Tokudome’s phone rang just a few days later. The Rev. Shigeya Kumagawa, the head of a private Catholic school in Nagoya, had read the article and wanted to invite Ruse to share his story with Japanese students.
Families shaped by war
It was Ruse’s first journey overseas. He traveled to Japan in November with his wife and his brother, Steve. Tokudome joined them for part of the trip.
Ruse brought a copy of each of the two photographs that his grandfather had kept when he left Japan.
On the train to Nagoya, Kumagawa told Ruse that he had lost much of his family to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki; many relatives survived the initial disaster only to perish of radiation poisoning in the days and weeks that followed. Kumagawa, a peace studies teacher, said his grandmother had gone insane from seeing so many of her loved ones die that way.
Ruse found it difficult to reconcile how both their families had been shaped by opposing sides of a brutal history.
Far from the devastation of Nagasaki, Carl Ruse and his fellow prisoners had watched the U.S. planes firebomb Nagoya, incinerating the homes below. Carl had suffered a broken leg in an earthquake and could no longer work. He had withered to 80 pounds. He was running out of time.
“If it hadn’t been for Harry Truman and his atomic bomb,” Carl once told his grandson, “we would never have gotten out of there.”
Members of the Japanese media trailed the American visitors during their trip, broadcasting parts of Ruse’s speech to 1,500 students at Kumagawa’s school about the way one child’s compassion changed his grandfather’s life. Cameras also shadowed them when they visited the Yokkaichi factory and stood in the place where Carl Ruse had watched the first U.S. planes drop food for the prisoners after Japan’s surrender.
“That was just overwhelming, to travel to that spot where he stood and knew he was going to make it,” Ruse said.
Finally, a name
The employees of the Yokkaichi factory examined the photo and said they believed that the boy was one of the few young teens who had worked in the factory. The photo, they said, was probably taken before the war began. But they didn’t know the child’s name or how to find him.
Then, as the trip was coming to an end, Kumagawa’s school received a call from a man who believed that the boy in the photograph was his brother.
There were more cameras flashing when Ruse, his wife and brother met the caller in a hotel meeting room. Takeo Nishiwaki, a small, elderly man, said his older brother — who had died at 30 of a respiratory illness — had worked at the factory when he was about 14 and had told him that he had given food to a prisoner there.
Ruse’s pulse quickened. He wanted to believe that he had found the boy, though he knew it was impossible to be certain. Still, there was finally a name: Fumio Nishiwaki.
Nishiwaki showed Ruse a photo of his brother, taken around age 18. It looked like the same boy, only taller, slimmer.
Nishiwaki returned the next day, as the travelers were preparing to leave. He told Ruse that he had called his brother’s widow after their meeting. She said she had seen the photo of the boy on the news and felt sure that it was her late husband.
There were no cameras in sight this time as Nishiwaki bowed farewell. “I’m going to go to the cemetery, and I’m going to tell my brother that we met,” Nishiwaki told Ruse.
Before Carl Ruse left Japan, he had carried the extra food dropped from the U.S. planes to the family of the boy. It was then that the boy, as a gesture of thanks, pressed his photograph into Carl’s palm.
The moment echoed, more than sixty 60 years later. As Ruse and Nishiwaki parted ways, Ruse took his copies of the photographs his grandfather had carried out of Japan and handed them both to the old man.
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