Life Is a Wonderful Experience: Autobiography of a Photojournalist

By Marie Ueda

Educated during the American Army occupation in Japan, the author begins with her childhood memories describing the postwar era of Japan -- how General Douglas MacArthur saved a doomed nation and reformed it to a democratic state. Being raised in a traditional society, the author exclaims the womens role from her own experiences: an insiders view. Having lived in Tokyo, she saw Japans political, social and economic transformations. During 1970s after leaving Japan, she became an expatriate and studied Western Civilization in three different universities Australia, Spain and Portugal which resulted in her speaking four languages. While in Portugal she began her career as a photojournalist and covered political uprising known to the world as Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976). Upon moving to the United States residing in San Francisco, California, as a foreign correspondent-photojournalist, the book recounts her life journey of personal and professional experiences, covering numerous major social news events, and one of them was a different kind of uprising: the gay revolution of the late 1970s to early 1980s which is now the one of the most controversial and politicized movements in the United States today. During 1980s she became a world travelogue-photographer and traveled the major parts of the globe extensively, and has documented her experiences in different countries and candidly expresses what she saw and what she thought, including many close-calls she encountered. Having experiencing deaths of her loved ones as well as having her own death dreams and also miraculously surviving a near-fatal automobile-accident, she opened up her mind to a different dimension -- the life beyond the death and raised questions regarding our connection with the universe; the paranormal phenomenon that occur on our planet. Concerning the coming future, this autobiography book is written to inform any readers to contemplate and understand our peoples, our planet, and our human awareness in the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532022395

Marie Ueda

MARIE UEDA is a Japanese-born photojournalist and a book author. As a photojournalist she worked for The Guardian newspaper of London, England, and as an author she has written two books: Testimony of the Twentieth Century - Before and After the Berlin Wall (1996), and Japanese Surrender 1945 - Atomic Bomb, Emperor Hirohito and MacArthur (2018).

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 Marie Ueda.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2240-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2239-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908047

iUniverse rev. date: 06/29/2018

Contents

Preface

Part 1 Forming Myself

Chapter 1 Born and Raised in Fukushima

Chapter 2 My Life in Tokyo

Chapter 3 My Life in Australia

Chapter 4 Moving in to Europe

Chapter 5 Working Holiday in England

Chapter 6 My Life in Spain

Chapter 7 My Life in Portugal

Part 2 Developing My Career

Chapter 8 Starting my Career Life in America

Chapter 9 The Turning Point in My Life

Chapter 10 A New Career Opportunity

Chapter 11 My Experience as a Travelogue-Photographer

Chapter 12 My Magazine Journalism Work

Part 3 Experiencing Different Dimensions

Chapter 13 Deaths of My Loved Ones

Chapter 14 Having Dream Experiences

Chapter 15 Experiencing a Miracle

Epilogue

Author’s profile

This book is

dedicated to my mother,

S a d a U e d a

Preface

In the history of the Twentieth Century, there were many remarkable women who influenced the world either politically or socially. Namely, they were Susan B. Anthony, a women’s rights activist of America; Marie Curie, a medical pioneer of France; Indira Gandhi, a political leader of India; Amelia Earhart, an aviation pioneer of America; Margaret Thatcher, a prime minister of England; Aung Sang Suu Kyi, a political activist of Burma, and more. Moreover, less known were Margaret Bourke-White, an American photojournalist; and Leni Riefenstahl, a German wartime cinematographer – their artistic creativity was inspiring. These individuals were all highly professional, respected female pioneers who broke the traditional male dominated world and performed outstanding and remarkable works. As far as I am concerned, they were the real front runners of our time and were the role models for the betterment of women. However, none of them were from Japan. Japanese women have not been represented in the social, political or intellectual arenas; not even one internationally. In this regard, growing up in the sixties in Japan, to be honest, I used to be ashamed of my country. Japanese women were always behind the scenes and behind men. Even post World War II decades after General Douglas MacArthur fully liberated Japanese women – he granted equal opportunity for every woman, gave woman’s rights, encouraged them to have a career, get engaged in responsible fields – and he opened the door to all women to participate in the society they lived in. But this did not entirely work on Japanese women.

