V03, Yū (You) Tone ‘21, Noboru Ōfuka, Great-uncle, 1942, Yamaguchi, Ōsaka
My great-uncle was born in 1942, just after war broke out between Japan and the United States. In November 2019, I asked him about his childhood.
Q: What kind of school days did you spend during and after the war?
A: It was a time where we did not have a lot of stuff. We always sewed our clothes whenever we had holes in them. We fixed everything and took care of things. We never wore pants with holes which young people wear nowadays. I think school was not different from what you study nowadays.
I do not remember elementary school, but I remember bringing lunch to middle school. I always brought wheat rice with a lot of wheat mixed with the rice. Some of my classmates had white rice. It was my job to go shopping, and I never brought money but paid with rice. After I came back from shopping, I always had dinner. I think we ate simmered food and radish rice, but I do not remember a lot. Rice was pretty important. I remember when my parents bought rakkyō (sweet peanuts), and I went to clean the rakkyō in the Yoshino River. I guess I had enough food to eat, mostly vegetables. I do not remember eating fish or chicken. But I remember buying eel at the fish store and frying them. We could not afford to buy a house.
I was born around Ube city, but after I was born we moved near the Ima-Hachimangū Shrine in Yamaguchi city. I had six or seven siblings, but I heard from my parents that there were about 10 siblings in total. So I am not sure how many siblings I had in total. [My grandmother, the interviewee’s younger sister, told me that she had eight siblings. So we suspect that there were eight siblings in total who survived.]
My father died at an early age, so we made him a coffin and took it to the crematorium. Unlike now, there were no funeral homes, so we had to take care of all the things for a funeral. After my father’s funeral, we went to Ōsaka.
Q: What kind of life did you have in Ōsaka? Was there any difference from Yamaguchi?
A: It was very difficult to find a job during this time. But it was not like we went to the same company. Still, I gained a job and went to Ōsaka with a group of young people who were also trying to find employment. We all met at a place in Yamaguchi, and then we went together to Ōsaka by train. Companies that needed employees picked us up from the station in Ōsaka. There were about 10 people in total who went to the same company as me. They were from Hiroshima, Ōsaka, and Kagoshima. There were two people who came from the same middle school who went to Ōsaka with me. I worked at a company where I made water supplies. The difference between Yamaguchi and Ōsaka was that I did not have to worry about food, since the company provided food. Also I was able to go watch movies every Sunday since it was a regular holiday. I worked at a company in Hirano-ku in Ōsaka. Hirano was not very urban, so it did not have any war damage.
Q: Were there any American Army soldiers around you?
A: There was a garrison of the U.S. Occupation force in front of our company housing. It is used as a base for the Self-Defence Force now. There were a few thousand soldiers in the garrison. Every day, I went out of my house carrying my baby sister, and when the soldiers came out of the garrison, they came up to my sister, saying “Hey, baby!” and gave her chocolate, canned food, and kashiwa candy. So, I did not have problems finding sweet stuff to eat. Since the garrison was for training and drills, it was not that big. I did not see that many drills, but I once saw the soldiers having a parachute drill.
Q: Have you had any experience that made you feel you were in war?
A: No, I never felt that I was involved in the war, since I was born just three years before the war ended. Also, the place where I lived and worked did not have any effects from the war. I heard there was a lot of damage near the Seto Naikai Inland Sea coast, but there was not much damage to the interior of Yamaguchi prefecture.