H11, Hitomi Ina ‘00, Tomiyo Watanabe, Grandmother, 1921, Fukuoka, Kumamoto
I interviewed my maternal grandmother, Tomiyo Watanabe. She is 77 years old this year. The topic of this interview is World War II, also called the Pacific War in Japan. The interview took place in my grandmother’s house in Kawasaki.
My grandmother was in her fourth year of secondary school when World War II broke out in Europe. She remembers the teacher announcing to the class that the war had started. However, at that time people’s lives didn’t change, except that many men were going off to battle. When she was 20, the war against the United States began after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. She lived in the city of Moji, which is now part of Kita-Kyūshū and quite far from Tōkyō, but even so the city was bombed. She remembers the American planes and the bombs, looking like a stitch of a sewing machine. These planes were dropping napalm, an oil-like liquid, on the roofs of houses, approximately every 300 to 500 meters. Then that liquid started burning almost immediately. Her house was burned down.
At the time of the bombing, she was living alone, since her mother had died that year, her sister was in Tōkyō, her two brothers were off to war in the Army, and her father had gone to Kumamoto. When the U.S. Army was bombing her city, dropping bombs every few hundred meters, the wind was blowing towards her house, blowing all the smoke in that direction. When she noticed that not only the wind but also the planes were approaching in the same direction, she took the minimum items which she had prepared (such as we now keep as an emergency kit for earthquakes). She remembers that she couldn’t see her way because of the smoke. When she came out of the house, the city was all on fire, which she described as a “sea of fire.” When the bombing took place, she hid in the air raid shelter (bōkūgō) until it was over.
After losing her home, she went to live with her paternal grandparents in Kumamoto. While she was there, diseases began to spread as a result of the bombing. When her aunt caught one of the major diseases, my grandmother rode her bicycle for a long way to ask the doctor for treatment, but when she reached the clinic, there was a pile of corpses in front of it, which one doctor was treating. During this time, most doctors were sent to the battlefields to treat the soldiers, leaving only a few in the cities. With so many corpses lying in front of the clinic, she couldn’t ask the doctor to come to her home and treat her aunt. As a result her aunt died from the disease.
What she wants to emphasize the most to the generations who didn’t experience the war is how she (and probably most Japanese) felt that the military government was using the name of the Emperor to justify the war. She remembers that the Emperor and his family were not considered human. They were “gods.” Every time she opens the curtains, or sees them being opened, it reminds her of a ceremony on any kind of special occasion at school. On the day of the ceremony, the principal, wearing white gloves, brought the large photograph of the Emperor from the special house that had been built just for the purpose of keeping the photo of the “god.” When the ceremony began, the photograph was covered with the curtain (again, made just for that purpose). The principal announced “Teitō.” This is when everyone, including both teachers and students, lowered their heads, while the principal slowly opened the curtain. People only raised their heads when the “god” appeared completely.
Because she had lived in Moji, the harbor town connecting Kyūshū with Honshū, she remembers the entire city gathering when the Emperor’s relatives passed through the city. Everyone had to lower their heads when they heard “Teitō,” and she couldn’t even see the faces of the imperial relatives.
Towards the end of the war, news about the battles wasn’t spreading properly. In her case, she lived far away from the city to avoid bombing, but this was true even in the cities. There was no television at that time, and the radio programs only had music. The newspapers, which were published irregularly, only informed people of victories. Even a few months before the atomic bombs were dropped, and Japan was losing battles, the newspaper headlines only spoke of battles won. When the atomic bombs were actually dropped, the headlines said “balloon bomb” or fūsen-bakudan. They did not call it a nuclear weapon.
When the end to the war was announced, she didn’t actually feel relieved. The war had left people with no food, no houses, and death. She remembers feeling that she was supposed to be happy to hear the news, but she really wondered “Why did Japan lose the war after all this pain?” Just because a piece of paper was signed, it was impossible for people to feel that everything was going back to how they were before, because that would never happen.
She says that she never hated the Americans. Instead she said that Japan must have been over-confident about its own power, because of events in the past, such as victory in the Russo-Japanese War and the “kamikaze” (divine wind) that saved the country from the Mongols. She also didn’t feel hatred towards General Tōjō Hideki, who was executed after the Tōkyō War Crimes Trial. She was too tired to hate.