Koichi Andoh
This is the story of Koichi Andoh, a man in his mid-twenties, who set off in November 1934 from his home port of Nagoya, in Japan on board an NYK Line steamer called the Hakusan Maru. After six weeks at sea he reached London and eventually arrived by train in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, in the New Year of 1935. He spent about five months in the town working for F & T Lumb's Hatchery and helping to train their workers in the art of determining the sex of one day old chicks. Why? Sorry you need to read the book!
Koichi kept a diary from the day he set sail to the day he returned home. It is a record of his long journey and time spent imparting an unusual skill to an alien culture. It provides a daily snapshot of his experiences and emotions whilst here and of working life in the valley's hatchery businesses. It is thus a unique insight into a specific period of the valley's history. The contents of the diary offer aspects of an adventurous journey made by a young man and the culture shocks he encountered along the way. It depicts his personal roller coaster emotions of joyful highs coming from great job satisfaction, and the lows of social boredom, melancholy and his more than apparent homesickness. He also reveals something of his spiritual side without indicating any particular religious beliefs. Nearly 70 years later in 2001, Koichi's son, Takayoshi, visited Hebden Bridge in a bid to trace his father's footsteps. He arrived clutching the original handwritten diary and about fifteen entries which he had already translated into English himself. Takayoshi's elderly mother Kimi had only told him of the existence of the diary along with a photograph album in the late 1990s and until then he seems to have known little about his father's life. I personally became more and more fascinated by the diary and the idea of a young Japanese man boarding a steamer in 1934 and travelling halfway around the world to sex chickens. I also began to realise that the chicken breeding business was a piece of local history which had largely been forgotten, overshadowed by the cloth and clothing industry for which the town is better known. This led me to begin researching the local hatchery history for myself. In terms of the diary, Takayoshi willingly set about translating the whole journal for me. I in turn researched the background to the time Koichi was here and his life after returning to Japan and his active service in WWll. Stephen Curry Follow on Twitter @MrAndohsDiary |
“I went to see the sights of Aden town. The town smelled nasty. The origin of bad smells was camel and goat’s dung I think.”
“Five of us walked around in the city until at 11pm and we drank coffee with two suspicious women.” “I took bath but hot water was too tepid. At once, I fled out from the bathroom!“ “Would you believe one of employee called me a German! Of all the things to say! I had resented this.” “It was quite unbearable to me that the attitude of British young men toward women. They did kiss and moreover, flirted with each other. I was vexed with them.” |