Akira Nagamine came to Manchuria in 1945 as a raw Japanese Army recruit, trained primarily to hold a satchel of explosives to his chest and throw himself under a Russian tank.

But the slender 20-year-old did not die or end up in a Siberian labor camp as so many of his companions did. Abandoned in Manchuria as WWII drew to a close, Nagamine embarked on an eight-year odyssey through a country torn apart by war and revolution. He escaped bullets, starvation, conscription, and arrest. Eventually, he made his way to California, where he picked strawberries in the rich fields of Watsonville, raised a family, and bought his own land.

Today, Nagamine owns a successful organic farming business and is the subject of a unique project that has drawn together UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Alan Christy, a cadre of volunteers, and 30 young students who are working to tell his incredible tale of survival through a book, documentary film, web site, and curriculum materials in what is being called The Nagamine Project.

“His story is just remarkable,” says filmmaker and UCSC alum Jono Schaferkotter (Porter ‘05, art) of the now 86-year-old Nagamine. “He walked through history.”

Extraordinary times

The first time Alan Christy heard Akira Nagamine’s story, he realized just how extraordinary a chronology it was. Nagamine’s life encompassed not only the story of Japanese imperialism but also that of Russian expansion, the Chinese civil war, the Korean War, and Japanese immigration to America.

“What we have here is the story of a common man living in great times,” says Christy, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who is fluent in Japanese.

It wasn’t long before Christy was seated at the kitchen table of Nagamine’s youngest daughter, Janet, listening to the grey-haired veteran recount his tale in a mix of Japanese and English with Spanish and Chinese thrown in, the linguistic footprint of his life.

Nagamine told Christy of being sent to Manchuria outfitted with a rifle, a satchel, and a pair of “chikatabi” (farmer) shoes. He described how his unit spent two or three weeks in the mountains skirmishing with Russian soldiers, emerging starved and covered in lice, to be told their country had surrendered.

He described their disbelief and how, that same day, he was shot through the hand during a fierce battle with Russian troops. He told of walking on a broken ankle, the wound on his hand infested with maggots, as he and four other soldiers tried to make their way to safety after the fight. He explained how one of his wounded comrades shot himself through the heart rather than be taken by the Russians and how another was captured in an ambush; how he carried a hand grenade so he could kill himself if it became necessary.

Over months of meetings, Nagamine told Christy an amazing tale of being sheltered by a Chinese man named Mr. Sun who saved Nagamine from a lynch mob, of escaping the fate of half a million Japanese who were captured and sent to labor camps in Siberia, where one-quarter of them died.

His memory took Christy to the years of the Chinese civil war when Nagamine was befriended by a Japanese former secret police agent who not only taught Nagamine the tricks of surviving in a war-ravaged land but partnered with him in a rice-farming venture, gaining the trust of both Korean and Chinese farmers who loaned them seeds and food.

Nagamine’s voice broke as he recounted how his companion was killed by a runaway wagon and how he cremated his beloved friend’s remains, gathering ash and pieces of bone in a box to return to Japan some day. Now alone, he said, he wandered through Manchuria’s volatile landscape, working as a lumberjack, a deliveryman, a brick layer—using his wits and physical strength to hide in plain sight.

“If I could stay alive I thought I’d get back to Japan someday,” Nagamine told Christy. “I had a little hope. If I stayed alive, if I have a life, someday I’ll get back.”

History is personal

In a book-lined conference room at UCSC’s new Humanities Building, Janet Nagamine, an internal medicine physician and mother of a 7-year-old daughter, delicately pulls a yellowed document out of a manila folder.

It is a circa-1948 map the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare sent to Nagamine’s father showing the direction in which soldiers were believed to have fled after the battle in which Nagamine was wounded.

It was the only clue Nagamine’s father, Tosuke, had of his son’s fate.

“Everyone in the village thought he (Nagamine) was dead,” Janet Nagamine says as she spreads out the document to be digitized by project art director Tosh Tanaka while Porter College student Loc Le logs information about the map into what will be a searchable database. “But his father always felt he was alive, and his father never gave up.”

