100 Year Old Japanese
There lives a man near Fukushima Daiichi who became 100 years old this April.
He lived in Okuma Town where the Fuksuhima Daiichi nuclear power plant is situated.
Mr. Yoshida now lives in complex housing in Aizu-Wakamatsu City, Fukshima Prefecture, 100 km west of the crippled nuclear power plant.
When Mr. Yoshida was an elementary school boy, he moved to Tokyo with his family from Okuma Town. Then he experienced the historic 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that took on tens of thousands of Tokyo citizens. So, he grew up in Tokyo to become an English teacher and get married. However, he was drafted to be sent to Manchuria in 1941 when the Second World War started.
As air raids by US air forces were intensified in Tokyo, his wife decided to move to Fukshima Prefecture though it was not easy to get a ticket of a train going out of Tokyo at the time. In February 1945, she got a chance to get on a train for Fukushima; it was one month before the Great Tokyo Air Raid where 100,000 Tokyo citizens were killed by bombing from B29s. She now thinks that if her trip had been delayed, she should have been killed.
When the war was over, Mr. Yoshida was taken captive by Russian troops. He was forced to work in mines in Siberia for three years. But he had a luck to return to Japan in 1948. He started to teach English in school in Fukshima City, 70 km west of Fukushima Daiichi. After retirement, Mr. Yoshida moved to Okuma Town, his home town, where he started to spend the rest of his life with his 75-year old son and great-grandchildren. Then, in March of the last year, the nuclear power station in Okuma Town got into a big trouble within an hour of an M9.0 earthquake; the Fukushima Daiichi plant invited a huge nuclear accident when it was attacked by 15-meter-high tsunamis.
When the big earthquake occurred, Mr. Yoshida was in his home. A tsunami drove sea water up to a location 100 meters from his home. But he had to leave his home due to the nuclear accident leaving his estate behind.
Nonetheless Mr. Yoshida plans to go back to Okuma Town if it is more than five years from now that he is allowed to return to his home so close to Fukuhshima Daiichi.
As of September 2012, there are 51,376 people in Japan who are 100 years old or older. Mr. and Mrs. Yoshida are two of them.
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Act 9:15 But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: