L06B, Arina Ii ‘04, Fumiko Ii, Grandmother, 1923, Toyama, Nagasaki
On November 9, 2002, I interviewed my grandmother, Fumiko Ii, who will soon be 78 years old. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t quite know where to start off, after I had explained to my grandmother the nature of my phone call. I telephoned her fairly often, so she had thought we were having one of our “normal chats” again, and she had already lapsed into a detailed account of her week. Once she had finished that, I decided to play it safe with a general question: “So, Grandma, can you tell me about your experiences during World War II?” That was all that was needed. My grandmother, who was generally perceived as a quiet woman, had always been quite talkative around my mother and me, and she immediately started telling her story. I will call it “Through Grandma’s Eyes.”
Oh, World War II was a time when we all had absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing at all. No one could afford luxuries, and when I say luxuries, I don’t mean things that we would consider luxuries today. Back then, we had to provide for ourselves. Our lives were based on jikyū-jisoku, where everything we needed, we made for ourselves. We women would save and collect every scrap of cloth so we could sew together clothes for ourselves and our family. We had to grow vegetables in the garden, and people who had rice fields worked hard at producing rice.
For those of us who didn’t own rice paddies, it was even harder to obtain food. We would have to quietly go over to one of the paddy owners and ask for even just a small share of rice. However much of a close acquaintance that paddy owner may have been, they never readily agreed to share, and we didn’t blame them, because we knew everyone was experiencing difficulties. So we went to their house and brought them our kimono to exchange for some rice.We called this butsu-butsu kōkan, or barter—the exchange of goods. Some farmers ended up “selling” their rice, because soon people would run out of kimono, so they had to pay the rice farmer, and the farmer made sure he put an enormous price on his rice, as I remember.
Arina, do you remember the old sewing machine that you used to play with when you were little? Well, you see, your grandpa bought that for us during the war so that I could sew shirts for ourselves, but also extra clothes to bring to the rice farmer to trade with.
Oh, and I remember, during the war; we weren’t allowed anything made of iron. Before the war we used to have a nice iron hibachi, but that, along with other iron things, was taken away from us. You see, the government had ordered this, because.they needed all the iron to make guns for the soldiers.”
Here my grandmother paused for a breath, so I asked: “How old were you when the war started?”
Umm, let’s see, I believe I was 18, or thereabouts. I got married when I was 21. Now that was another problem. You know how now, and before the war as well, people were able to have nice big weddings with lots of celebrating, but during the war, we just couldn’t afford the luxury. My family couldn’t afford a proper wedding kimono, so I had to borrow mine from a friend who had been able to keep hers. Wedding ceremonies during the war had to be very quiet, and almost secretive in a way.
“So, Grandma, were you still living in Nagasaki when the war started? Or had you already moved to Toyama by that point?” I asked.
I was already in Toyama when the war started. As soon as I graduated from high school, I left Nagasaki to live in Toyama with your grandfather because his family had been ordered to be the priest family of the Oyama shrine there. But as soon as I arrived there, the war started, and nobody had any time to be idle. I was sent to the school there, to become a teacher. That was actually enjoyable, in its own way, considering the circumstances. First I was given the chūgakkō-ichinen-sei [equivalent of Grade 7] to teach. I taught them everything, really! History, Geography, Japanese, Math. We rotated around; after a while, I taught 3rd year [Grade 9] and 2nd year [Grade 8), and so on.
During the war, school wasn’t like it is now. The students couldn’t just study, even if they wanted to. At the school where I was teaching, the students all took only the essential classes, the most minimal amount, and all of the extra hours in school, they were set to work in the school vegetable patches, for their lunches. Oh, we grew potatoes and sweet potatoes, all in between classes.
My grandmother chuckled slightly at the thought.
“What about the air-raids and the sirens at night? Did you have a lot of those?”
The sirens, oh, those sirens were terrifying. You see, we weren’t allowed to have nice, bright lights on in the house like we do now. We had to keep them covered with dark sheets so that the bomber pilots couldn’t see us well. But at night when the warning sirens went off, we all had to jump out of our beds as quickly as we could, grab our bōkū-zukin (protective hoods), valuables, food, and anything we could find quickly and carry, and jump into the shelters that we had dug by our homes.
Once again my grandmother chuckled slightly.
Now this shelter of ours: your great-grandfather, who was living with us at the time, believed that if the house fell down and burned to a crisp, if all our valuables were destroyed, if everything we needed was gone, people could survive anything if they had with them a barrel of miso. So he would always have one large barrel of miso that I had made from the beans we had grown in our garden, hidden in that shelter. He would walk around saying “We’re going to survive this war, sucking on miso. You gotta have miso to survive.”
Luckily, you see, our little village was in the countryside, so we never actually got hit by a bomb. But Toyama city got hit badly once. And the sound of those bombs dropping, they seemed to fall like hailstones really! Like this: “pa, pa, pa, pa, pa.” When a larger bomb hit Toyama city, the sound was so loud that I could hear it all the way in my village, and I thought that a bomb had fallen right outside our house, so I rushed outside, expecting to see our neighboring houses in flames or something! It just went “BOOM!!!” so loud like that. Arina, no one can understand what it’s like to hear the sound of a bomb falling. You have to have heard it yourself. It’s not a sound you can just explain with words.
After the war was over, it wasn’t as if things went back to normal again. We still had to live in poverty. We had already realized that not owning a rice paddy was a real disadvantage, so your grandfather went around and pleaded and pleaded, and finally we were able to buy our own field for rice. That made things a little better. For.the people who didn’t have fields or the money to buy rice, times were even worse.
As I said before, we couldn’t have luxuries. For example, we blew our noses in old newspapers, I remember! We couldn’t possibly waste nice clean paper for our noses! We only had so much of everything. We were given ration vouchers to exchange for goods. Even then, not everyone was given these vouchers. Sometimes we had to draw straws to decide who would get a voucher. That was the only fair way. So when it was exchange day, I woke up at the crack of dawn to try and get the best of the goods. We had an expression for the amount that was dealt out to us, though. It was so little, whether it be rice, vegetables, or cloth. We called it suzume no namida—like a sparrow’s teardrop.
The rations were so inadequate that we had to be creative with our food. There was never enough rice, so we had to mix potatoes in with the rice to make it seem like there was more. We ate a lot of okayu or zōsui—rice cooked with a lot of water, like gruel. And if the lady next door said that she had discovered that the red weeds growing in our garden tasted nice with miso and sesame seeds, then I didn’t hesitate to go out into my garden and pick those weeds and serve them for dinner! We had to improvise as best we could. But you see, we were all used to eating funny things by then, so I suppose our bodies had built up a sort of immunity to things like weeds, because we didn’t get sick from eating anything. People only got sick from not eating anything, so we basically ate anything that would go down our throats!
I suppose all this conformed us to our ways of thinking. We have a state of mind. We see people now, and we think how lucky they are. They can easily throw away clothes because they see a small tear, or because they are out of fashion, and that’s just the way they were brought up. But in my generation we can’t do that easily. I’m always saying to myself, “I’m sure there’s some way I can recycle that.” But people now don’t have the same mentality, and that’s not their fault. That’s just how the world is now, I suppose.
I think the war made us stronger, in a way. We’re not easily brow-beaten. We now have a mentality, a state of mind, that doesn’t let us give up that easily. During the war, we had made our minds up that we were going to survive. In the same way now, if we make up our minds to do something, nothing can really get in the way of us doing it.
By now it was getting late and I knew my grandmother well enough to know that soon she would be dozing off, wherever she might be, so I thanked her for her help and wished her good night. As I put the receiver down, I realized that I had never up until now connected my very own grandmother with thoughts of World War II. It had never occurred to me to think of the terror she had experienced. This made me realize how wrapped up in our own issues we are. I believe that this has been a strange and excellent experience for me to be able to briefly see a fraction of World War II through Grandma’s eyes.