Eight decades have passed since the end of World War II. The generations who experienced the war are also passing away, and their memories may die along with them. To help preserve the reality of life during wartime, this website aims to collect the testimony of those who lived through the war years. While secondary sources are useful to learn the larger historical context, primary documents, both oral and written, are invaluable for a full understanding of the war at the level of each individual.
Each of the 177 individual posts in this website is the text of an interview with a survivor of World War II, describing his or her personal experiences. Each interview was conducted by a Grade 11 student, usually 16 years old. These took place during the years from 1984 to 2020, including 177 students who graduated between 1985 and 2022. Students chose to present the interview results in a question-and-answer format or as continuous narrative, either first-person or third-person.
Aside from the views expressed by the interview subjects themselves, and reactions by the student interviewers, the content of each post is completely unfiltered. No commentary or analysis is included, nor any historical context. These are the voices of eyewitnesses, speaking to us from the past.
These transcribed interviews are a precious historical resource, especially since the great majority of the interview subjects have already died. Sadly, some of the interviewers have also died in the intervening decades since they were high school students.
Background, Procedures, and Content
These interviews originated as a class assignment for a course in Japanese History, part of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme at Saint Maur International School in Yokohama, Japan. Founded in 1872, Saint Maur is the oldest international school in Asia. Its student body is multilingual and multicultural, representing over forty nationalities (including many students with multiple citizenships). English is the main teaching language of the school, although all students also study Japanese and either French or Spanish. The approach of the IB History curriculum is designed to help students understand past events within a global context, not through a narrow national perspective.
The interview subjects whom students chose all had first-hand knowledge of the years of continuous conflict with China and the West. Often called the Fifteen-Year War, this began in September 1931 with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and continued through surrender to the United States and its allies in September 1945.
Interview subjects described their experiences during one or more of these historical periods:
- Tension between Japan and China during the 1930s, leading up to the undeclared Japan-China War (Nitchū Sensō), referred to at the time as the China Incident (Shina Jihen), from 1937 until 1945
- Japan’s domestic economic problems during the worldwide Depression
- The increasing political influence of the Japanese Army and Navy in the 1930s and especially during World War II
- World War II (1941–1945), referred to in Japan as the Pacific War (Taiheiyō Sensō) or, at the time, the Greater East Asia War (Dai-Tō-A Sensō)
- Conditions in Japan immediately following World War II, during the U.S. military Occupation (1945–1952)
Students chose their interview subjects on their own. They included many nationalities, and interviews were conducted in a variety of languages. All of these were translated into English by the students themselves. They have been lightly edited for clarity and accuracy and to resolve confusion, factual incongruity, or contradictions, but there have been no substantive alterations.
The original text of each interview is preserved in the Archives of Saint Maur International School. They have all been transcribed and digitized by Glenn Scoggins, a former History teacher at Saint Maur who now helps to organize the Archives. Although the use of Artificial Intelligence would have made this process easier and faster, no AI tools were used in the creation of this website. (Needless to say, AI was not an option when students began these interviews over four decades ago. Technology consisted of a typewriter and sometimes a cassette tape recorder.)
The website has been made possible by the invaluable guidance of Jamie Payne, head of Computer Science at Saint Maur. Without his expertise and organization, the interviews would have existed only on dusty yellowing paper.
All participants, including the students and their interview subjects, were asked for their permission for the transcribed interviews to be preserved and used for historical research. In some cases, for reasons unique to each case, permission was withheld. Those interviews were immediately returned to students without question, not kept in the database, and do not appear in this website.
Nevertheless, if any of the former Saint Maur students, or those whom they interviewed, object for any reason to the inclusion of their interviews in this website, please contact the editor, Glenn Scoggins, by email at steadfast1872 [at] gmail [dot] com. Those interviews will be removed promptly. Similarly, if the website contains any factual errors, they will be corrected immediately after contacting the editor.
Index and Glossary
This website also includes a comprehensive Index, grouping the interviews in order of the student’s Saint Maur graduation year and the year when the interview took place, with an individual student code for each interviewer. In the Index and at the top of each transcribed interview, the student’s name, graduation year, and, whenever possible, the interview subject’s name, relationship, and birth year are included, although this information is often absent, unclear, or estimated. As described in the following section, the locations where the events described took place are also listed in the Index and at the top of each interview.
In many cases, the nationality, ethnicity, or heritage of the student interviewers included countries other than (or in addition to) Japan. These are indicated in the individual student code, which precedes the student name at the top of each interview and is included in the Index. These abbreviations are used:
| Code | Nationality | Code | Nationality | Code | Nationality | Code | Nationality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B | Britain | F | Philippines | M | Malaysia | Sg | Singapore |
| Br | Brazil | G | Germany | N | Netherlands | Sp | Spain |
| Bn | Brunei | I | India | P | Portugal | Sw | Switzerland |
| C | China | Ir | Ireland | T | Turkey | ||
| K | Korea | U | United States |
There were 70 such students (out of the total of 177, about 40%), and American or Chinese nationality made up more than half of these cases.
The website also includes a Glossary of Japanese Terms, with translations and explanations for words that frequently appear in the interviews.
