That spring 50 years ago

Xinhua News Agency, Tokyo, April 8 Title: That spring 50 years ago

Xinhua News Agency reporters Wang Zijiang, Yang Guang, And Guo Wei

Atsuko Sasaki is 77 years old and has snow-white hair, and she has lived in an apartment building near Asakusa in northern Tokyo for seven years. Every Monday through Friday, she would walk for more than half an hour to a temple to pay her respects to her husband, rain or shine.

The storage of the temple's ashes has been automated, and she only needs to swipe the card, and the conveyor belt will send the urn out. Atsuko would light incense and talk to her husband. She said that the reason why she avoided the crowded weekend was to chat with her husband across time and space.

It's been more than 8 years since her husband left this world, and Atsuko feels that he has never left, and has never left since the two were married in Beijing on December 19, 1987.

"I just think people really can't say it, but the fate is there." Atsuko told Xinhua News Agency.

The separation began in Nagoya in April 1971, exactly 50 years ago, when the 31st World Table Tennis Championships were held in the spring, just like now. Atsuko, who grew up in northwest China, had just returned to Japan from China for a few years, and she was not used to living in the remote Shimane Prefecture, and she always wanted to return to China. After learning that the Chinese table tennis delegation had come, I felt that "my relatives have come, and I must go to see them."

Since Rong Guotuan won the world championship in 1959, table tennis has swept the country. Atsuko remembers playing table tennis when she was in the fifth grade of elementary school in Jiuquan. "Everyone carries a ping-pong racket, rushes out to grab the stage after class, and when the bell rings after class, if the teacher says one more word, everyone stomps their feet, which makes the teacher embarrassed."

Atsuko did not dare to go alone, so he made an appointment with a colleague, the two took the night train to Nagoya, the organizing committee said that There was a competition in China the next day, it was particularly nervous, it was best not to disturb, and it was recommended that they go again after the game. At the end of the competition on April 7, Atsuko and her colleagues took the night train to Nagoya again, and when they heard that two Young Japanese women were visiting, the Chinese team sent Zhuang Zedong to meet him, the most famous athlete of the Chinese team, who won the men's singles championship of the World Table Tennis Championships three times in a row in the 1960s. Dunzi remembers that he was wearing a red Chinese team uniform, he took out a delegation brooch to give her as a souvenir, she did not want, she wanted the national emblem he wore on his chest, but was refused: "This is not OK, each of us has only one, every time we appear to wear." ”

The meeting was short, less than 15 minutes, but it left a deep impression on Atsuko.

"Very tall!" Atsuko recalled. "Actually, he's not very tall, it's about 1.70 meters, but I think he's very tall." When I saw him, I felt that he was the kind of spirit of the Chinese nation. ”

Hearing that the Next Day the Chinese team was going to take a train back to China via Osaka, Atsuko and her partner found a small hotel near the train station, and she was so excited that she didn't close her eyes much overnight, and wrote a letter that was three or four pages long, expressing the excitement of a Japanese who grew up in China and was excited about the Chinese team winning the championship and seeing the championship. The next day, she squeezed through the "sea of people" in the station to send off, and finally saw the members of the Chinese team again on the carriage, and handed the letter to them in person.

It also happened to be April 8.

Atsuko didn't know what happened in the middle of that World Table Tennis Championships, what the man she saw did outside the arena, or the world-changing "ping-pong diplomacy" that happened two days later.

Of course, she couldn't imagine that she would have intersected with this person named Zhuang Zedong in the future.

These experiences, and the stories that followed, she had told them many times over the past few decades, but when she told them again, she still had tears in her eyes.

Then it was the 80s, and life had ups and downs, and the years had twists and turns. In 1987, she went through all the hardships to give up her job in China for a Japanese company, changed her nationality, and married Zhuang Zedong, who was a coach at the Children's Palace in Beijing.

"Actually, the president of the Japanese company talked to me and he said you can still work in Beijing if you want. But my mother said that when you marry Mr. Zhuang, you must be wholehearted. So Atsuko sold her house in Tokyo and went to Beijing to become a housewife.

In the 1980s, there was a big gap between income and living standards between China and Japan, but Atsuko said the decision was not difficult. "I really experienced the power of love, and I felt that as long as I was around Mr. Zhuang, I could suffer anything." It's strange that when you hear these things in a novel or a movie before, you don't have any feelings, but when you actually encounter it, you know its great power. ”

In interviews, Atsuko always referred to him as "Mr. Zhuang".

After getting married, the two people were almost inseparable, Atsuko said, and the two people only lived together for 26 years when they were not together in the shower and on the toilet. "He is outside the Lord, and I am inside the Lord." I used to say that Mr. Zhuang is the sun, I am the moon, I borrow the light of the sun, and without the sun, the moon cannot emit light. ”

On February 10, 2013, Zhuang Zedong died of illness in Beijing, and Atsuko lost her only relative in China. She also has five siblings in Japan, and she has been living in Tokyo since 2014 to take care of her.

Atsuko's phone hangs a pendant made from a group photo of the two of them from many years ago, and the two people in the photo are smiling happily. Tokyo's home is also full of her husband's photos and calligraphy works, the other day the Tokyo earthquake, Atsuko lived on the 10th floor shook very badly, because she was worried that her husband's photo fell from the bookshelf, she desperately got up and rescued the photo.

If it were not for the epidemic, she should have returned to Beijing to visit her husband's grave during the Qingming Festival last week, and she used to return to China three times a year, once on the Qingming Festival, once on the Zhongyuan Festival, and once in a table tennis tournament named after her husband.

After her husband's death, she divided the ashes into two parts, one in Beijing and one back in Tokyo.

The beijing cemetery is located in Changping, and the stone foundation at the bottom of the tombstone bears the inscription "Beloved Wife Sasaki Atsuko Kyōri". The back is inscribed: "Here lurks the people whose balls push the earth".

In 50 years, she had only returned to Nagoya once three years ago, when she went to a Japanese tv station to do a show, and the hotel where the Chinese team stayed had become a parking lot.

"I'll never go again, and I'll be sad when I go." She said.