L05, Maki Igarashi ‘04, Hisako Ogura, Grandmother, 1926, Aichi
I interviewed my maternal grandmother, Hisako Ogura, on November 10, 2002. She was born in 1926 and is 76 years old now.
It was 1944, I think, when the war got worse. Inside Japan there were many air raids. Do you know what air raids are? Airplanes dropped bombs, one after another. Then a lot of people died, and there were fires, and my house burned down in May of 1945. There were terrible air raids, one after another. During May 1945, on the 14th, I think, a lot of buildings burned down. That was the city of Nagoya. Most of Nagoya was burned. It was already mostly burned, but my house burned down on May 14. We had another house near Nagoya Station. We thought that it would be a target of the air raids, so we decided not to live there, but instead we moved to a house in the suburbs. But then the suburbs were burned down, and the house near the station was still standing, so we walked there. It was very far to the house in the center of Nagoya. There was nothing to ride on except a small baby carriage which was given to us by a relative. So we put in things like our chopsticks and rice bowls that we got from other people whose houses didn’t burn down. The people who didn’t have a house gathered material that they could use to make a roof and cooked for themselves, but most people begged or went to some relative’s house or a friend’s house.
My grandmother and I walked through the burnt fields, pulling the baby carriage, and we went to the house in the center of Nagoya. We thought the house would be burned down, so we had left it unlocked. During air raids, when the incendiary bombs were dropped, if the door is locked, you might be burned to death, so to be able to get in and out as quickly as possible, we never locked the door. Even though it was the center of the city, there was a little area that was open, and a friend of ours brought tables and rice bowls from the house, so we were able to cook the rice right away. During that time, there were always air raids everyday. Nobody that I knew went to fight in the war, but some of my relatives were killed in the air raids. Some nights there would be three air raids a night. We had to get up and run for cover. When it was cold, we didn’t want to wake up, but if you died in your sleep, you would be called a hikokumin (traitor), so we woke up and stayed awake. There were these pants called monpe, and because we didn’t have time to change, we slept in them.
I was a college student then. There were no women’s universities, so once I had graduated from girls’ high school (jogakkō), I went to a technical college (senmon gakkō). But there were no classes: instead, I went to a huge factory called Aichi Kōkūki, where planes were built. I was helping to install the light on the wings. I nailed it onto the wing and compressed the nail into place using air pressure. But because it was a factory, it was one of the targets of the air raids. When the air raid alarm went off, we all had to escape. We could go in any direction. Once the planes had left the area, the alarm would be turned off, and we had to go back and continue to work. But one of my co-workers never came back. We searched in the direction where she had run, and we found that she had died. We thought that she had run in an unlucky direction. It was all about luck.
The factory where I worked was not destroyed that badly that day, but another factory nearby was badly ruined by the bombings. Many of the workers were university students who had been drafted for factory labor, called gakuto. Many of the students died, and a friend of mine died as well. There was a family living across the street from me, and their two sons were killed together. Another family lived behind me; their daughter died as well. You couldn’t know if they were killed on the same day, because there were so many bombs being dropped at once. If the missing person hadn’t come home, their family waited outside of the house. Right when I was on my way home, I saw that their mother looked pale. I thought that they were waiting for their sons, but they never came home. As for the family living behind our house, their son (who went to high school) was waiting, but his sister hadn’t come back. Every day, he went to the factory where she worked, but she couldn’t be found. They said that the factory she worked at was a mess. They couldn’t find her body, because it probably was scattered because of the explosion. Finally they said that she was dead, but at that time, they could not put one body in one coffin because it would take up too much space, so they put two bodies in the same coffin. They were carried by truck, and there would be a big mountain of coffins. Sometimes, you could see someone’s foot hanging out.
Did they identify the bodies? I guess they could if they had enough of the body, but in the worst cases, you could see parts of the body hanging from electrical wires, or they could be floating in nearby streams. I was so scared. On the way home, I had usually passed by that factory, but I began to take a different route after that. There were also air raids at night, and everything got burned. The next day, on the way to the factory, I saw the factories on both sides that were burned down. There was a wide road between them, but you could still feel the heat. The fire was gone, but the heat still remained.
The school I went to was a mission school. Do you know what a mission school is? It’s a Christian school, but during the war, people called it a “spy school.” All of the foreign teachers were glared at and suspected of being spies, so eventually they went back to their homelands. There were some teachers who stayed, but they were called “spies,” so they all left. The principal had to go through a strict inspection. When I was working at the factory, the girls from my school sang Christian hymns (sanbika). We were told not to sing them, but when nobody was around, we would. It was hard for our school. During the war, the school was burned down because of the air raid.
My house was still standing even after the war ended. We were lucky. Nagoya Station was not bombed, because the station was used for transportation, and the Americans planned to use it. Next the factory was destroyed, so the workers evacuated, and we were all separated. So I went on a train and went to a suburb far away. That summer, the war ended.