I have decided that I want to be a better storyteller, since I'm actually pretty bad at it. So every once in a while, I'll forgo an entry in place of a story. Today's is particularly apropos, because it takes place at the very end of the second world war, and today is Remembrance Day.
My dad's father was an engineer in WWII. He left his wife, my grandmother, in Scotland, and went halfway around the world. I don't know very much about 'his war' because he very seldom talked about it, but he must have seen quite a bit of combat. When I spent three months in France back in '97, he wrote me letters asking if I had visited some of the places there where he had fought. He spent a fair bit of time in the far east, as well. We found a box of pictures in our garage this summer, and a few of them were pictures from the time that my grandfather spent in Malaysia and Japan. This story is about the time that he spent there.
The war was over. Japan had just surrendered, and all of the military personnel had to be taken into custody. This was a pretty big job, so everyone was responsible for helping out, though it was often difficult for the Allied soldiers to know who the members of the military were.
In a routine search of a building, my grandfather came across two men: one old, one young. The older man was in bed, and the younger man explained that he was a physician tending to a very ill elderly patient. I can only imagine what this exchange must have been like, for my grandfather's thick Scots accent used to confuse me as a child, and by then he had been in Canada for nearly 30 years. My grandfather, for whatever reason, did not believe the young Japanese doctor, and ripped down the bedcovers to expose the older men in full military dress, with both a samurai sword and its hairi kiri dagger on the bed with him.
The two men were handed over to the appropriate authorities as POWs, and my grandfather kept both the sword and the dagger. When he returned from active service to my grandmother in Scotland, she made him throw away the dagger, refusing to have an instrument of suicide in the house. The sword however, is still around, and on the event of my grandfather's death, will pass to my father.
And, I hope, eventually to me. It is my hope that if the sword ever comes into my possession, that I will be able to trace its origins, and learn something about the people to whom it rightfully belongs. Ideally, if the sword ever becomes mine, I would like to return it to the people who it belongs to, though it has been suggested that the Canadian National War Museum might be interested in it, as well.
And that is the story of how a Scottish-Canadian family has a real samurai sword. It is a story that makes me vaguely uncomfortable, though it fascinates me, at the same time.