French aviator's aborted but ambitious journey links people 15,000 km apart in Japan and France (2)

Oct. 30, 2014

French aviator's aborted but ambitious journey links people 15,000 km apart in Japan and France (2)

The story about Japy’s ambitious flight and the friendship which emerged from his meeting with Sefuri inhabitants took a fresh turn in 2013, when a female Japanese reader organized a reading performance about the episode in Paris and Beaucourt.

After the conclusion of the twinning contract, interchanges between Sefuri and Beaucourt were at a low ebb, due in part to difficulty in actually receiving each other’s mission. The 9.11 terrorist attacks of 2001 in the United States also forced them to postpone related programs. In the meantime, Sefuri merged with the neighboring bigger municipality of Kanzaki in 2006. At present, Kanzaki has a population of 32,000, including about 1,700 in the Sefuri region.

The reading performance has helped to revive momentum for interchanges between Kanzaki and Beaucourt. Kanzaki City officials, led by Mayor Shigeyuki Matsumoto, have spent busy days preparing to welcome Beaucourt Mayor Cedric Perrin and Nicolas Japy, a grandson of Japy’s elder brother, on the occasion of the performance.

Yuko Aoki, the Japanese reader, has written a text for the performance, Les Ailes d’André (André’s Wings), by herself. The canon-like performance is played in Japanese and in French by two readers, Aoki herself and Vanda Benes, a French actress and stage director.

Her project emerged from a casual conversation with her long-time French friend, Jenny Kimura, as she happened to be a remote relative of the Japy family through her mother. The performance in André’s birthplace in September last year was timed to coincide with the annual Japy festival there and played before dignitaries in Beaucourt and a group of Japanese friends of Aoki, including a couple from Saga. The incident has been remembered in Beaucourt so strongly that one street in the city is christened “Sefuri-Saga-Japon.”

Aoki, who worked with Japan’s public TV channel NHK for over 30 years, currently serves as president of the Reading Center in Karuizawa, the sole facility of its kind in Japan. She expects to continue the reading performance at a total of 11 places across Japan through November.

Aoki’s reading campaign culminated in a performance held at a public hall in Kanzaki in late October in the presence of Nicolas Japy and his family, his wife and two daughters and a son.  The Beaucourt mayor partially joined the reading.

The visiting Japy family also realized their long hoped for meeting with the author of the book before the performance; they dined with the 89-year-old former elementary school teacher at a comfortable Japanese-style hotel in Saga. The author took the occasion to present a copy of her book to Nicolas.

The aileron of Japy’s aeroplane which Nishikawa saw at her old school is currently stored at a display facility in Sefuri. Another wooden piece of the airplane, the upper part of the broken vertical stabilizer, had been held at a villager’s home, but this is also stored at the same facility. The aileron measures 152 centimeters in length and 42 to 52 centimeters in width, while the part of the vertical stabilizer is 70 centimeters in length and 22 centimeters in height.

The two “witnesses” of the incident were on display for visitors at the reading performance in Kanzaki. Also on display were four pieces of old photos, including the one showing Japy lying on the bed just after he was rescued from the crash site.

These photos were provided by a woman who lives near Fukuoka and whose father served as an interpreter for Japy while he was in Sefuri. “My father could speak several foreign languages. Maybe, this is why he was called to the place where the French aviator was receiving care,” Akiko Takada recalled. Because her father died of a war-related disease outside of Japan in her childhood, she cannot clearly remember what her father talked about Japy. “But I remember this. My father told me, ‘When I began to talk to Monsieur Japy in French, he looked so delighted,’” she said.

Japy continued to dream of visiting Japan again, but he could not. The airman devoted his remaining life mainly to training young pilots and developing air routes in Tahiti and other places. He died of heart attack in 1974 when he was strolling on the shore in Finistére, Bretagne, northwestern France. He was 70. Gondo confirmed this by obtaining a copy of a local newspaper article about his demise.

The reading performance took up not just Japy’s aborted flight but also the history of the Japy family and that of Beaucourt. The two readers, playing as friends in their 50s to 60s, were mutually talking about their dreams for their second stage of life while linking them to Japy’s passion for life and his courage.

The reading performance in Kanzaki was preceded by an opening event, in which 23 Sefuri Junior High students performed a short play depicting how Sefuri villagers, their ancestors, rescued Japy. The school has been performing the play every three years since 1994 as part of cultural festival programs, according to Principal Kazuhiko Kubo.

“We hope that our students will inherit this moving story over years by performing the play,” he said. “The beauty of the town of Sefuri is condensed in the story.”

The year of 2016 marks the 80th anniversary of the incident, which has linked the two municipalities in Japan and France beyond time and space. Nishikawa, a mother of two daughters, is trying to help organize programs in commemoration of the heroic incident for the particular year, soliciting support and ideas from as many citizens as possible. She hopes that the episode will contribute to strengthening friendship and humanity among young people on both sides.

