C01, Yumiko Ishii ‘87, Grandmother, 1922, Kanagawa: Ninomiya-machi, Tōkyō
In May 1986, I interviewed my grandmother, who is 64 years old. She explained her experiences during World War II.
Q: How old were you when the world war began?
A: I was 19.
Q: Where did you live then?
A: My family all lived in Ninomiya [a town in western Kanagawa], but I was in Tōkyō as a student in a sewing school.
Q: Did you have to return to your family home?
A: Yes, because the war was getting worse. In my sewing school, we had to stop studying and practice putting out fires.
Q: Were you sad that you couldn’t continue studying?
A: Yes, that was the hardest part of the war for me. I couldn’t study what I really wanted to learn.
Q: What happened in Ninomiya?
A: I saw some small airplanes flying above. We had to hide in our safe shelter below our garden. Since we had a large garden, there were many places to hide. The small planes carried bombs.
Q: What did you have to eat?
A: Our house was right in front of a farm, so we grew vegetables and other food for the soldiers to eat. We had to eat the leftovers after the Japanese Army soldiers finished. The soldiers got the first choice for everything.
Q: What was the scariest thing that you saw?
A: When I heard the noise of the airplanes, that was very scary. I had eight brothers to take care of, so it was very hard for all of us to hide.
Q: Where did the American planes drop their bombs?
A: They didn’t attack our house, because it was out in the countryside, but they dropped bombs on the train station, where there were many people.
Q: What other things scared you?
A: Boys younger than me sometimes picked up the unexploded bombs and fired them, because they thought it would be like a firecracker. I was going to do it too, but my mother stopped me, because she thought it was silly. I’m glad that she stopped me, because if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be alive today.
Q: What was it like living near the Japanese Army soldiers?
A: We let them sleep in our house. There were many soldiers coming every night. They slept on the floor, since we didn’t have enough futon mattresses.
Q: What was your saddest experience?
A: Every night there was another funeral. It was very sad to see people whom I knew dying.
Q: What was most fascinating?
A: It sounds very odd, but I thought the U.S. airplanes, all flying in a straight line, were very pretty and fascinating. It was scary, but I could also see the beauty in that.
Q: What did you learn from experiencing the war?
A: My father told me that Japan was surely going to lose. He said that the U.S. was much more powerful and had more resources, and that Japan was very stupid to fight with such a strong country. It was like the poor fighting against the rich. But the saddest thing was that I couldn’t finish my education, and I knew the sadness of losing human beings.