The Fresh Green of Mount Aoba and the Vanishing Footsteps

This is a dialogic narrative based on historical events. A grandfather, a witness to the 1950 Tohoku University Eells Incident, passes down the silent memory of his turbulent youth to his grandson, Ritsu, in the year 2026.

Episode 1: The Rusted Stylus

Outside the window, the wind rustled through the green leaves of Sendai, just as it did all those years ago.

May, 2026.

Inside the sterile, white walls of a hospital room.
Ritsu, a college student, sat by his grandfather’s bed, aimlessly touching the touch-sensitive light switch on the wall.

His fingertips slid smoothly over the flat, inorganic plastic without any resistance or friction.

The flat digital light flickered silently with each touch, offering no raw or vivid texture of reality.

"Ritsu, would you open that package you have there?"

His grandfather’s voice, raspy yet clear, broke the silence of the room.
Having reached his 90th birthday, Sotsuju, his body no longer moved as he wished.

Yet, deep within his eyes, there was still a lingering spark, like an unquenchable warmth.

Ritsu pulled a small, unnaturally heavy brown envelope from his pocket, which he had retrieved from his mailbox at home just this morning.

The sender was an unfamiliar individual's name.
The contents were described simply as: "Personal effects."

As Ritsu carefully tore open the edge of the envelope, a polite letter on washi paper and a heavy metal bar slipped out.

It was an old stylus, covered in red rust, with a tip as finely pointed as a pencil.

His fingertips moved from the seamless plastic of the switch to the coarse, rusty texture of the stylus.

A rough, heavy sensation—proof that someone's passionate hands had once held it.

The cold metal quietly drew the warmth from Ritsu’s fingertips.
The grandfather stared intently at the rusted stylus, letting out a thin, trembling breath.

"A stylus... So he still had it. I lent it to him back then, and I never saw him again after that day."

The letter was from the family of a former university comrade who had passed away last month.

The comrade who, on that fateful day, had been arrested and expelled from the university.

"That was once my entire world. And it is the very past that I betrayed."
Gazing at the stylus with both affection and a hint of dread, the grandfather began to speak softly.

"May, 1950. The fresh green of Mount Aoba was painfully bright back then."

"I was a student at Tohoku University, in the literature department, just like you are now."

"Only five years after the war, we devoured books on philosophy and socialism, arguing late into the night."

"We truly believed the university was the last fortress of freedom in Japan."
"But then came Dr. Walter Crosby Eells, the educational advisor for GHQ."

" 'Purge the communist professors from your universities,' he declared."

"To us, his words sounded like the curtain rising on a new era of state surveillance and oppression."

"Was the academic freedom we had only just won about to be stripped away by American hands?"

"Before printing those flyers, I always stared at my own fingertips," his grandfather said, raising his voice slightly as he looked down at his motionless hand.

"I would ask myself, 'Will my hands move as delicately as always today?' "

"Feeling the cold steel of the stylus, I spoke to my own body, carving each letter with desperate intent on the stencil sheet."

"I borrowed this very stylus from him, spending sleepless nights carving the words 'Defend academic freedom' to print our flyers."

"But on that day—May 2, 1950."

"The lecture hall erupted instantly, transforming into a battlefield of shouting and swirling heat."

"Students rushed the stage, seizing the doctor's microphone, screaming."

"Both he and I were in that crowd."

"But he was arrested, and I fled, consumed by fear."

"He was expelled and vanished from the university, while I chose silence, living out a successful, comfortable life as if nothing had happened."

"This rusted stylus... perhaps it is his final question, put to me after all these years."

Afterword & Next Episode

Thank you for reading Episode 1.
A single "rusted stylus" delivered to a quiet hospital room.
It awakens the frozen passage of time in the grandfather's heart, resurrecting the storm of the 1950 Eells Incident at Tohoku University.
In Episode 2, the intense drama of the microphone seizure at the Mount Aoba campus and the fateful choices they made will begin.

Stay tuned for Episode 2!

📖 Next Chapter:https://note.com/ttukumoo/n/ne1d62c41efa4
🌐OriginalJapanesehere:https://note.com/juicy_laelia8513/n/nbe2cabd424a5

"Thank you so much for reading to the very end!"💗