The tattered map is both a personal record as well as a political one and an illustration of what The Nagamine Project collaboration is about. At the heart of the undertaking is the notion that, beneath the grand strokes of history is a wealth of personal stories that need to be told.

The Nagamine Project, which is under the auspices of the UCSC Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories, began when Janet Nagamine approached Christy about her father’s story two years ago.

“I thought maybe it would be a book, maybe just a family keepsake,” Christy says. “I wasn’t sure.”

Soon, however, the story had burrowed into Christy’s imagination, not just as an historian but also as an educator. Set to teach a new class, “History 150D,The Japanese Empire,” Christy decided to make Nagamine’s story the centerpiece of his lessons.

“I wanted students to learn by doing, rather than learn by listening,” he says.

So Nagamine made visits to the campus, lugging boxes of organic apples for students, sitting in a plastic chair, and answering their questions. Soon, students were fanning out to do research around Nagamine’s recollections: building a bibliography of more than 300 references, creating a web site, blogging about their experiences.

When the course ended, 30 of the 45 students told Christy they wanted to continue the work—without pay or even class credit. Now divided into committees that include curriculum development, filmmaking, writing, web presence, fundraising, and more, the student interns are entrenched in a project they hope will inspire others the way it inspired them.

They talk of the lessons they learned from Nagamine about survival and perseverance, about how they want others to understand Japanese history as they do, to see a world story through human eyes.

Jordan Bentley, a 26-year-old history and physics major at Crown College, leans over a 1937 military map showing Japanese settlements in Manchuria. “I see history in this map,” he says, touching a finger on railroad lines, on towns he recognizes. “I see my own learning. And I see Mr. Nagamine walking somewhere in there.”

A California story

Nagamine is a sturdy man with high cheekbones, closely cropped hair and a hand still half-curled from the bullet wound he sustained.

When he came to the United States on an economic refugee visa in 1956, he had $24.32 in an envelope and a 30-month contract to work for a strawberry farmer in Watsonville. One of the first photographs he sent home shows him grinning in a farm-labor kitchen. On the back, he wrote of the wonders of American appliances and of his happiness. In Japan, he earned $1 a day. In Watsonville, he was earning 95 cents an hour.

Like his time in Manchuria, Christy says, Nagamine’s California story tells the history of Japanese immigration after WWII. He took a wife, Hideko, in an arranged marriage and worked hard. When his contract expired, they followed the crops, cutting peaches and cleaning broccoli and cauliflower for canneries. They started a family, saw the promise for year-round employment in hothouse flower growing, and pooled money with other family members to buy a five-acre plot of land. Like he had done with the rice seeds in Manchuria, Nagamine approached lumber suppliers promising to pay his bill once his greenhouses were built and the crops harvested. Only one man, Bob Butcher of San Lorenzo Lumber, took the chance, later telling Janet Nagamine that he had looked into her father’s eyes and knew he was trustworthy. Nagamine also made the same deal with the owner of a nearby grocery store, Bridge Market, so his family would have food to eat.

Now, Nagamine lives amid an array of greenhouses where he and his son grow organic cucumbers, bok choi, tomatoes, and herbs. He still gets up in the morning to water, to check the cucumber plants that spiral upward on suspended lines like delicate ballet dancers. And, on certain days, he sits down with Christy or one of the Nagamine Project volunteers to go over the details of his life.

He says he’s surprised that a man with a 10th-grade education can teach college students and that he hopes his life will help youth appreciate the freedom and opportunities they have.

“His story is inspiring: his perseverance, how he survived,” says Kyle Wojnar, a senior history major at Kresge College whose own father sailed from the Philippines to America on the same ship Nagamine did. “He just kept trying. That’s literally what happened.”

The project has been helped along the way by the UCSC Foundation Board and the UC Humanities Research Institute. This winter, students and volunteers hope to travel to Japan to do more research on a story they believe will captivate others the way it has captivated them.

“His story hits so many pieces, everyone can connect to it,” said filmmaker Schaferkotter. “I think it has a power to it.”

For more information or to donate to The Nagamine Project, visit UCSC’s Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories.

Peggy Townsend is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz.

This article appears in the fall 2011 issue of Review magazine.