TOKYO — For decades, the faded photo of a baby Japanese girl and a child’s colorful drawing hung on a wall in the home of Franklin Hobbs III in America.
As a 21-year-old U.S. soldier fighting on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, Hobbs found them in the pocket of a fallen Japanese soldier and took them as a souvenir.
Until recently, he tried not to think too much about the battle or the photo and drawing. Then, a few years ago, at his wife’s suggestion, he decided to try to give them back.
For the girl in the photo and her sister, they meant the world.
Hobbs, now 86, returned to Japan this week for the first time since the war and met with one of the daughters whose life he changed by returning the items. Chie Takekawa had drawn the picture of an air raid drill that Hobbs found on her father — a man she barely knew and whose remains have never been found.
“As a child, I had always wondered when my father would come home from the war,” Takekawa, 74, said Thursday with a beaming Hobbs by her side. “I feel like he has actually come back after all these years. I am very grateful.”
Hobbs — himself an orphan from an early age — said he first found them in an envelope on a Japanese soldier lying dead outside a large cave. A corporal in the Army Signal Corps, Hobbs had just survived an intense battle on the beach, digging in deep with a buddy and eating raw bacon for three days.
When the fighting had calmed enough, he was assigned to drive a truck to help set up lines of communication for the U.S. troops. He was steering up a hill when he came upon several other Americans searching the bodies of three dead Japanese.
One of them was 36-year-old Matsuji Takekawa.
“I saw the letter sticking out and I said, ‘I don’t wan’t any swords or anything, but I think I’ll take this letter.’ I just picked it up, I suppose out of curiosity. But I felt a little bad about it at the time.”
Hobbs took it with him when Japan’s surrender that August meant he could leave the island after eight months.
He considered himself lucky.
The battle, which began on Feb. 19, 1945, and lasted more than a month, claimed 6,821 Americans and 21,570 Japanese.
About 12,000 Japanese are still classified as missing in action and presumed killed on the island.
Japan’s government announced last week it is investigating two sites believed to be mass graves that may contain as many as 2,000 of the dead.
The battle for the tiny volcanic island became a symbol and rallying point for the U.S. after the American flag was raised on its highest ground, Mount Suribachi.
For Hobbs, it was simply a killing field. “It was just death everywhere, and I hated it.”
Hobbs graduated from Harvard Business School, married and raised a family. One day, his wife, Marge, was going through his things at their home in Brookline, Mass., she noticed the mementos and suggested Hobbs try to return them. They contacted a family friend, Reiko Wada, who could read the address on the envelope.
Though the address was outdated, Wada contacted the Japanese health ministry — which keeps records for pensions — and was able to find the family in the northern Japan city of Sanjo, where it owns a liquor store. To Wada’s surprise, the baby in the photo — Yoko Takekawa — was living in New Jersey, where she had moved to do missionary work.
On a trip to Japan two years ago, Wada turned the photo and drawing over to Japanese officials, who had them delivered to the older sister, Chie, who still lives in Japan.
Chie Takekawa said they are on the family altar, where she makes daily offerings of water — in her father’s letters home, he often spoke of his constant thirst.
“It’s hard to bring back the emotions that I felt when I first saw the letter,” she said. “We were all amazed that this could happen. I was just so happy.”
