さようなら、私の友人、河野さん！ Goodbye, my friend, Kono-san!

さようなら、私の友人、河野さん！ [Sayonara, watashi no yujin, Kono-san!]

Goodbye, my friend, Kono-san!

I still remember that evening at a restaurant in Hiroshima in 1995 when, in complete ignorance, I causally placed the plastic-coated menu at the center of the dinner table, only to have my host, Kono-san, lunge across the table to retrieve it and prevent a fire, for, little did I know, the center of the table was a red-hot, table top grill, on which guests placed meat, vegetables, and batter provided by the waiter, to make their own okonomiyaki. I was deeply embarrassed at my gaffe, but Kono-san never gave the slightest indication that a faux pas had just been committed.

Earlier, on the way up to the restaurant, in the elevator foyer, he had scratched his head with a puzzled look on his face as he read the elevator instructions, before admitting in perfect English, “I do not understand their logic.” Back in 1988, when, as a rookie amateur radio operator, I had established my first contact with Toshiaki Kono–JA4DOB, the same qualities of politeness and humility were immediately evident.

The majority of the radio contacts I made, to my absolute delight, were Japanese, but unfortunately, I spoke even less Japanese than most of them spoke English. Kono-san, a high school English teacher, was a godsend. He taught me the rudiments of Japanese conversation – enough to exchange basic information such as name, location, and signal report.

This stood me in good stead, as my station VU2ABE racked up over 11,000 two-way contacts with Japanese stations in sixteen years, till I discontinued the hobby on account of moving to the US. Kono-san was a kind and patient teacher, a fact that was confirmed by his students when he invited me to his classroom on my second visit to Japan in the year 2000.

On that second visit, Kono-san offered to take me out to the Seto Inland Sea in his small motorboat. I dithered a bit because I am no friend of the water and, also, I did not have the proper attire for a boat ride. Kono-san brushed my objections aside and lent me a pair of shorts which, in my hurry, I packed with my own clothes the next day when I left. I still keep it, twenty years later, as a memento of that exhilarating day of sun and sea spray, with my friend.

The visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was a somber and solemn event, for clearly the nuclear bombing had impacted his family and friends, as Onomichi, his city, is only about fifty miles (eighty kilometers) from the hypocenter of the Hiroshima bomb. We never talked about it, but he did tell me of the word hibakusha designating people affected by the two 1945 atomic bombings.

While writing this tribute, I discovered to my utter surprise that out of the 15,513 contacts in my logbook only 8 were with Kono san. Yet, he was my best friend in the world of amateur radio. In only our second contact, some months after the first, Kono-san volunteered to be my QSL manager. (QSLs are confirmation cards that hams exchange after a contact and are valuable to hobbyists.) Kono-san would collect the cards meant for me and send them to by airmail in packets of about a hundred. He refused to accept my offers for payment for this invaluable service.

So when the lockdown pinned me down in the same home in Shillong, India, from where I had operated my amateur radio station two decades ago, I looked around for something to do, in addition to working full time remotely, and remembered the cards I had hoarded away in a cupboard. It did not take me more than a minute to realize that there was something I could do for which I would never ever find the time, if it were not for C0VID-19 – scan each and every card before time took its toll on them.

It took me more than a month, forty-one days to be precise, to scan the 7,881 cards. Since some cards carried information on the reverse, I scanned both sides of all of them for uniformity, for a final tally of 15,762 scans. And now that they are all digitized and neatly labeled, they can go with me wherever I go. The total weight of the cards was a staggering 67 pounds (or 31 kilograms). The dedication and diligence of Kono-san staggers me. I had not realized the enormity of his generosity till now.

Sadly, Kono-san passed away two years ago, on June 28, 2018 at the age of 82.

The best way for me to remember my friend (and his wife, Hiroe-san, who passed away last month) is to have used the lockdown time for this gargantuan task. Many times, faced with the formidable task, I felt like Sisyphus. But I pushed on. I persevered till I completed the last one today in memory of my friend Kono-san.

河野さん、友情ありがとうございました！ さようなら！

[Kono san, yujo arigatogozaimashita! Sayonara!]

Thank you very much for your friendship, Kono-san! Goodbye!

Shillong, India 2020/07/05