KOKA, Shiga Prefecture--At three years shy of turning 100 years old, Chieko Sugimoto is not easily flummoxed, but nothing could have prepared her emotionally for a recent discovery by her granddaughter.

“Grandma, is this something that is important to you?” the grandchild asked Sugimoto with a quizzical look after cleaning out her storehouse in March.

She was holding a paper box containing a bundle of 40 or so letters. Some of them were marked in scarlet ink, “military post” and “censored.”

Words written on the box warned: “Do not read.”

Sugimoto, 97, was momentarily stuck for a ready answer.

The letters were testament to her first love, which she had sealed deep in the recesses of her mind 80 years ago. She even kept it secret from her late husband.

Sugimoto, the eldest daughter of a farming family in Shiga Prefecture, was born in 1923.

In 1937, war broke out between Japan and China. The day would soon come when her father was called to the front to fight in China.

The village neighbors threw their arms in the air in celebration and shouted “banzai,” the customary send-off for a soldier in those days.

Sugimoto wanted to join the villagers in the joyous celebration for her father but could not bring herself to do so. She was too busy weeping while watching the scene from her hiding place.

Around that time, Sugimoto and her classmates at the women’s high school they attended were asked to each write a letter to a hometown soldier in the field as a class assignment.

Sugimoto was assigned to write to a man named Jiichiro Nishiura. He was a 21-year-old infantry soldier, six years older than Sugimoto.

She simply copied a template for her letter, and was stunned when she received a reply from him, a very caring one at that.

“So your father, too, has been in the field,” he wrote. “Granting though it is for the country, you must be missing him very much.”

Sugimoto decided to send him a pressed flower, to which Nishiura wrote back that he was moved by her “gift of beautiful flower petals from your hometown.”

“You are a true woman guarding the home front, a ‘yamato nadeshiko’ pure and simple.”

He continued, describing what it was like to be in the battlefield: “I am surrounded on all four sides by enemies.”

It marked the beginning of their years of a sweet--and difficult at times--correspondence.

The two finally met when Sugimoto was a student at a technical college in Kyoto.

Nishiura had returned to Japan and visited her on campus. He was slightly taller than her. “He seems like an honest man,” Sugimoto thought.

“Can we meet after school?” he asked her. “How about 5 p.m. at Kyoto Station?”

Sugimoto recalled she was very nervous on her way to the station.

“How about dinner?” Nishiura asked.

Sugimoto, still a teenager, was shy and assumed she should not automatically say yes to such a proposal. She declined, giving an off-the-cuff answer.

As soon as the date was over, she regretted her decision. “I wanted to chat with him more,” she thought.

Nishiura felt the same way, and he later wrote to her saying so: “When I close my eyes, I see you.”

Nishiura visited her at home in Shiga Prefecture during the New Year holidays.

By that time, Sugimoto began to have feelings for him, deciding, “I cannot marry somebody else but him.”

But Nishiura hesitated and wrote to her: “Let’s end our relationship. I am going to join the air corps.”

“It was you, only you and nobody else, that inspired me when I was in the battlefield. You appeared in my dreams on countless occasions when we were quartered in a camp,” he gushed.

“But if you stay with someone like me, your future happiness will be ruined,” he wrote.

In another letter, the lovesick man penned, “Do you think that you and I can make promises concerning each other’s future?”

“I am determined and confident that I can, but will your parents allow it?” he wondered.

Sugimoto was also distressed by the fact that they were raised with very different backgrounds. She was not sure if her father, away from home, would approve of their marriage.

Asked by Nishiura that if she would stay with him even if her father disapproved of their relationship, Sugimoto did not know what to say.

He said he would wait until she graduated from the college.

At the same time, he wrote to her: “I wish you a happy life. Please forget about me.”

“But I will go on, fly around in the great arch of the sky, with your image burned in my heart forever, to accomplish a great mission,” he wrote.

The end came suddenly.

In December 1940, Sugimoto received an express mail from a colleague of the subject of her affections, which read, “Mr. Nishiura died in a crash.”

His aircraft had encountered turbulence on its way from Taiwan to the main islands of Japan.

After Sugimoto’s father returned home, she tied the knot with a man who was one year older than her. Her husband was a very kind man, and they were blessed with three children.

“I should get Jiichiro-san out of my mind,” she swore to herself.

Sugimoto placed all the letters she received from her young boyfriend in a box and hid it in a bookshelf in the storehouse.

She had kept the vow until her granddaughter showed her the box in March.

She no longer remembers the face of her first love. But she wanted to tell the younger generations what she and Nishiura--as well as other young lovers back then--went through during the war.

“Love was forbidden back then,” she said. “Yet, many people kept fighting. Thanks to them, we are here today.”

In July, she created a 31 syllable verse and submitted it to the local Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s tanka section.

Tanka has been Sugimoto’s favorite activity since she finished being a full-time mother. She has created 4,000 verses over the years.

Yet, it was the first time for her to write a verse about Nishiura.

The man she loved and the springtime of her life will never return.

But, sitting in front of the pile of secret wartime letters that she thought she had got rid of decades ago, Sugimoto can now remember a breath of those bittersweet memories.