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.
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