K05, Yumi Moriguchi ‘02, Fumiko Nakano, Grandmother, 1913, China, Korea, Nagasaki, Yokohama: Naka-ku
On November 5, 2000, I interviewed my grandmother, Fumiko Nakano, who is 87 years old. My grandmother wasn’t directly involved in combat in World War II, because she was living in Kyūshū, but she had an interesting experience in China before the war started.
In 1933, when conflict was already taking place in several places around the world, she was attending a midwifery school in Japan. Because there were so many people injured during this time period, my grandmother and some other students volunteered to go to China to help the injured people. They were packed into a large ship and sent from the city of Hirado in Nagasaki to Shanghai. During that time, Shanghai was the “entrance” of China.
In China, they had to travel around the country to treat the injured soldiers. On the way from Shanghai to the city of Nanking [now Nanjing], they stopped at a town and saw a large number of Japanese and Chinese soldiers injured and naked. They had nothing to wear because their clothes had been robbed by other poor people in China. They had no energy to fight back against the beggars. Also she saw the body parts of the soldiers scattered everywhere, and inhaled the air consisting of oxygen and ashes. My grandmother said that it was one of the most tragic scenes that she saw during the wartime.
She had walked along the Great Wall of China with her school friends during this long journey of approximately six months. Old trees and mud covered the path, but because the Great Wall was also damaged badly, there were some holes in the path, leading to the bottom of the ravine. My grandmother said she saw some people falling down from the Great Wall because of these hidden “traps.”
In the city of Nanking, she went to theaters with the Japanese soldiers to see the traditional Chinese dances. She also walked along the noisy and energetic marketstreet, where ducks (still alive) were sold for sale. Her long journey came to an end at the city of Kwangju in the Korean peninsula, where she sailed back to Kōbe in Japan, again packed into a large ship.
My grandmother also described her experience of the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. She was in the sixth grade in a Japanese elementary school in Kyūshū. Because she lived in a different region of Japan, she wasn’t affected directly by the earthquake. But it did affect the important school event that my grandmother was waiting for. In sixth grade, each class used to save two yen per month so that they could have a school trip at the end of the year. But because of the earthquake, they gave all of their savings to help the people injured in the Kantō area. My grandmother said she still remembers the photographs in the newspaper that she saw about the Kantō Earthquake. There were pictures of people dying in the river, burning to death, or naked and wandering around as if they were in hell, which made her feel sorry for them.
In 1943, two years before the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my grandparents used to live in a company house in Honmoku, a residential neighborhood in Yokohama. World War II had already begun, and many battles took place everywhere. Beginning in 1944, American bomber planes dropped bombs on the cities, changing the peaceful neighborhood into a hell—injured soldiers and civilians were crawling on the ground. One day, one of the American bombs fell on my grandparents’ house, and all of their belongings were destroyed, including my grandmother’s midwifery equipment. However, because my grandmother was visiting her hometown in Kyūshū, she wasn’t injured or hurt at all. Far away, she didn’t even realize what happened to her house until she received a phone call from my grandfather. He was staying in the house in Honmoku, but miraculously survived. When my grandmother returned to Honmoku, what she saw was again “hell.” According to her, what made her really shocked were the children wrapping themselves with reed screens (sudare) because they had nothing to wear. Those children became thieves in the “hell,” robbing other people to survive.
Because my grandmother is 87 years old, she overcame lots of obstacles during her lifetime. While I was interviewing her, I was thrilled because I saw her as the living source of history who had actually seen the real warfare, not just as my “grandmother.” We both enjoyed talking about the past, and she mentioned that she was very happy telling her story to the next generation. She concluded the interview by saying “I’m impressed about Japan becoming very peaceful like it is today.”
I was so impressed by the testimony of my grandmother that I visited her again to celebrate “Respect for the Aged Day (Keirō no Hi).” When I told my grandmother that I’m interested in history and archaeology, she took me to the room in her house where many surprising artifacts were stored. They were the evidence of the past. Many valuable things were there, which belonged to her parents, my great-grandparents.
