I remember another incident.
One of the abuses of middle school life was that the older boys invariably bullied the younger ones. One practice they delighted in was to get their miserable victim in some lonely field and, on some trumped-up charge, lay into him savagely with their fists. As were were wandering over the hills one day we had the bad luck to be caught by a gang of bullies.
One of them—his father owned a silk mill in our town—a rough, stupid fellow, called Okawa, came rushing at us.
“Look here, Sakai, you’ve been getting too cheeky lately.”
Sakai gazed into this face for some time and then blurted out impulsively, “How do you make that out?”
The big boy suddenly gave him a punch in the chest.
“I’ll teach you to answer back a senior. That’s cheeky.”
Sakai rolled over on the grass, but soon picked himself up and made a mad rush at his assailant’s chest. But he was much smaller and, anyhow, it was three to one. The next minute he was on the ground again and was beaten like a dog. When he rose a second time I saw the glint of steel. It was his new penknife he held in his right hand.
The colour left Okawa’s lips. Sakai’s face, too, seemed to go a shade paler. Swiftly as a rat Okawa scurried, but Sakai ran him down near the place he had once squashed the snake. The patch
