J12, Eri Yoshida ‘01, Kotoko Yoshida, Grandmother, 1921, Fukushima, Yamagata, Chiba
I would like to introduce my grandmother briefly before starting to write about what I’ve learned from her. Kotoko Yoshida is my mother’s mother, and she was born in 1921, so she is 78 years old. Our interview took place in her room, and we were both very relaxed as we talked. She didn’t mind at all talking about her experiences, which made it a lot easier to listen to her and ask her questions.
It was on December 8, 1941, when World War II broke out. Your grandfather was a petty officer in the Imperial Navy. That is why he was safe, and he wasn’t chosen as one of the kamikaze pilots. When the war started, men went off to war to fight for the country, while women and students who were below the age of 18 had to work at factories. They were making parts of airplanes and ships, and they were preparing the bullets for the soldiers.
Our father was a coward! He hated to lose his house, the factory that he owned, and his family, so we were the first ones to evacuate to the countryside. We were called sokai dai-ichigō (first evacuees). We evacuated to a village called Atsushio Onsen, which is a small hot spring village in Fukushima prefecture.
In the first year of the war, I was 20 years old, and I used to leave my house very early in the morning and crawl into the train, which carried hundreds of passengers to inaka, the countryside. We went to the countryside to farms that had any vegetables they could sell to us.The farmers didn’t want any money, because they couldn’t buy anything with money at that time, but they wanted our possessions, like kimono, jewelry, vase, and so on. Because there wasn’t enough rice, we got ration tickets, and we had to line up in order to receive food from the soldiers. However, that wasn’t enough for us to survive.
So that’s why I had to get on that train everyday, half of my body falling from the window, exposed to the air, and I remember grasping onto some passenger and him holding me in the train. We were all desperate to get on that train, and if we missed that train that left very early in the morning, then we would have had no food for that day. That train would take us to Chiba, Fukushima, Yamagata and many more rural areas. I left very late at night. We couldn’t stay overnight, because the inns asked for rice if you stayed overnight. However, I had to go back, because my family was waiting for me.
By 1944, B-29 bomber planes flew over us everyday and dropped bombs on Tōkyō, Ōsaka, and other populated cities. I remember sewing black curtains for the window and for the lights, so that even if we turned on the light, the airplanes wouldn’t be able to see our houses. If they saw any light, they would immediately drop bombs! We didn’t want that, so we lived in the dark, and used only small light bulbs.
The Japanese government never told the citizens that we were losing. They said that we were winning from the very beginning, which was a lie. We were losing, but they never showed any indication of it. If they had told us that we were losing, then we would have stopped working for the country and just accept the fact that we were losing.
A week before the Second World War ended, the Soviet Union entered the war, knowing that Japan would lose. They announced that they were going to fight against the Japanese Army. However, they didn’t even have to fight. We had already lost. They took the island of Sakhalin, and many Japanese who had settled there were sent back to Hokkaidō. I thought that was really unfair. Just unfair! I still can’t forget about that feeling.
Anyway, we had to survive. We ate anything we were able to find. We even ate the grass that was growing on the streets, anything. We went to the beach, to look for any seafood, we went to the mountains to look for any plants, or mushrooms, or anything that we could eat. We were that desperate.
In Manchuria, during the war, the Japanese Army had a small factory, which was top secret, but of course the word spread around fast. The commander [of Unit 731], called Ishii, planned to manufacture poisons to kill as many people as possible. First, they used the animals to test if the poison worked, and then—it’s awful—they experimented on the Chinese! The Japanese soldiers took many Chinese into the factory, inside a small room, and spilled the poison over them, and they died.
However, after the war ended, the American Army said [to the soldiers in Unit 731] that they would forgive them for experimenting on the Chinese, but they wanted the data and any documents about the poison, so that they could make that poison. It was very dangerous, but of course, the Japanese Army gave that data and documents to the U.S. You can read about this in a book called 731 Butai (Unit 731).
I learned a lot from my grandmother, and I felt like I was in wartime myself, experiencing the war, and suddenly I felt hungry. I was very sad to hear that many children were evacuated to the countryside, away from their parents, and they were treated as if they were important for Japan. They wanted as many children to survive as they could, so that they could rebuild the country after the war.
It was also funny to hear that my grandfather came running home (yes, running as fast as he could!) to my grandmother, so that they could get married. His house had a farm, so they were able to share food with the rest of the family. I was glad to hear that my grandfather was safe, without any injuries after the war ended.