E10B, Julian King ‘94, Shigeko Hoshikawa, Grandmother, 1919, Shizuoka, Aichi, Yamagata, Manchuria
My maternal grandmother lives in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture. I interviewed her by phone on November 30, 1992.
I lived in Ichinomiya city near Nagoya, in Aichi Prefecture, from 1940 to 1945, and then again from 1946 to 1952. Grandpa was forced to join the Imperial Army when he graduated from higher school in 1940, and he was sent to Manchuria. His group included 2,000 soldiers. Of those 2,000 soldiers, 1,500 were sent to Okinawa, and they all died in battle there when the American landed. Many of the others were sent to an island called Mediana in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There was no food, and many soldiers starved. When the Americans came, they couldn’t fight, so many survived.
In Manchuria, Grandpa patrolled the border between Manchuria and the Soviet Union. In 1943, he was sent to Nagoya to send other soldiers by train to their hometowns across Japan. Only one other person came back to Japan at the same time, and he was sent to Hiroshima. It was lucky that Grandpa was sent to Nagoya, because there was less danger there than in Okinawa, where soldiers were killed in great numbers. One of Grandpa’s wishes was to go to Okinawa and pray for the soldiers and civilians who were killed there. He finally went there in 1987, and he was very happy to do that. He felt sorry for many of the soldiers, both those whom he knew and others that he never met, because he was luckily brought back to Japan, where he managed to survive.
The air raids over cities in Japan got worse and worse from 1943 onwards. The American B-29 bombers, at least twelve each night, bombed the center of the city first, and as the residents tried to escape, they bombed the escape routes to kill as many people as they could. Many people hid in the underground shelters, called bōkūgō, during the night. They came out in the morning and went to work as if nothing had happened.
The B-29 incendiary bombs [shōidan] contained lots of oil [napalm], and when they hit the ground, they caused great fires. Many people who lived in the center of the city had to run through the flames to escape. These bombs floated in the river and continued burning as they went downstream.
There was a food shortage, and the amount of food that each person could get was limited by the government. During the war, there was some food, but even less during the two years after the surrender. I had some rice to eat except for one month in July 1944. There was no rice supply, and I had to eat boiled soybeans with no taste for one month.
After the surrender, when food was most scarce, people traded their kimono to farmers and obtained potatoes in return. I also had relatives in Sakata, in Yamagata Prefecture, so I went there for three months after the war, until Grandpa returned and got a job in Nagoya at Nittsū [Nippon Express] logistics company.
After this interview was over, I learned much more about the war, and it made me remember what I had seen at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. There were photographs, taken mostly after the war. These photographs told the truth; they did not lie. You could tell that these photos conveyed reality in a way that people could not express in words. Some pictures and oral history are important for humans.