G05, Aya Kurasawa ‘99, Masa Maekawa, Neighbor, 1923, Niigata, Tōkyō
Mrs Masa Maekawa is a 74-year-old woman who is a neighbor of mine. She lives with her married son, since her husband passed away a few years ago. Although I was not familiar with her, she and my mother became friends, so she arranged a time for me to interview her in November 1997. This is a summary of what she told me about her life, from the beginning of World War II through the difficult times after the war ended.
Maekawa-san was born in January 1923 (Taishō 12) near Echigo-Yuzawa in Niigata prefecture, and she lived there throughout her childhood. She was the oldest daughter of a banker, and in 1936 she entered jogakkō, which is where girls received a secondary education after finishing elementary school. At the time, not many girls could go to jogakkō because they had to be rich enough. Only about ten girls from each elementary school entered jogakkō, and she was the only one from her small elementary school. Most of the higher education for women was at vocational schools, and the only public university for women was Nihon Joshi Daigaku. There were also teacher training colleges such as Tōkyō Jokōshi and Nara Jokōshi, but most families could not afford to send their daughters there. Girls mostly learned how to become a “good wife and wise mother (ryōsai kenbo).”
While she was in her jogakkō, the Japanese and Chinese armies clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing in 1937, leading to the Japan-China War, which she believes led to World War II. Since those events, Japan was short of natural resources and other supplies. She ordered a pair of leather shoes, but because leather had become scarce, she had to wear geta (wooden clogs). She could only wear leather shoes on special occasions like school trips. This was also true of clothing. During the war, she had to wear monpe, which were loose trousers, tied around the ankle.
At school, she had learned English before the war began. However, when her younger sister and brother went to school, English was not taught anymore. It was forbidden, because it was the language of the enemy. When Japanese played baseball, they could not use terms like “strike” and “foul,” which they had used before. Instead they said “yoitama” (good ball) and “waruitama” (bad ball.” Schools took students to see movies, but they were all related to war, such as Okesutora no Shōjo and Nishizumi Sensha-tai. They could only listen to military music called gunka. A popular song was “Mugi to Heitai (Wheat and Soldiers).”
The Emperor was worshipped as a god at this time, until he declared himself to be a human being after the war in 1946. Every morning when she arrived at school, and every afternoon when she left, all of the students had to bow to a photograph of His Majesty the Emperor (Tennō Heika) and Her Majesty the Empress (Kōgō Heika) displayed at school. On special occasions, such as the birthday of Shōwa Tennō (Emperor Hirohito) on April 29, the photograph was displayed in the school auditorium, and there was a ceremony. All Japanese looked up to the Emperor, and during the war they were made to believe that Japan was always winning, through the few sources of information, such as the radio, which only reported good news. They were extremely loyal to the Emperor and the government and would follow all of its orders.
After the Pacific War (World War II in the Pacific) began in 1941, school students were required to work for the nation. Girls were sent to factories producing military equipment. However, Maekawa-san did not work in a factory. She had already graduated, so she was at home learning flower arrangement, tea ceremony, sewing, and so on, as part of training to prepare for married life (hanayome shugyō), even though she was supposed to be sent to a factory. Her father did not want her to have a hard life, so he asked a friend who was a local government official to let her work at the city hall.
While girls worked at factories, all healthy boys were conscripted by the military for two years, to be trained and then sent to battlefields. The government sent a draft notification for all of the boys born in each month of the year. Maekawa-san had a younger brother who was paying to go to secondary school while still working in a factory. However, he realized that he didn’t have time to study even though he was paying tuition. So he decided to apply to a military academy, but he couldn’t pass the exam.
When boys left home for the Army, the jogakkō students sewed senninbari, which was a towel with a thousand red dots. Each girl sewed one dot with red thread. They were wrapped around soldiers, because it was believed that it would protect them from bullets. Also tigers were embroidered on the towels, since it was said that tigers could run for 1000 ri (one ri is four kilometers) and then run back for 1000 ri, hoping that the soldiers could return home safely. Sometimes on the towel they sewed a five-sen coin, since five is larger than four (shi, a homonym for death), as an incantation that the soldiers would overcome death. However, when boys or men came back dead, girls and women never cried or grieved in front of others, since they were taught to be resilient like the yamato-nadeshiko flower, with a resolute attitude. Sometimes families only received body parts of the remains, or sometimes only rocks, and they were told that these were the rocks from the spot where they died.
As the war progressed, there was not enough food for people to buy. Food was distributed by the government. The amount of food depended on what each person did for the country. Soldiers received the most rice. However, there was never enough, so they always ate side dishes, mostly vegetables, to fill themselves up, so that they would not eat all of the rice, which was precious. Often Maekawa-san had to take her kimono and furniture to exchange with farmers for rice. However, rice was not available at all during the last years of the war, so everyone ate potatoes instead. This is why today there are many people her age who do not want to eat potatoes. Other food, such as fish, soy sauce, and miso, was distributed. In the mountains of Niigata, people could not eat raw food, because it would rot, so they could only eat pickled food. There were no snacks, so children ate nukazuke (Japanese pickles) instead. Also mothers boiled down sweet potatoes until it became like candy. When soy sauce and miso were not available, mothers tried to make something similar, since they are essential to Japanese food.