French aviator’s aborted but ambitious journey links people 15,000 km apart in Japan and France (1)

Oct. 30, 2014

French aviator’s aborted but ambitious journey links people 15,000 km apart in Japan and France (1)

The girl was always looking up at the red, rectangular object put on the wall of the poorly lit corridor in front of her classroom, without knowing it was so important an item that would later lead to a twinning between her native place and a small French city. “We were playing and running around there every day, but nobody told us what the object was,” said Kiyo Nishikawa, who was then a pupil at Kuboyama Branch School in Sefuri Village, Saga Prefecture, southwestern Japan.

She recalled. “It was when we were third graders. One day, our class teacher told us, ‘Decades ago, an airplane with a man from France aboard crashed in the Sefuri mountains and villagers in Sefuri, the people you know, tried hard to rescue the airman. It sounds so great, doesn’t it?’” Then, she realized that the object was a part of the crashed airplane, actually a wooden aileron on the left wing.

French aviation pioneer André Japy was on a 15,000-kilometer flight from Paris to Tokyo in November 1936, with a prize of 600,000 francs at stake. As the distance had to be covered in 100 hours, Japy took off from Hong Kong in bad weather on the last leg of the flight early in the morning of Nov. 19, and his Caudron Simoun, registered No. 7078, got caught in turbulence over the East China Sea. He gave up flying direct to Tokyo and looked for an airfield to land in western Japan, but his plane was struck by a violent wind down to the steep southern slope below the peak of the 1,055-meter Mt. Sefuri.

Japy, then 32, was seriously injured and hovered between life and death, but he was rescued alive by inhabitants in Sefuri. Rescuers reached the crash site through trackless paths, braving rains and fogs in darkness. It was about four hours after the crash.

Japy had suffered deep wounds in the forehead and had the left thigh and the left hand broken. Those who rushed to the scene included local firemen and a police officer as well as farmers and charcoal burners. An on-the-spot investigation made two days after the accident revealed the fuel tanks on both sides had been empty. The altimeter had shown a reading of 820 to 850 meters, according to police records. To be lucky to Japy, among those who reached the scene was a local physician, who told those people to bring the injured on a makeshift stretcher slowly and carefully down to his clinic and quickly gave him a first aid treatment there. Japy was later moved to a national university-affiliated hospital in Fukuoka, about 50 kilometers northeast of Sefuri.

A book compiled by a children’s book writer, who lives in Saga City, in 1991 gave a detailed account of how Japy was rescued and how warmly he was received by Sefuri inhabitants when he revisited the village before returning to France four months later.

The story, notably the bravery of people in the small village for rescuing Japy, was handed down from generation to generation in the airman’s birthplace, Beaucourt in the Territory of Belfort, northeastern France, as André hailed from the Japy family, well known for its contribution to the town over centuries. The situation was somewhat different in Sefuri; the story was not uttered actively among people in the village, partly because Japan and France became enemies to each other in World War II. The situation also may be linked to a Japanese saying: Good deeds should be laudable, when done not openly. This obviously made Sefuri people involved hesitant about talking about the incident.

A monument was built by the villagers at the crash site in 1966, 30 years after the incident. But Chiaki Gondo, the author of the book, had to spend almost five years for investigating the incident once again, looking into old materials and documents and interviewing more than 100 people.

Impressed with the philanthropic spirit of the villagers and Japy’s courage for the journey, Gondo hoped to introduce her book, entitled “Fly! The Red Wings,” to someone who may be interested in the dramatic episode in France.

Her hope was realized three months after the release of the book. Her younger brother, who was a business executive, met two friends of his in France. These people helped to present copies of the book to the French government and Beaucourt City, paving the way for Sefuri and Beaucourt to enter into a sister city affiliation in 1996, exactly 60 years from Japy’s abortive but ambitious flight.

Nishikawa, the former schoolgirl in Sefuri, grew up and became an elementary school teacher, but the story about the French airman seldom came up to her mind, until she met Gondo at a ceremony on the closing of her old school in 1998. “At that time, I came to know that Mrs. Gondo has been visiting the monument on the anniversary of the incident every year.” This led her to endeavor to make the episode widely known to young people in Sefuri so that the story will be handed to the next generation.

The first aid treatment made by the Sefuri physician, Shigeto Ushijima, for Japy proved to be appropriate, and this helped him to recuperate miraculously. Since he was grateful for the care provided by Dr. Ushijima, a letter of thanks was presented to the physician in the name of the then French ambassador to Japan, A. Kammerer.

In the course of research for writing the book, Gondo visited Ushijima’s house, though he had moved to a different place several years after the incident. The letter of thanks came up in discussion between the two, and a few weeks later, a copy of the letter, written in French and dated on Dec. 26, 1936, was sent to her via the Sefuri Village office, according to Gondo.

She could obtain a lot of information about Japy at his home, but she found that the physician and his wife were living a very humble, publicly unknown life. “This made me feel so choked up,” she recalled tearfully.