many times the orphanage made crucial decisions that determined Tetsu’s economic and social fate as a woman. Tetsu was born in Fukushima City, Fukushima prefecture, in the Tōhoku region in 1901. Her family lived at the economic and social margins. Tetsu’s father and mother