Manchuria

Manchuria is the setting of the formative wartime episode that explains how Tengo’s father reached postwar Japan and entered the work that would later shape Tengo’s childhood. For the father, it is neither the prosperous promised land of official propaganda nor a chosen home: it is a desperate refuge from hunger, followed by an invasion that turns survival into flight.

Settlement and Hardship

Tengo’s father was the third son of a farming family from Tohoku. In the final years of the war, poverty and a severe economic depression left him and other men from the same region with few prospects. They joined the government’s program of agricultural colonies in Manchuria and Mongolia not because they believed the slogan of a virtuous paradise, but because remaining in their villages meant barely staying alive, while suitable work in the cities was out of reach.

After basic instruction in using firearms and rudimentary information about local agriculture, the settlers left Japan with three cries of “Banzai.” They travelled from Dairen by train to the remote borderlands between Manchuria and Mongolia. There they received land, farming implements, and a rifle, and began cultivating the fields. The land was poor and stony, and in winter it froze completely. With food scarce, the settlers sometimes ate stray dogs. Government assistance kept them alive during the first years, but their circumstances remained harsh rather than prosperous.

The Soviet Invasion and Escape

By August 1945, the settlers had begun to glimpse the possibility of an easier life. That prospect ended when Soviet forces repudiated the neutrality pact and invaded Manchukuo. A government official who had secretly warned Tengo’s father that the weakened Kwantung Army could not resist told him to prepare to abandon everything and flee as soon as possible.

When he learned that Soviet forces had crossed the border, Tengo’s father rode to a railway station and boarded the second-to-last train bound for Dairen. Among his fellow settlers, he was the only man to make it safely back to Japan that year. The escape depended on advance warning and a narrow opportunity to leave; the land and possessions acquired through the colony were left behind.

Return to Japan and the NHK Job

After the war, Tengo’s father went to Tokyo and tried, unsuccessfully, to make a living through the black market and by training as a carpenter. He could scarcely feed himself. In autumn 1947, while making a small delivery for an Asakusa sake merchant, he happened upon the official who had warned him in Manchuria. The official had returned to Japan and resumed his position in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

Learning that his former acquaintance could not find steady work, the official suggested collecting NHK fees. He wrote a letter of recommendation and even acted as guarantor. Tengo’s father accepted the job despite not knowing much about NHK, because it offered a fixed income. After training, he received a uniform and a collection quota. In postwar Japan, radio had grown rapidly as people sought inexpensive entertainment amid poverty and the shock of defeat, creating demand for collectors to visit listeners’ homes.

The Wartime Past in Tengo’s Childhood

The job that began with the father’s return from Manchuria later became a rigid family routine: on Sundays, Tengo had to accompany him on the collection rounds from morning until evening. His father treated the rule as absolute, even when Tengo had a cold, fever, cough, or stomach trouble. The remembered rounds link the father’s wartime struggle for survival to the son’s childhood isolation and physical endurance: the work secured a regular income, but its demands left Tengo unable to accept Sunday invitations and convinced that he belonged to no group.

Manchuria thus enters the narrative through a chain of consequences rather than as a present-day destination. The father’s flight made his return possible; the chance encounter in Tokyo turned survival into stable employment; and that employment became the mechanism through which he imposed a punishing schedule on his son. The colony’s promised security is reversed at each stage: its inhabitants face starvation and invasion, while the work that follows the father’s escape provides a livelihood at the cost of Tengo’s freedom to spend Sundays as other children do.