A Long Journey Home : Brought to the U.S. as a Memento of War Nearly 50 Years Ago, Japanese Sailor’s Diary Is Returned to His Family

Through three generations of war and peace, the dead Japanese sailor’s World War II diary remained tucked away in Albert Elsbernd’s bottom desk drawer, a mysterious journal in a complicated foreign script.

Picked up in a battle-scarred building in the Philippines in 1945, brought home to a 14-year-old Elsbernd by a returning U.S. soldier, the indecipherable chronicle was treasured as a young boy’s war memento. But years later, the book began to eat at Elsbernd, who came to see it as something that had to be returned to its rightful owners.

Now, nearly 50 years afterward, Elsbernd’s mysterious war trophy is back home: With the help of his nephew, Mark Elsbernd, a manufacturing engineer for a Japanese-owned company, the leather-bound volume was finally returned to relatives of the luckless sailor, Kazumi Nemoto.

In a small ceremony Wednesday in the isolated northern Japanese town of Samekawa, about 200 miles north of Tokyo, Mark Elsbernd turned over the book on behalf of his Uncle Albert, ending a search that was aided by top-level Hitachi executives and the Japanese press.

“It was an emotional day,” said Elsbernd, 38, of Granada Hills, after a three-hour meeting with Hiroshi Nemoto, a 70-year-old nephew of the dead sailor. “I couldn’t believe the warm feelings I got. I thought to myself, ‘It’s over. The diary is finally back in the place it belongs.’ ”

Mark Elsbernd learned of the saga last month when he was contacted by Uncle Albert, a 64-year-old retired Cincinnati police officer, about the diary he had kept in a bottom drawer shoe box, tucked away with the car insurance papers, bank statements and pictures of the kids. Mark, who is an engineer for Dataproducts Corp. in Woodland Hills, a division of Hitachi, contacted company executives in Japan, who took a special interest in the project and launched a search for members of Nemoto’s family who could claim the diary.

The family came forward the day after a Nov. 10 story in a Japanese newspaper.

The surviving Nemoto is the youngest of seven children. He is a municipal official in the small town who had long given up hope of collecting any more mementos of his dead uncle. He and his siblings are Nemoto’s closest known living relatives.

Kazumi Nemoto, a Japanese naval aircraft technician who would have been 70 this year, kept the diary for several months in 1945, translators said, logging not only personal data, but precise accounts of military movements and various aircraft records. Still bearing a 300-yen price tag, the book had only three English words within its pages--”stainless steel plates.”

The diary described Nemoto’s sadness over his inability to get together with a brother during a military leave. It also included passages describing a malarial disease that killed many Japanese troops--and perhaps Nemoto as well--in the spring of 1945, months before the war ended.

Its final entry was not long before Nemoto’s death on April 24, 1945, at age 21, according to Japanese military records.

The Japanese army later withdrew from the Philippine village where the book was found, according to the Elsbernd family. Discovered in a desk in an artillery-battered building, the diary was brought home by a boyfriend of Albert Elsbernd’s older sister.

“I was just a kid with wild aspirations about war and battles and this book represented something of a fantastic mystery to me,” Albert Elsbernd recalled. “It was written almost entirely in Japanese, which gave it this great mystique. But it was something kept by a soldier, a real soldier, an enemy soldier. And that was breathtaking for me.

“As I got older and cleaned that shoe box out time and again, I never threw the diary away. I had this premonition that someday I would turn to it again.”

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Years passed. Albert Elsbernd fought in the Korean War, served nearly three decades in the Cincinnati Police Department and retired to a job as a security guard. But the book’s unsettled business continued to weigh on his conscience.

At night in bed, he would recall the way his aunt grieved for his cousin, killed in Germany during World War II just three months after his 18th birthday.

“My cousin had been taken at such a young age that my aunt never had time to collect enough pictures, to have things she could look at and keep in his memory--and it broke her heart,” he said. “I convinced myself that this book might make somebody in Japan feel good, maybe lessen another mother’s pain of losing a son so young to war.”

Albert Elsbernd tried several times to translate the diary, looking for clues that might help him find the author’s family. Finally, last month he contacted his nephew in Los Angeles--knowing that as an American employee of a Japanese-owned corporation, Mark had regular contact with company executives in Japan.

One night, when the two were having dinner at a Burbank restaurant, the elder Elsbernd took the book from his pocket. Mark Elsbernd recalled: “He told me, ‘This is something I’ve been holding for a long time. I don’t think I should keep it any longer. It belongs to somebody else.’ ”

Albert Elsbernd said: “I told him, ‘If you don’t find anyone who wants this, just toss it in the ocean. That way, it could finally make its way back to Japan. Because I don’t think its owner ever did.’ ”

But Mark Elsbernd did not throw the pocket-sized notebook into the sea. Instead, he showed it to Katsuhide Kato, a Hitachi executive from Japan.

“When he saw the diary, his eyes lit up,” the engineer said. “He read the thing cover to cover. He told me, ‘In Japan, this would be invaluable. In my country, everything is family. This is a book any family would want to have again.’ I think the project took on a cultural significance for him.”

Kato said in a phone interview from Tokyo: “Had the circumstances been different, if Mr. Elsbernd had been an American soldier who had taken the diary from the body of the dead soldier Nemoto, it might have been a sad experience for the family. But this was not the case. The diary was being presented by someone who had received it as an innocent young boy, who was now a grown man with a very gentle heart. This gave the book more spiritual importance. And we wanted to help find the family.”

Kato consulted a high-ranking Hitachi executive, Hiroshi Gonmori, now 70--who as luck would have it also served in naval aviation in the Philippines.

Gonmori initiated a search of military records for information on the deceased sailor. When that failed, company executives went to a local Japanese newspaper. The story ran under the headline: “Please Help Search for Soldier Nemoto’s Family.” The nephew phoned the newspaper the next day.

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Mark Elsbernd agreed to return the diary on his next business trip to Japan. Hitachi executives accompanied him to Hiroshi Nemoto’s home to present the diary Wednesday.

Elsbernd said he could feel his heart beating when he came face-to-face with Nemoto.

“He bowed to me, and I bowed back,” he said. “Then we shook hands. I smiled. He smiled. Then I gave him the book. I told him. ‘Sir, this diary belongs with you, not us.’ ”

Albert Elsbernd, meanwhile, was back in Cincinnati, thinking of a young Japanese warrior he never met.

“The lesson here is that no matter what color your uniform, no matter what side of the battle you’re on, you have people at home who care,” Elsbernd said. “That’s what this book is about: It’s about family.”