However, one thing that was exceptional about Japanese women — they were good in literature. One of such examples was Shikibu Murasaki who wrote Tale of Genji, the longest and oldest novel in the world, which was written more than1000 years ago and is known as a master piece work. Throughout Japanese history, in fact, there were remarkable women authors; they were outstanding novelists, similar to British women novelists in a way, but these topics were all cultural arenas, not social, philosophical, political or intellectual involvements, and unknown to the outside of Japan. In this regard, there was ‘no evolution’ among Japanese women: they live by traditionalism and indulge in traditionalism, and cultured for the traditionalism. Questions began since my youth being raised in a feudal tradition; I saw the absolute oppressed female role without changes and challenges. Because their grandmothers did it, their mothers did it, many women would do it, but as an individual I would have had to follow the same path because of the family or social traditions? Did I have to repeat the same role like other women without developing myself? At that point, since I did not follow the way of Japanese traditional life, I realized that I had to find an alternative living for my future – I should live outside Japan and that would be the only choice for me. So, I did. I took action when I was 27 years old. After I left Japan, I had an opportunity to study Western Civilization at three universities – Australia, Spain and Portugal – and by accident I became a photojournalist. I worked for The Guardian newspaper of London, England. After moving to the United States, I developed my career as a travelogue-photographer and travelled around the globe extensively.

Wandering an unknown world, shooting, seeing the different countries where I had never been to before, and learning about its people were exciting, exotic and fascinating experiences to me. Since I accumulated travel journals in my mind, convincing myself ‘my personal experience is a foundation of myself and best treasure of my life’, I realized that I have many different phases of life experiences that not many people have, so I decided to compile my stories. At that point, by pure accident again, I became a story teller: a book author. To begin with and to be truthful, book writing was a very surprising and unexpected discovery for me, because I never ever thought I could be a writer who could express thoughts in words. But when I did, I realized I could do it and quite easily. So I decided to record my life-long journey in book form and present it to the public. Not only my life-story and travel experiences, but my book - Life is a Wonderful Experience – also includes the interview-testimony of an American war-veteran of World War II in the Pacific who was in Japan in August of 1945. He was a United States marine soldier who was stationed in Nagasaki and photographed the atomic-bombed city and described it to me. He presented to me the most reliable historical information, which cannot be found anywhere else, not even in the National Archives in Washington D.C. The book contents covers from the years of the post-World War II to the early years of 2000, and it parallels with many historical events that took place worldwide.

In the last part of my book I deal with unexplained phenomenon and life after death issues. Since a child, I always believed there were other planets like ours out there, and questions came to my mind — Does human life like ours exist out there, do they have civilizations like ours, and do they have wars among themselves like we do? Do they also produce nuclear arsenals like we do? As is commonly known, death is inevitable for all humans — after we die we go to other worlds or heaven, but our soul continues to ‘recycle’; that is understandable to me. But if the entire planet vanishes from the map of the universe which is caused by evil powers, what will happen to our souls? In this regard, I am looking for an answer. There are some groups which I have joined who study unexplained phenomenon and discuss such inter-dimensional issues. I became a UFO journalist and now belong to the UFO Minority who researches the unknown world and life beyond the universe. I do hope that my book, Life is a Wonderful Experience, will provide readers vital new insights as well as fascinating tales, and the readers will be enlightened and able to expand their knowledge wider than before.

Marie Ueda,

Author

November, 2016

Part One

Forming Myself

CHAPTER ONE

Born and Raised in Fukushima

Childhood in Postwar Japan

I was born and raised in the region of Fukushima, some 150 miles north of Tokyo. The name of Fukushima has been known to the world since 2011; when it was hit by an earthquake-tsunami and nuclear plants exploded causing disastrous environmental pollutions. The time I was born, Fukushima region was surrounded by rural hills, rice fields and clean rivers, and was inhabited by farmers, fishermen and agricultural families. The city where I was born was Shirakawa, about 15 miles inland from the shoreline of Fukushima. The city population was 40,000 and the Shinto festivals took place all year round and the community was traditional; the people were profoundly conservative who came from multigenerational families. I was from a family of eight — a grandmother, father, mother, three older brothers and one younger sister — our family goes back 16 generations. My father was the owner of a Japanese wooden-shoe factory, and was also a landowner of rice fields and vegetable farms, as well a mountain where he got the wood to manufacture the shoes. Our property was quite big and my father employed 30-40 factory and farm workers. In my infancy, despite the fact that World War II was going on in the Pacific islands, my city was quiet and tranquil; there was no sign of disturbance. Most family had a house with a vegetable garden in the backyard, and fishermen from the coastline of Fukushima would come to our community to sell their catch. We ate fresh sardines from the clean ocean and no one was starving; we had a peaceful life and overall I never felt any fear of war. The only thing I remembered about the war was that my father used to say, Tokyo is burning! In the spring of 1945, Tokyo had been air-raided many times by the American B-29 bombers and was burning like hell for weeks. The night sky of Tokyo turned orange for many nights and my father saw it from Shirakawa.

