88-Yr-Old Ex-Japanese Detainee Translates "Crime and Punishment"

Sapporo, Aug. 15 (Jiji Press)--An 88-year-old former Japanese detainee in Siberia has privately published his translation of "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. After retiring as a teacher, Fumio Jinba brushed up the Russian he had acquired during his detention. He took about five and a half years to translate the masterpiece by the renowned Russian novelist into Japanese. The translation is intended to be easy to read even for junior high school and high school students. "I was about to give up many times, but it was good that I continued," says Jinba, who lives in Sapporo, the capital of Japan's northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido. "I hope this book will convey the spirit of never giving up to young readers," he says. On Aug. 20, 1945, Jinba arrived at a military base on the Korean Peninsula after miraculously surviving a crash as a navy pilot at the age of 19 shortly before the end of World War II. Upon his arrival at the base, he learned Japan had been defeated in the war. Jinba was detained by the former Soviet forces two days later and was taken to Siberia in November the same year. "I was always aware that I may die," Jinba says, as he recalls hunger, cold and slave labor at a coal mine during the two years he spent as a detainee. While many other Japanese detainees in Siberia died in the extreme cold, a strong wish to return to Japan kept Jinba alive. After returning to Japan, he worked as a social studies teacher at junior high and high schools in Hokkaido. He was over 80 years old when he began the translation work. Jinba pasted copies of the original novel in notebooks and carefully translated each line. He made notes as part of measures to help young people read the book with some 600 pages more easily. Based on his experience of detention, Jinba says he hopes Japan will become a strong country. But he adds: "People should never kill each other. Japan needs to nurture people who will lead the world with science and medicine, not with weapons." END