Early on in their life in Aomori, Totto broke out in boils all over her body as a result of malnutrition from having subsisted almost entirely on kelp noodles. She was also hurting from paronychia, a purulent infection of the fingers and toes caused by bacteria that attack the cuticles and nail folds. This, too, was a symptom of malnutrition. Few people are inflicted with paronychia these days, but the inflammation is excruciating. Still, Totto gritted her teeth and tried to bear the boils and the pulsing pain of the nail infection. A trip to the doctor would not have provided any relief, as medicine was impossible to come by due to the war. She was far from alone in her suffering, though; it was a fact of life for everybody.
Mother could see that Totto needed more protein. Together the family filled two baskets with fruits and vegetables that had been grown in Suwanotaira and took several trains until they reached Hachinohe Port, whereupon they approached the fishermen and introduced themselves. “Hello, we’re here from Tokyo. We were wondering if we could exchange our vegetables for some of your fish.” The locals replied generously, “Sure, take whatever ya need,” trading their fresh catches for the produce.
No sooner had they returned home than Mother got to work simmering the seafood. Because Totto’s father greatly preferred meat, Totto had never had much in the way of fish. The head and the tail took an especially good deal of courage to try. Fearfully, she brought them to her mouth, only to discover with relief that they were rich in fat and delicious. A mere three days after the family started incorporating fish into their diet, Totto’s boils began to disappear; in just ten days, she had fully recovered. Oh, the wonders of protein!
Reflecting back on it now, Totto realizes that Mother’s ability to adapt to this new environment was truly remarkable. It was thanks to her that the family succeeded in building strong bonds with their neighbors and that Totto and Noriaki-chan managed to acclimate to their new life.
She would say to the children, “Whenever you visit someone’s house and they invite you to stay for dinner, make sure you gratefully accept.”
This confused Totto. Back when they lived in Tokyo, her mother had always instructed, “No matter how much people insist that you stay, you must tell them you will eat dinner at home.”
“But didn’t you say we must never accept a meal from another family?” Totto asked. Mother replied promptly, “Meals at other people’s homes are more nutritious than what I can give you here.”
This was undeniably true. The dinners Mother made in the apple hut often consisted of flour dumpling soup with plenty of vegetables, or steamed potatoes. They sometimes ate soup with crushed Nanbu senbei—a staple rice cracker in the region—and every so often they had simmered fish. These were heavenly meals compared to what they’d been eating of late in Tokyo, but they hardly ever had white rice, and eggs and chicken were entirely out of reach.
Little Noriaki-chan took Mother’s advice to heart and began heading out shortly before dinnertime to visit his friends’ houses. He was five years old, adorable, and charming, so people unfailingly asked, “Why don’t you eat with us, little boy?” This made Noriaki-chan a very happy camper, treated as he was to a wide variety of food.
Sometimes, Mother would say to Totto, “Go find your brother, will you? I’m sure he’s having dinner nearby.” Totto would find him sitting around a sunken hearth in a neighbor’s home, delighting in his dinner. In such cases, Totto would choose to squat outside and wait for him to finish. Totto was also ravenous, of course, but couldn’t bring herself to say, “I want some, too!” When Noriaki-chan left the house, she would greet and thank the neighbors, then lead her brother home. The more Noriaki-chan benefited from such generosity, the more his nutrition, and his health, visibly improved.
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“Draw a Jinjokko!”
Totto started attending school in Sannohe, which was one train stop away from Suwanotaira. Only seven trains ran between the stations per day. In the mornings, she walked twenty minutes from the apple hut to Suwanotaira Station, rode the train for five minutes, then walked another thirty minutes from Sannohe Station to her school. There were very few buildings around the station back then, and the closest shops and houses were some distance away.
The town of Sannohe spread out from the base of the hill where Sannohe Castle once stood when the Nanbu clan ruled the region in the sixteenth century. That was where Totto’s school was situated, though there was little for her and her peers to study at the time. Instead, the students spent most of their days doing volunteer labor such as making bags out of paper and tending to farms.
On her first day of school, Totto felt all the children’s eyes on her as she took a seat. They peered at her from afar, curious about the newcomer. Totto considered how she might become friends with her classmates. After turning over many ideas in her mind, she decided to open her notebook and draw.
A few girls came up to her desk and said, “Draw a beko!” or “Draw a dog!” in their Aomori dialect. Totto understood that beko meant cow, which she drew as best she could, though she was not a particularly good artist. The resulting sketch was a rather skinny creature, but the girls seemed impressed. “Yer good!” they exclaimed.
“Phew!” thought Totto. “It looks like I’ll be able to make some friends.” But then one girl said, “Draw a jinjokko!”
A jinjokko? What in the world is that? Totto had never heard the word before. But she could not ask for clarification for fear that she might ruin the friendly atmosphere she’d worked hard to cultivate. She pondered for a little while, then handed the notebook to the girl and said in her best Aomori dialect, “Draw me yer jinjokko!”
The girl started to sketch. Totto peeked over her arm and saw that she was drawing a doll with a bob cut. So jinjokko was what they called a doll in Aomori!
Her plan was a great success. When Totto’s turn came, she drew a doll with a ribbon in her hair and was once again met with impressed sighs.
And that was how Totto was able to make new friends. It was difficult at first to understand what they were saying, but within a week she had mostly deciphered the dialect. The girl who asked Totto to draw a jinjokko became one of her closest companions. She was sweet and smart, and the two spent all of their time together.
Often during class, Totto and her classmates put together paper bags meant for use ahead of harvest to protect apples from insects. Some children grew bored of the work and scampered off, but Totto kept at it, even when she was the last one left in the classroom.
You would take loose pages of a magazine and smooth the frayed edges with your fingernails, lay a few pages down so that they were slightly staggered, apply a thin layer of glue to each sheet, then fold them individually into bags. “Aren’t you tired of that yet?” her classmates would always ask as they left, to which she invariably replied, “Not at all!” in her newly-acquired Tohoku accent.
The students were also charged with carrying the contents of the nearby slurry pit to fields atop the hill. Surprisingly, Totto didn’t mind the work. In fact, she was often one of the first to volunteer, but she always preferred to hold the front end of the carrying pole. She worried that if she was in the back and they tripped and fell, she would get soaked with the sewage in the bucket.
Her fears proved well-founded. One day, the rope of the carrying pole snapped halfway up the hill and the girl holding the back end got drenched in slurry. Totto felt so very sorry for her as she led the girl back to the teacher at school.