C02, Yōko Katō ‘87, Mr Katō, Father, 1937, Fukushima
My father experienced World War II as a child. At one time, he had to evacuate to Fukushima prefecture. He is a good example of people who had to endure the war on the home front, as I learned when he talked to me in May 1986.
Q: I heard that you evacuated to Fukushima. What was the situation like when you left Tōkyō?
A: Bombing had begun in Tōkyō, and the front part of an American B-29 bomber dropped right into the house of my next-door neighbor. If it had dropped three meters to the side, I would have been killed, and you wouldn’t have been born!
Q: That sounds really scary. Where did you go in Fukushima?
A: Kitakata town in the mountains of western Fukushima. That was where my relatives lived.
Q: How old were you then?
A: I went during the summer vacation of Grade 1, so I was probably seven years old. I returned the next April, before the beginning of Grade 2.
Q: What was life like in Kitakata?
A: Since I was from Tōkyō, I was good at schoolwork, but the other children sometimes made fun of me since I was from the city.
Q: What was the situation like when you returned?
A: While I was away, an unexploded bomb fell on her house. I was astonished to hear this. Also I remember an American pilot whose parachute did not open, who fell into the neighbor’s garden, the same place where the piece of a plane had landed before. After the war, some Americans came to find their corpses, but they couldn’t find anything. Probably they were buried deep in the soil, or possibly some people took their bodies and destroyed them.
I also remember that there was a tunnel in our garden, which we used as our air raid shelter. Whenever the radio announced that planes were coming and we heard the siren, we turned off all the lights and ran into the tunnel. The aircraft came like a swarm of bees, and I can still remember the awful sounds they made. When they dropped their bombs, the earth shook, and we could hear the Japanese anti-aircraft guns trying to shoot them down. Inside the tunnel, there were wooden boards to support the walls and roof, so that they would not collapse. But usually when the bombs dropped nearby, there was a great shaking, and dirt fell anyway. From the house to the tunnel, we laid newspapers on the ground. This was because we had no lights, and the white newspapers guided us to the tunnel entrance.
Q: What was it like inside the house?
A: We put black paper on top of all of the sources of light. This way we could hide from the bombers at night, since they wouldn’t be able to see where people lived. Everything was gloomy at night, since we could turn only a few lights.
I learned that this was a very scary experience, and I got a good view of what it was like to live during wartime.