(Voice actor) Ms.Carolyn Miller

People emigrated to Brazil, for example. Many Japanese migrated to Hawaii too. So it wasn’t unusual for people to move abroad. In most cases they were single adults moving to another country, or whole families settling overseas. But also there were cases of children moving abroad with their adoptive foreign parents. “Red Shoes”, a well-known song in Japan is about one of those children moving overseas. The song was based on a true story. The girl’s name was “Kimi-chan”. Kimi-chan was born in 1902 to a single mother. This mother and child family was said to be very poor. So the mother made a decision to move to Hokkaido in pursuit of a job. There she met a man whose name was Shiro Suzuki. She remarried to Shiro, giving Kimi-chan a new father. He was a good father to Kimi-chan. However, their life did not get better even after they started living together. So Kimi-chan’s mother and Shiro decided to take a part in Hokkaido development. They took a job cultivating the undeveloped land of Hokkaido to grow food. The winter in Hokkaido was severe and cruel, and the work was so harsh that many people died from exhaustion. They thought three year old Kimi-chan would be too young to be brought to such an environment, and decided to leave her with a foreign missionary couple. They thought she would have a better life with the foreign missionaries where she could have warm food, rather than staying them in poverty. They made the painful decision to leave Kimi-chan. However Hokkaido development was harsher than they thought. Shiro quit and got a new job with a small newspaper publisher in Hokkaido in 1907. There he and Kimi-chan’s mother met Ujo Noguchi who later became a leading songwriter in Japan. Noguchi had also lost her daughter, at 7 days old in 1908. Although the way they parted with their child was different, they could relate to each other’s sorrow and pain in losing a child. So, Noguchi wrote the song “Red Shoes” based on Kimi-chan’s story. In the song, a girl with red shoes was taken away by a foreigner. It says the girl, with her eyes turned blue, must be living in a foreign land now. However, that was not what really happened. Kimi-chan had an even sadder fate than that.