Two Years and Nineteen Days

Posted by Mike Cash (Kiryu, Japan) on 27 August 2009 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

The final resting place of Corporal Shinichi Kanuma, Imperial Japanese Army.

His tomb is of the type one most commonly sees for deaths from WWII. They differ from civilian tombs in that they have the actual name of the decedent on the front of the stone, while civilian tombs have either the family name (modern) or the post-mortem name assigned by their Buddhist temple (older tombs). Military tombs are solitary interments, compared to family tombs (modern) and either solitary or husband/wife tandem interments (older tombs, such as the short one on the left) and the post-mortem Buddhist name is inscribed on one of the side faces. On the other side face of military tombs there is usually inscribed an account of the person's birth (including father's name), time of entering service and unit numbers, areas served in and/or campaigns engaged in, and the date and manner of death.

Corporal Kanuma was born January 29th、1924, entered the military November 20, 1943, fought in the Manchurian campaign in June 1945, and though he managed to survive the war itself he died in a Soviet P.O.W. hospital in Irkutsk (Siberia) November 29, 1945. His tombstone states he was 22 years old when he died, but that is due to an obsolete Japanese custom of counting newborn infants as being one year old already.

His tomb grabbed my attention and curiosity strictly due to its unusual location. It is alongside a logging road up through what even now in 2009 is a very rural mountainous area. There are other graves in the area, but all near dwellings. This tomb and the very few near it in the photo are nowhere near any homes. Indeed, as far as I can tell they are the only ones along the entire 12km stretch of the logging road.

As best I can tell, no one has visited or in any way cleaned or cared for the graves in this little cluster for a very long time. So when I go by I usually stop and clear away the encroaching underbrush.

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