K02U, Katherine Burghart ‘02, Seiryō Hayashi, Grandfather, 1925,Toyama, Fukui
I interviewed Seiryō Hayashi, my grandfather, who is 75 years old, on November 3, 2000 in Tōkyō. He described to me his experiences during World War II and the U.S. Occupation of Japan.
I was born in 1925 and grew up in Yatsuo, Toyama Prefecture. My father was a farmer and the Yatsuo village head. When Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941, I was attending high school in Toyama City. There was very little change to our lives immediately after war was declared. My friends and I continued to go to high school, but we knew that when we graduated, we would have to enter the military. In high school we received some simple military training, like marching, and we had to listen to patriotic speeches by the military officers assigned to our school. We followed the course of the war through newspapers, the radio, and newsreels, on the rare times we went to the movies. Frankly, since Toyama is on the the Japan Sea and had no industry or any strategic importance, it was not threatened by the American Army Air Force at any time during the war, until the very end, when it was devastated by U.S. bombing.
Of course, due to the propaganda, we thought that Japan was winning the war, but in retrospect perhaps we should have realized that the war was not going Japan’s way, when some children from Ōsaka who were related to some people in our village came to stay. In Yatsuo we never really suffered during the war, compared to the people who lived on the Pacific Ocean side of Japan.
My father grew lots of vegetables and fruits along with rice on his farm, and being near the sea, there was always fish to eat as well. I remember that there were some shortages that quickly developed, like oil and gasoline, but we had very little use for those things and so did not miss them when they became scarce. Since I lived in an isolated, rural area of Japan and lived a simple life, the war had very little impact on my family and myself.
After I graduated from high school in 1944, I joined the Imperial Japanese Navy. I was sent to Hiroshima for about eight months of basic and technical training. This was quite exciting for me, not necessarily because of the war, but it was the first time I had lived outside of Yatsuo or Toyama. I was very lucky after that, because in March 1945, I was assigned to a radar unit in Fukui. Therefore I left Hiroshima about five months before the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the city. I really did not have a particularly hard or dangerous assignment in the Navy. I just sat in front of a radar screen for about six hours a day and watched the monitor. It was very quiet, because Fukui did not interest the American Air Force and was probably out of the range of most of their bombers. Of course, by that time in the war, Japan did not have an air force to defend us, so if we had spotted any American planes, all we could do was sound a warning.
After Japan surrendered in August 194, I was quickly discharged from the Navy. Fortunately for me, it did not take me long to return home to Toyama. The trains were running on erratic schedules, but I was able to squeeze on to a local train that finally got me back to Toyama and then Yatsuo.
It took about a month for a detachment of American soldiers to come to Toyama to establish the Occupation. I can not recall any Occupation soldiers ever coming to our small village of Yatsuo. They may have visited briefly but I never saw any. I know that, during this time, people living in the cities had a very difficult time, since their homes had been destroyed and food was in short supply. However, I was fortunate to have lived with my family on a farm that was large by Japanese standards. We had an adequate food supply and could supplement our diet by catching fish in the Jinzu River.
The major economic problem we had in Toyama was not shortages of food and shelter but lack of jobs. The economy was in shambles, and most people struggled to maintain just a subsistence living standard. Very few people had an income. I worked on the farm; there was no mechanization of farm work then, so all the tasks had to be done by hand. I really wanted to find a job to earn money. I think it took me about four years before I found a position with Nissan Chemical, a fertilizer manufacturer.
I remember the Occupation was very harsh for many Japanese. I escaped the worst of the deprivation, since my father’s farm was almost self-sufficient. However, all Japanese were affected by the reforms of the Occupation and the freedom we suddenly had, despite being controlled by America. Democracy was imposed on Japan through a new constitution written by Americans. There was land reform which gave many poor tenant farmers their own land; this was an important change for our area. Women being allowed to vote was another example of dramatic change in a very short period of time. Bits of American culture, like music, even penetrated our village of Yatsuo. Japan in 1950 was completely different from that country called Japan in 1940.