American occupation: Growing up in postwar era Japan, one of the first things I remember was the period of American occupation. American soldiers were everywhere, and there was an American movie boom; Hollywood productions were very popular. My father was fond of the American motion pictures, particularly cowboy and war movies. He often took me to the local movie theatre to enjoy the only entertainment at that time. The films were all subtitled in Japanese and I could not understand the words, but I really enjoyed just following the actions. So at an early age I absorbed the American pop cultures. During the occupation, I recall one specific scene which still remains in my eyes. The city of Shirakawa was suddenly awakened by horrendous sounds of destruction and the ground shook like an earthquake. People were terrified and running toward the direction of the sounds. Out of curiosity I followed them. There were hundreds of military tanks, jeeps, and motorcycles which were passing through the city, like a military parade, and Japanese streets were not made for war tanks, that was causing terrible sounds echoing all over the city. That was the first time I saw war machines with my own eyes, outside the movies. There were thousands of American soldiers sitting on top of the tanks with chewing gum in their mouths as they smiled at us. They threw candies and chocolates to the kids on the side streets looking on. Many kids were picking up the sweets from the ground and very excited. But I did not. There was a sugar shortage in postwar Japan and all kids were crazy to find any sweets, including me. But I never wanted to eat anything by picking it up from the ground, like a dog. I just kept watching them passed by. Nobody was shouting against the passing soldiers, some of the onlookers smiled at and even welcomed them, waving their hands to greet them.

During 1950s: Before the industrial and economic recoveries began, Japan was importing all sorts of products from America, and my father was purchasing those latest Made in America products such as a washing machine, refrigerator and television. These were luxuries and very expensive items in those days. He would show them to my mother and family explaining, These are the latest appliances that Americans are using today. The American people are the number one people in the world! Being a business owner and reading a financial newspaper, my father was keenly informed on international financial issues. So, in comparison to ours, we believed Americans were wealthy and had a high standard of living. Another memory which was etched deeply in my mind was when I visited Tokyo for the first time. My father often made business-trip to Tokyo and one day he invited me to accompany him. I was very excited. Tokyo was the most beautiful city in Japan and people were fashionably dressed; the city life was very sophisticated. But what I saw was very different. In 1945, the last year of the war, Tokyo had been bombed by American B-29 bombers and heavily burnt, and although it was on its way to recovery, the downtown was crowded with poor people in dirty rags. There were the homeless people, war orphans, ex-soldiers, returnees from Manchuria, thieves, smugglers, beggars, and it was chaotic. There was no social order and people would steal anything from anyone. The handicapped war veterans were wearing white clothes and playing war music on the street corners begging for money. Many kids of my age were working as shoe-shiners on the side streets and the war-orphans were also begging for money or food to survive. My father and I were the only well-dressed people around, so many kids came to us to beg showing the palms of their hands. I felt so sorry for them that I gave them some monies, but my father warned me saying, Don’t do it, because hundreds of more kids would follow us for more monies. I felt sorry for them and sometimes wondered what happened to those war-orphans and homeless kids of my age that I saw that day…