A common saying during the war was “zeitaku wa teki” (luxury is the enemy). Gold was a symbol of luxury, so she would have had to remove all of the gold thread from her kimono. Women did not wear precious kimono, since it would have been so wasteful to ruin the beautiful embroidery by taking out the gold thread. Everyone wore monpe instead of kimono.
Maekawa-san married when she was 20 years old, in 1943. Fortunately, she was able to hold her wedding at a famous shrine with a formal wedding kimono. Her marriage was arranged by her family (omiai kekkon), like everyone else at this time. There were many girls whose husbands had already been chosen while they were still in jogakkō. People couldn’t choose whom to marry, especially during the war. For example, when her cousin received an offer of marriage, she quickly accepted, because there weren’t many young men around. However, right after their wedding, her husband had to go to war, and she had to stay at home with his mother to support her family. This was called jugo (supporting from behind the gun).
There were wives who moved to Manchuria along with their husbands. The government wanted men to go there and establish farms. So men willingly went there and received large allotments of land. However, at the end of the war, when the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria, those families had to evacuate immediately to Japan. Some people left their children behind, who became war orphans (zanryū-koji).
It was after the war ended that Japanese led the hardest lives. Maekawa-san gave birth to five children, four girls and one boy. They are all living happily now, but during and after the war, they were unhealthy because of lack of nutrition. So in order to let them eat, she often said to them “I don’t like this food” and gave as much as possible to her children. Many mothers weren’t very healthy, and often they had anemia or tuberculosis. Not only did mothers give up their food, they also used their kimono to sew their children’s clothes, their husband’s shirts, their baby’s diapers, and their futons. Silk diapers were of high quality, but they did not absorb well. The shirt collars got old and ripped, so the wives fixed them using the parts of the shirt which were tucked into the pants. Then when the shirt got too old, it was made into underwear. Mothers did everything for their family.
After the war, there was still no rice, so people ate udon and sōmen noodles and zōsui soup. They sometimes ate oshiruko, which had mochi made of udon flour instead of rice, in a sweet red bean soup. Most people got the extra food they needed through the black market (yamiichi). There were many tents around Shibuya Station which sold food illegally. Farmers brought rice from the countryside to sell at the black market. So restrictions were placed about how much rice anyone could carry. Women put rice into pockets sewed into their obi sashes, or they hid rice in hollowed-out book covers. In total they might carry five kilograms, along with their baby, strapped on their back. Women tried to dress as if they were rich, since the police mainly kept an eye on poor people.
When Maekawa-san moved from Niigata to Tōkyō in 1945 (Shōwa 20), everything had been burned in the Great Air Raid of March 10. Many people had evacuated to the countryside to escape the bombing, so people who returned earlier had taken their land for free. They built houses out of scrap material on vacant lots. In order to make money, they searched for pieces of iron or glass in the soil or in the rivers. They sold these to iron scrap buyers.
There were many wives who had lost their husbands in the war, carrying their children on their backs. There were even some cases when the wife was told that her husband had died, so she married his younger brother, but there would be trouble if the husband came back alive. Many children had been evacuated to the countryside if they didn’t have relatives to look after them. But in some cases their parents in Tōkyō had been killed, so when the children came back to the city, they were homeless.
Around Ebisu Station, where Maekawa-san and her family built a house, there was an American military base. There were also prostitutes, called panpan girls, who took these soldiers as customers. Some babies were born as a mixture of Japanese and African-American parents, and many of them were sent overseas to be adopted. The reputation of Ebisu was that only worthless people were living there. However, when Sapporo Beer began to build its brewery there, the price of land grew, and it grew much more during the economic “Bubble” of the late 1980s. People who lived in Ebisu could sell their land for a very good price. Maekawa-san’s family sold their land and moved to the suburb of Machida in 1987. But there were some people who didn’t sell their land, and when the economic “Bubble” burst, the land prices collapsed, and they are suffering now.
Maekawa-san thinks that North Korea today is very similar to Japan during World War II. Everyone is starving and there are shortages of everything, but people believe that the Dear Leader and his government are perfect. Although her family was not very rich, she said there were people who suffered much more than she did, so she was relatively happy. She also said that Japan is blamed around the world for the Pearl Harbor attack and the Rape of Nanjing, but in reality all wars include atrocities, since war is all about killing. Germany and Italy also committed atrocities, and the U.S. sprayed Agent Orange on Vietnamese people, causing birth defects. Japan is blamed because it lost the war, but it became a rich, developed country.
I found her defense of Japan to be quite interesting, since it showed that she still had a nationalistic feeling about the country, which was created during the war.