H06, Sayaka Haishi ‘00, Grandfather, 1925, Grandmother, 1928, China, Hokkaidō, Tōkyō
Before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States on December 8, 1941, Japan had already invaded China and Vietnam. The Japanese Army then attacked the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia and kept moving southward to enlarge the area under Japanese control.
My grandfather, who is now 73 years old, was sent to China in January 1944 at the age of 19. All male students, except for those with health problems, were sent off to countries under Japanese control to fight in the Army. This was called gakuto-shutsujin (student mobilization), which sent students overseas to fight for Japan. First he was sent to Shanghai, but his division kept on fighting and moving towards Nanjing, and then when they finally reached the interior, the war ended with Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. The Army moved back to Shanghai on foot. It was a year later when he was finally able to return back to his home country, because there were many thousands of soldiers and civilians waiting to get on the ships to go home.
In June 1946 he arrived in Hakata in Kyūshū and then took a train home to Tōkyō. He lived in Asakusa, along the Sumida River in a place called Yanagibashi, but all he could find was burned down houses. His neighborhood was completely gone, and he had nowhere to stay, so he called his friends and relatives and left for Hokkaidō where her mother had evacuated.
After the men had gone to fight in the Army, the women had to work in factories to make uniforms and machinery for planes. My grandmother, who is now 70, worked in a factory making army uniforms and also in a printing office where paper money for occupied countries like Malaysia and Indonesia was printed.
The food shortage was a big problem. Most families had only small amounts of rice, mostly potatoes and flour. The flour wasn’t white like it is now; it was red. The leaves of the potato plants were eaten too. All green leaves were considered edible, and so everything was eaten. For everyone to get the same amount of food, ration coupons were distributed, but most times the food ran out, and even people with coupons couldn’t buy food. Rice could not be grown, because all of the men had been sent off to fight in the war, and there was no one left to work on the rice farms. The food shortage got even worse, because the government said that more people would be needed for the army in the future, because right at that time there was a shortage of Japanese soldiers. This resulted in a population growth, with many babies born and many more empty mouths to feed.
My grandmother lived in Shin-Ōkubo, where the Japanese Army ran many officer candidate schools. These were military academies which taught cadets to become career officers, so her neighborhood was often targeted by the American B-29 bombers, which dropped shōidan (incendiary bombs). After the first B-29 attack in 1944, fire drills and practices took place to save the residents from the American attack. My grandmother remembers learning how to put out large fires. Each family dug trenches in the yard for a place to hide from the attack. In those days, most people didn’t live in apartments, so every family had their own yard to dig an air raid shelter. These dugouts were small, with nothing inside. Everyone carried their zukin (a thin cap-like pillow to protect your head from falling objects and fire), because they had no idea when the sirens would go off.
My grandmother worked with a sewing machine to make uniforms for the Army. One day she accidentally sewed over her right forefinger. The needle didn’t break, and it poked five to six holes right through her finger. Blood squeezed out like big red beads. She cried and went to the factory clinic, but when the doctor saw her crying, he shouted at her “Stop crying! Think of all the soldiers suffering for our country! This man sitting here just scratched off an infection in his eye, because it was getting too swollen. You have no reason to cry!” She was shocked to hear this.
All of the girls who work for the Army got one loaf of bread (koppe-pan) everyday. This was kept a secret, because the Army didn’t want poorer people who had no food at all to find out. My grandmother took the bread home for her family. No one ever told her not to talk about the bread, but no one ever said a word about it.
Incendiary bombs (shōidan) didn’t cause radiation hazards like atomic bombs, but they caused fires and houses were blown apart during the attack. My grandmother and her sister were moving all of their possessions into the air raid shelter until they realized they were surrounded with fire on all sides. A fireman screamed “Is anyone else out there?” She splashed water over her sister and then herself. They were soaked with water, and they ran through the fire to an open field where they were able to find the rest of their family. They watched their house burn down while sitting on top of a large bare earthenware pipe. She thought that if they had been too scared to run out of the fire, both of them would have burned to death within their own house. Because of this attack, my grandmother doesn’t have even one photograph of herself when she was young. All of her memories were burned down with the house in Shin-Ōkubo.