FEATURE: S. Koreans enjoy emotional reunion with former Japanese teacher

SEOUL, Jan. 4 Kyodo

It was raining outside Nagasaki train station on Nov. 28, 1997, and 83-year-old Megumi Kawaguchi was waiting with four umbrellas.

Kawaguchi, bent and wrinkled with age, taught at a small elementary school in Gimhae of South Korea's South Gyeongsang Province in the early 1940s when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule.

After a while, three men in their 60s showed up to meet with their former homeroom teacher of more than 50 years ago.

''Everything seemed like a dream,'' said Cha Yun, founder-chairman of PR consulting firm CPR.

''I even told my wife to pinch me hard to see if it's real or just a dream after learning Mr. Kawaguchi was still alive and we were going to meet him,'' the 73-year-old Cha said in an interview with Kyodo News.

Kawaguchi was excited about his former students visiting him, Cha recalled.

''The taxi driver who drove us to Mr. Kawaguchi's home didn't receive a fare for the highly emotional and exciting reunion of an old former teacher and also three old former elementary school students,'' Cha said.

''Think about the unforgettable moment that we, all gray-haired and with spectacles for the aged, stood up before Mr. Kawaguchi and were singing a song we learnt from him when we were 10 years old,'' Cha said.

''The three days at Mr. Kawaguchi's home were really like a dream,'' Cha said.

In the minds of Cha and his two fellow classmates, now an Oriental herbal medicine doctor and a Christian missionary, Kawaguchi was ''an emblem'' set for any teacher in the world.

Whenever they got together, their talks often turned to those days when they were learning from Kawaguchi and many memorable episodes that had happened during that time.

In the summer of 1997, one of them visited Japan on a business trip, and he decided to try to find out where his former teacher was living.

After making many telephone calls and asking around he found out that Kawaguchi was living in Nagasaki in Japan's southern main island of Kyushu.

Before beginning his class everyday, the Japanese teacher made it a rule to write on the blackboard the word ''magokoro,'' which means ''sincerity.''

Kawaguchi used to say, ''Being sincere and honest is far more important than doing well in studies,'' Cha recalled.

Cha and other students at that time heard Kawaguchi emphatically saying almost everyday, ''Makokoro motte yarinasai,''(Do everything with sincerity).

Sometimes Kawaguchi reached for his whip to administer corporal punishment, but it was only when a student realized he deserved such suffering.

What made Kawaguchi completely different from other Japanese teachers was he didn't talk about things like respecting the Japanese emperor and ''kamikaze'' or suicide bombers.

''His teachings were about growing up as a sincere and honest man and he himself was really setting an exemplary model for his little students he was teaching at that time,'' Cha said.

In October 1998, the three former classmates invited Kawaguchi for a three-day trip to South Korea during which they took him to the elementary school and other famous tourist destinations.

Kawaguchi was able to meet with a group of other former students who are now mostly farmers and still living in the countryside.

Ever since their reunion with Kawaguchi, who is living in Fukuoka these days, the former students have kept up correspondence with him.

''I am very happy to write letters to Mr. Kwaguchi and receive letters from him. His clear and high-pitched voice on the phone sometimes carries me back to the old days when I was sitting at the classroom where he was teaching,'' Cha said.

Kawaguchi's teachings always stayed in the mind of Cha, who graduated from the Naval Academy and served as an information officer in foreign countries before establishing his PR firm about 10 years ago.

Cha worked as an information officer at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo for five years in the early 1980s.

Cha said he has taken his former teacher's teachings as his company motto, which is ''Honesty, Integrity, Sincerity.''

''I want any teacher to keep asking himself or herself while teaching students whether students would visit them more than 50 years later,'' Cha said.

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