Attending Sunday School

One day in the street near my house, a Christian man was showing a ‘picture theatre’ to children. It was a colorful story of Jesus Christ and inviting kids to join a local church. Being raised in the Shintoism/Buddhist tradition, I became curious about the man named Jesus Christ who performed the most important mission in history. He was someone we never heard of in Japan. I simply wanted to know about Him and started going to the church every Sunday, which was run by a Swedish missionary family from Stockholm. The pastor spoke English as well as Japanese, so we learned about the Bible in Japanese. At the end of the class he gave us a homework assignment, which was to paint a picture of Jesus in color and the following Sunday we showed it to him. As a reward, we received chocolates and candies, and that was the only way to get sweets for me. I really liked the story of Jesus Christ; singing songs and enacting His life story on Christmas Day each year, I thought, as a child, that it was the most beautiful human story of all. I really enjoyed attending the church and kept going for years. However, as I grew up and understood better the contents of the Bible, I started to examine the deeper meaning of the words, and some questions popped into my mind. No one else raised questions to the pastor, but I did, saying, To my mind, human is human and God is God. God is invisible and not alive, and the two entities are different. We cannot mix together. I was simply telling him my candid thoughts, but the pastor did not seem pleased with my comments. When I turned about 11 years old, the pastor asked all the kids to go for ‘baptism’. Since I was not convinced and doubted the story about Jesus, I thought why I should. My answer was clear; I immediately quit going to Church. My thinking was, This is a fairy tale story, made up story only for children. Because we kids do naughty things, the text was prepared only for kids in order to control our behavior. No adult would believe such a story! I don’t want to attend church anymore! I never went back to Sunday school ever again.

School Age - MacArthur's Children

Before and during the World War II, the most honored man in Japan was Emperor Hirohito. He was a God figure for Japanese people and Japan was God's country and that was how we were educated at school. Children who were years older than me, making jokes about the Emperor or criticizing Him were prohibited. Yet no one had ever seen Him in person, and it was rare even to see His photo; we did not even know what He looked like. His public appearances were very rare and somehow concealed. But after the war, a big shift took place. This most honored man was replaced by the military general from the United States of America; his name was General Douglas MacArthur, the General and Supreme Commander of occupied Japan. I saw a photo of the two men, Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur standing together. MacArthur was tall and solid, physically well built, and in comparison the Emperor was a short man. This photo was the very first image of the Emperor that appeared for the public to see, and most Japanese reacted by saying, Is He our Emperor? He looks like a human, like us! We thought He was the God of Japan! During the occupation era, more photos of the Emperor started appearing in public, so we soon learned what our Emperor looked like. However, He became the second man in his own country. General MacArthur was above the Emperor; he became the most powerful man in Japan. He was in charge of the fate of the country, as a consequence of the war and the atrocities committed in the South Pacific islands as well as occupied China. Japan was held responsible for crimes against humanity and the Emperor was deemed guilty in that regard. As the commander of the defeated nation, General MacArthur had the almighty power to decide the fate of the Emperor. However, the General decided not to arrest or execute Him, instead, MacArthur became a hero in the country which was the enemy until some months ago.

In my early school-age years, I started hearing good things about General MacArthur. Many people liked him for what he was doing for Japan and praised him, saying, General MacArthur is a great man, he is the savior of Japan! He was certainly popular and supported by the majority. At that time I was too young to understand why he was a good man, but in later years I realized that what people were saying was true. At the end of the war, Japan was completely broken down; utterly chaotic and devastated in many ways — physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and politically — it seemed that recovery was out of the question. But General MacArthur showed up at the right time and the right place; he was the right leader for us. He introduced many reform programs in order to save a dysfunctional doomed Japan. Among his many projects, some of the things I remember were, first of all, that he amended the contents of the Japanese Constitution. For example, the role of the Emperor was changed to being a Symbol of Japan, not the God of Japan. He also changed the contents of school textbooks and education for democratic western systems. One good thing I recall was that he imposed a school lunch program which Japan did not have before. At my elementary school we were now eating an American style lunch – white bread, milk, meat, soup, syrup, cookies and good nutrition for growing kids – and especially the milk which we did not have enough of. Traditionally, we did not eat much meat; our main foods were vegetables, rice, fish and seaweed, and that changed a lot. As a result, postwar generations are taller and healthy compared to wartime generations. Other programs he introduced were the liberation of Japanese women — the rights to vote in election and banning contract marriage – and Freedom of the Press, economic and social reforms, and more. When an economic boom began during the 1960s, I believe it was the long-term result of the reform programs put in place by General MacArthur. In this regard, he was a remarkable reformer for the postwar Japan. Indeed, he was the savior of Japan and it is with good reason that he was highly respected as the Great General by the Japanese. Without him, out of the magnitude of chaos that I recall, Japan might have entered into a military uprising or civil war, as happened to neighboring countries like China and Korea, and the recovery might have been much slower. In this regard, for the generations of postwar Japanese, we are all MacArthur's Children.

