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Students Cheer On Chinese Freestyle Skiers (February 17)
Chinese athletes competing in the preliminary round of freestyle skiing aerials at the Iizuna Kogen ski area on February 16 had a large group of kids cheering them on. They were pupils attending Kawada Elementary School in Nagano, who made a school trip to see the event and to support Chinese skiers with more than 150 flags sent by an alumnus.The Chinese flags were a gift from Yukio Sakaguchi, the 97-year-old honorary chairman of Nisshin Oil Mills, who claims that China is his second home. After Sakaguchi graduated from a Nagano high school, he moved to Shanghai, China, and went to work at a Nisshin factory in present-day Dalian (in northeast China). When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, though, he had to part ways with his Chinese friends with whom he had spent many enjoyable evenings.
Although Sakaguchi was captured by Soviet soldiers at the end of World War II, he was freed thanks to the intervention of his former Chinese colleagues at Nisshin.
"When I found out that athletes from China were coming to Nagano I was overcome by a feeling of nostalgia," Sakaguchi recalls. He said he decided to send a box of Chinese flags to his alma mater when he learned that pupils from the school would be going to see the freestyle aerials.
"I wanted the kids to do the cheering for me," Sakaguchi explains. "and to shower the Chinese athletes with warm and friendly applause." (Shinano Mainichi Shimbun)
Kawada Elementary School pupils wave Chinese flags sent by an alumnus.