The first artifact that she showed me was the uniform of the Japanese Navy which belonged to my great-grandfather. My grandmother told me that he used to be the captain of one of the ships in the Navy. I was amazed that the period when he was a naval captain included the years of the Russo-Japanese War. Because I studied about it very recently, I found it interesting that one of my relatives was actually involved in that war. The actual uniform was fairly small, almost the same size as the uniform of a Japanese secondary school student.
When I went to the Edo-Tōkyō Museum during the summer holidays, I learned that Japanese people used to be much smaller than today. The main reason was the lack of food. The people of Edo were not starving, but they never had a surplus of food. They had just enough food in order to survive. It was after the Tokugawa Period of isolation ended that the Japanese people started to grow. My great-grandfather followed that trait.
Even though the uniform was small, it was very gorgeous. I saw many golden buttons, the long jacket down to the waist, and special golden epaulets on the shoulders. I was thrilled to think that this uniform had actually seen the real Russo-Japanese War—enormous explosions, Russian soldiers shouting, and Japanese soldiers fighting to give their lives for the Emperor. I also saw the portrait of my great-grandfather wearing the uniform, drawn by a painter. From my point of view, he seemed to be dignified, suitable for a naval captain.
The next artifact that my grandmother showed me was the family tree of her mother, my great-grandmother. When she took it out, it was only a pile of old brownish papers. But when I stretched it slowly, it became very long. It might have been a few meters long. I found this very interesting, because it dated back to the 11th century, before the first Shōgun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, lived. It began with the name Seiwa Tennō, one of the emperors. Then came the name of his sixth son, Prince Sadasumi Shinnō. After that, many names followed that I had never heard before, including the names of the Minamoto clan. The members of the Minamoto clan started with Minamoto no Raikō and ended with Minamoto no Ienaga. My grandmother told me that this Ienaga was our original ancestor, who founded the clan. Because the family name of our ancestors was Yokochi, I found the name Yokochi Tarō next to Ienaga.
Most of the names in the family tree were new to me, but it was enjoyable because it was almost like listening to the actual voices of the people in the past. It was far more enjoyable than reading history textbooks.
Around the middle of the family tree, I found the name Hidetada. This was the son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Shōgun who started the Edo Bakufu in the year 1600. It didn’t say that he was one of our ancestors, but instead there was the name of the title that our ancestor used to have, during the period of Hidetada’s rule. I learned that our ancestor used to be “Onando Kumigashira,” the official who had to keep all the important objects that belonged to the Shōgun. The same pattern followed for other Shōguns in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Iemitsu, Ietsuna, Tsunayoshi, Yoshimune, and Ieharu.
This family tree ended during the Edo Period. I asked my grandmother if our ancestors were writing this during the long span of 1000 years. She told me that each samurai clan had an official scribe whose job was to write the family tree, and our ancestors probably ordered that person. Also she told me that our ancestors might have ordered him to dramatize the real family history, and the evidence for that is the name of the Emperor that was written at the beginning of the family tree. But even if that was true, I found this very interesting and enjoyable.
In the family tree, my grandmother pointed out the name Hōmyō-ji, a temple in Zōshigaya, Tōkyō. She told me that all our ancestors were buried there, and my great-grandmother used to send money there every year. But she never had sons (my grandmother only has sisters), so she came to the conclusion that the Yokochi family would come to an end. So my great-grandmother took all of the bones buried there and moved them to Daiseki-ji temple, in a mountain in Yamanashi prefecture called Minobu-san. My grandmother still remembers the time when she accompanied her mother to that place.
According to my grandmother, her father (my great-grandfather) retired from the Navy because of a naval disarmament treaty after World War I. This resulted in the reduction of the number of ships and sailors in the Navy. Japan agreed to carry out this process under pressure from the Western countries. Because of this, my great-grandfather went into the Naval Reserves in 1921 (year 10 of the Taishō Period). Eventually he retired from the Navy, and started teaching in a local elementary school. I heard that he became the principal of a secondary school. I found this very interesting: the transformation from the role of a naval captain to a teacher.
Through the visit to my grandmother’s house, I think I found another pleasure of history and archaeology. Seeing the real objects from the past stimulated my mind, and it clarified the facts in the history textbooks. That’s why I like both history and archaeology. I’d like to study more in this field and find more pleasures that I had ever known before.