Images of Human Destruction

During elementary school, I experienced something that affected me deeply both mentally and emotionally. In our educational classes, we children were obliged to watch documentary films of the Atom-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and taken to a commercial movie theatre. The films were in both black and white and color; we watched and learned that the two cities were totally destroyed, flattened for miles, still burning and smoldering, and among the debris of destruction, burnt, charcoal-blackened human bodies were layered and scattered all over the ground. The Bomb created extremely high heat and victims looked for water to drink; the riverbanks were covered with bodies of those who had tried to drink the water, and died; the river water turned red from human blood. Some victims were still alive, crawling, moving slowly, crying in pain, and seeking water to drink. Among them were many children looking for their parents. In Hiroshima when the Atomic-Bomb was dropped, it was at 8:15 in the morning, a summer heat of August and most children were playing in schoolyards, so a high number of children became victims. I will never forget one particular scene. A girl of my age, 7 or 8; her hair was gone, her clothes had burnt and fallen to pieces, and her face and body were burnt and blackened. She was standing like a zombie amid burnt bodies on the ground, crying in pain and wandering aimlessly, looking for help. When she slowly raised one of her arms, the burnt flesh hung down from it. As those documentary films were shown in a commercial movie theatre, the screen was big enough to see its graphic details. I was terrified and horrified! It was such a horror scene to watch that I have not forgotten it to this day. At that night I had a nightmare. School educators kept showing us more archival films and watching those Atomic-Bomb victims recorded on films were all too real, causing me trauma that was very painful to deal with as a child.

After I learned about the Atomic-Bomb victims, a small incident took place in my house. One day, my father and his business visitor were talking in the living room and I overheard their conversation. My father was asking the visitor, What happened to your ear? I guessed something was wrong with his ear. The visitor replied, I was in Hiroshima on the day the Atomic-Bomb dropped and got hit by radiation blast; one side of my face was burnt and I lost one of my ears! The moment I heard of it, my entire body became chilled. I was terrified, imagining a man who looked like a Frankenstein monster and I did not want to see him, so I quickly ran away to the other room. I was glad that I did not see him, because having many nightmares brought on by the horrifying documentary films, I was very afraid of seeing a ‘real victim’. The Atomic-Bomb victims were called hibakusha in Japanese. In the postwar years, many Atomic-Bomb survivors had to hide their identity to the public, because their cell and genes were affected by radiation, and babies who were born to them were ‘born deformed’. Concerning such a side effect, nobody wanted to marry or employ those ‘genetically defective’ humans: the hibakushas. After the bombing, the radiation-mushroom cloud went up into the upper atmosphere and remained for hours, and when it rained the rain turned a black color like ‘gasoline’ from the radiation it contained. Anyone who was hit by that rain was also affected as it caused side effects, damaging the body cells permanently. Japanese society discriminated against those hibakushas, treating them like ‘untouchable outcasts’. For example, major corporations would not hire them and people would not marry them either, because of their health concerns. They were the innocent civilians and the worst war-victims of the Emperor’s War, but Japanese society discriminated against them who were there at the wrong place at the wrong time. I felt ashamed that Japanese people had no compassion for them.

After showing us these Atomic-Bomb films, the school educators’ next programs for us to watch were real films of World War II in Europe and what was happening on the other side of the globe. These documentary films recorded the human atrocities that were committed by Nazi Germans. I well recall a shocking scene of concentration camps, where thousands of naked corpses were swept up by bulldozers, and carried to pits and dumped. I was again horrified at watching such a real human hell. They were the worst genocide in our entire human history and took place not long ago, just one generation before us, and this happened in Germany, one of the most civilized countries in the world, besides, the time was in the middle of the 20th century, not medieval times! As an eight year old child, many questions came to my mind about why it happened in such a horrendous scale? Why did those people have to be killed and what had they done wrong? And, especially the children of my age, as children were not guilty, why did they have to be slaughtered? The documentaries explained that Hitler was responsible for those mass genocides. Then, I noticed something else. While watched those films, I saw ‘swastika’ in Nazi German flags and German soldiers wearing ‘swastika’ marks on their uniform, and that caught my attention. The swastika is a common sight in