H14, Sayo Kondō ‘00, Haru Kirioka, Grandmother, 1915, Tōkyō, Niigata
On November 15th 1998 I interviewed my maternal grandmother, Haru Kirioka, who is 83 years old. I asked her about her experiences during World War II and what happened to her after the war.
My grandmother was living in Tōkyō before the war with her husband and two children. When the war started, her children were sent to the homes of their relatives as part of gakudō-sokai (evacuation of school children). Then she too went to her relatives’ home in Niigata Prefecture around 1943. There was less bombing there, so she had her children join her there also. My grandfather stayed in Tōkyō to research chemicals at his science lab.
At first there was enough food, but after a while they started to eat roots and vines of vegetables. They cooked these with the flour distributed by the government to make suiton. They also cooked rice with water to make gruel (okayu), but by the middle of the war, there was hardly any rice left. and the okayu was mainly made up of water. They sometimes traded expensive clothing for rice and vegetables with the farmers. Money was useless in those times because there was nothing to buy.
The children could not concentrate on their studies, because they were always afraid of the air raid sirens. Children who came from the big cities such as Tōkyō were often bullied by the local children. English was no longer taught at the schools, and English words such as “baseball” were replaced by Japanese, as “yakyū.” English dictionaries were also used to make cigarettes to sell to people. The pages were rolled into tubes, and tobacco leaves were stuffed into them. During the night, light bulbs were covered by black paper so that the enemy airplanes would not find the houses where people lived. They also put black curtains on the windows to prevent any light from leaking out.
At the beginning of the war, my grandmother and all other Japanese people believed that their country would win the war. The announcers on the radio kept on saying that the Japanese Army was strong and that it had an advantage over the enemy armies. However, the number of men sent away as soldiers increased, and even young students were recruited for the Army. At the beginning of the war, only men who passed the physical examination were sent to fight in battle, but eventually even unhealthy men were forced to become soldiers. People were not informed about the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. and they did not find out about them until after the end of the war.
After the Japanese government surrendered in 1945, my grandmother returned to Tōkyō. However, everything had burned down, and since it was impossible to find the boundary lines between people’s property, her land was taken over by her neighbors. Therefore, she reluctantly returned to Niigata with her husband. She became a tailor there, and my grandfather became a science and art teacher. Her children were all alive and healthy, but my grandfather’s father was unable to cope with the cold weather in Niigata, and he passed away. He had wanted to return to Tōkyō, but he was unable to before his death.
My grandmother had a fairly safe and comfortable life, compared to other families, and therefore she returned to Tōkyō only several years after the end of the war. My grandmother said that she did not have the time to hate the enemy countries. She was preoccupied with thinking about her family’s future and how to continue surviving. She said that the war was a time of fear and sadness, and she hopes that the younger generation will not have to suffer through such hardships.