Organization and Search Options
It is possible to search the entire website for specific individuals or categories, using the tags (key words) assigned to each interview. These include:
- Student interviewer’s name and graduation year
- Interview subject’s name (where available)
- Interview subject’s year of birth (sometimes estimated)
- Location(s) of the events described in the interview (where available)
The locations where the events described took place are included in the Index and at the top of each interview, divided as shown below according to (a) prefectures within Japan; (b) cities and towns within Kanagawa prefecture; (c) wards within Yokohama city; as well as (d) events in other countries outside Japan.
A total of about 140 interviews represent events in the following 38 prefectures (to-dō-fu-ken) of Japan, excluding Kanagawa prefecture:
| Hokkaidō | Gunma | Niigata | Mie | Kagawa | Fukuoka |
| Aomori | Tochigi | Toyama | Wakayama | Ehime | Nagasaki |
| Akita | Ibaraki | Fukui | Nara | Okayama | Kumamoto |
| Yamagata | Saitama | Nagano | Kyōto | Hiroshima | Ōita |
| Miyagi | Chiba | Yamanashi | Ōsaka | Yamaguchi | Miyazaki |
| Fukushima | Tōkyō | Shizuoka | Hyōgo | Kagoshima | |
| Gifu | Okinawa | ||||
| Aichi |
Of these, the largest number referred to events in Tōkyō, followed by Shizuoka, Nagano, Niigata, Aichi, Ōsaka, Hyōgo, and Hiroshima.
A total of about 60 interviews include events that took place within Kanagawa prefecture, in Yokohama and/or other cities and towns. Excluding Yokohama, these include the following six cities (-shi) and four towns (-machi), indicated by italics in the Index and at the top of each interview:
| Kawasaki-shi | Fujisawa-shi | Hayama-machi |
| Yokosuka-shi | Hadano-shi | Ōiso-machi |
| Kamakura-shi | Odawara-shi | Ninomiya-machi |
| Hakone-machi |
The largest number of Interviews, totalling about 40, include events that took place within Yokohama city, in ten of the city’s 18 wards (-ku). These are also indicated in italics in the Index and at the top of each interview:
| Naka-ku | Kanagawa-ku | Kōhoku-ku | Minami-ku | Isogo-ku |
| Nishi-ku | Tsurumi-ku | Midori-ku | Kōnan-ku | Kanazawa-ku |
Of these, more than half refer to events in Naka-ku, the center of Yokohama.
[Kanagawa ward (-ku), one of the 18 wards, should be distinguished from Kanagawa prefecture (-ken).]
Events outside of Japan were described that happened in these 18 countries and regions, totalling about 50 of the interviews. These are listed in the Index and at the top of each interview:
| East Asia | Southeast and South Asia | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Korea | Philippines | Germany |
| China | Malaysia | United States |
| Manchuria (China) | Singapore | Brazil |
| Hong Kong (China) | Indonesia | Australia |
| Taiwan | Brunei | |
| Karafuto (Russia) | Burma (Myanmar) | |
| Siberia (Russia) | India |
The largest number of these events took place in Manchuria (northeastern China) and other regions of China, followed by Korea and the Philippines.
Chinese and Korean names of interview subjects are listed in East Asian order, as are the names of Japanese historical figures. All other names, including those of Saint Maur students and interviewees of Japanese nationality, are listed in Western order for consistency.
Clarifications
When interview subjects refer to “the war,” they may mean the Japan-China War (beginning in 1937) but more frequently refer to World War II. For example, “when the war began” usually means December 1941, when Japanese forces attacked American and British territories. This should be clear from the context.
Another potential source of confusion may be the education system before and during the war, which differed significantly from the post-war system. Children between the ages of 6 and 12 attended six-year elementary schools (jinjō shōgakkō, re-named kokumin gakkō during the war), which were coeducational, tuition-free, and compulsory. The majority finished their school education after Grade 6. For those who continued, boys’ middle schools (chūgakkō) or girls’ secondary schools (jogakkō) lasted another five years, until age 17. A small minority of male students took competitive examinations to enter three-year higher schools (kōtō gakkō), which led to university (daigaku), with most courses requiring at least three more years of study. Therefore, you will see references to the “fifth year of middle school” at age 17, before only a few graduates entered higher school (or military academies). Graduation from university, after seventeen years of elementary, secondary, and tertiary education, was usually no earlier than age 23.
This assignment did not take place every year between 1984 and 2020. The number of participating students also varied considerably from year to year, based on enrollment in the Grade 11 IB Japanese History class, which was a Saint Maur graduation requirement for all students through the Class of 2000; thereafter, students had a choice of Social Studies subjects in Grades 11-12. Unfortunately, some interviews were loaned out for research purposes and never returned, a lapse which I deeply regret.
Moreover, some IB History students took advantage of the various assignment options, which allowed them to conduct interviews related to other 20th-century events and periods, such as the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Chinese Civil War (1945-49), the Korean War (1950-53), or the Cold War period that followed World War II. Those interviews are not included in this website but may be source material for a future endeavor.
Thank you very much for taking an interest in this project!
Glenn Scoggins
History Teacher at Saint Maur International School (1977–2022)
Organizer of the Saint Maur Archives (2022–present)