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http://www.accordions.com/news.aspx?d=04-Dec-2015&lang=de&s=11051
http://www.accordions.com/news.aspx?d=04-Dec-2015&lang=de&s=11051
04-Dec-2015
by Harley Jones
|
 2015 marks 70 years since the end of World War II and this is especially notable, because so few who lived during that terrible period of conflict are alive today.For the 70th Anniversary, there have been many news stories around the world about WWII and some of these stories have featured accordion pictures. Just last month while visiting the CIA Archives in Finland, I was shown a book of photographs of accordion/soldiers selected from WWII archives by the Finnish Accordion Association. Pictures showed prisoners and soldiers enjoying accordion music together. Below is a story, this time from Japan of how the music of the accordion helped in terrible times. Yuisuke Tanaka, a member of the Japanese Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria, was one of 1,000 Japanese soldiers imprisoned in Karaganda in central Kazakhstan, which was part of the former USSR. Yuisuke Tanaka, now 89 years old, was 19 years old when he was detained. He and his comrades were sent to a Soviet labour camp, where conditions were very bad and the work was hard. Anyone who tried to escape was gunned down. The temperatures in Karaganda dropped below minus 40C in winter. Tanaka lost two fingers to frostbite and suffered a serious head injury due to a fall while working laying railway tracks. “Living was harder than dying,” he recalled. Yet even within this harsh life, there were happy moments. A German soldier in the camp taught Tanaka to play the accordion, and the heartwarming tunes of the instrument soothed his desperate mind. Tanaka returned to Japan in 1949 and after much hard work became a musician. Since the 1980s, he has been sharing his experiences in the camp and the importance of music to the soul while playing the accordion, which continues to do to this day. |