E09, Ayako Kimura ‘94, Chieko Kusunoki, Grandmother, 1923, Wakayama
In November 1992, I asked my maternal grandmother to tell me about her memories of World War II. She was born in 1923 and will turn 70 next year.
Q: What was the first signal or incident that you remember about the beginning of the war?
A: I was listening to the radio at home when the newscaster announced that war with the United States and the Allies had started. I had been taught since elementary school that our country was in a state of emergency, but I never really understood the meaning of it. I had already graduated from high school when I heard this, and it struck me for the first time. I was worried about our future and what would become of us.
Q: How did your everyday life change?
A: At the beginning of the war, when Japan was winning in 1942, everything seemed to be the same as before. But later on in the war, conditions worsened. We were short of food and were given ration tickets, per family or per person. The ration tickets were limited, so we could not get enough food or clothes. The shops started to run out of supplies, and soon there were not many left to buy, even with the coupons.
Q: How difficult was it to get food? What did you eat?
A: It was very difficult. There was not enough rice for our family, so we had to visit the farmers and trade daily supplies like soap, sweets, and cigarettes for rice and vegetables. We first bought the soap and cigarettes with the ration tickets, and then went to the farmland to trade it for rice. Often we still did not get rice.
Q: What did you do when you heard the air raid siren (kūshū keihō)?
A: If it was at night, we had to turn off all the lights in the house. We hid ourselves inside the air raid shelter which we had dug outside the house. It was only a small hole or a pit, just big enough for the family to fit in, with a wooden plank covering the top. This shelter prevented us from being affected by the vibration of the bomb, or being shot by machine guns.
Q: What kind of sounds did you hear outside?
A: We heard the loud noise of the bombs landing, which shook the ground if they were nearby. We could also hear them falling from the sky. When I was hiding inside the shelter, I could hear the enemy aircraft just above my house. I heard machine gun fire and the noise of breaking windows. When the attack ended and the enemy flew away, I went back into the house to find holes in every wall, and every window was broken. Everything in the house was broken: the walls, the windows, and even the door. It was a disastrous sight.
Q: About how many patients a day were carried to great-grandfather’s hospital?
A: Whenever a bomb fell nearby, around twenty to thirty injured people were brought to my father’s hospital. The problem was that it specialized in internal medicine, and we had to send them to a surgeon after doing the best we could do.
Q: How injured were they?
A: It was the most shocking thing that I ever saw in my life! I saw so much blood and flesh that I nearly fainted in horror. There were people with pieces of glass covering their face, people with about an inch of skin on their neck, just holding their heads upright, and people with arms about to fall off. Some people who looked uninjured sat there with whitish-blue faces. Although their injuries looked less severe than the ones covered with blood, they had internal injuries, such as burst intestines from the explosion of the bomb, and their chances of survival were lower.
Q: What happened when the enemy invaded?
A: The only place where American troops actually landed was in Okinawa, so we never experienced this in Wakayama. I just knew that if a bomb landed on us, we would die. If the bomb blast damaged our internal organs, we would die. We always had the pressure of living and trying to survive this war.
Q: What was the most painful and bitter experience that you had during the war?
A: The fear of dying at any minute scared me so much. I could not get enough sleep because the air raid siren could go off at any hour. I was always hungry, never getting enough food to eat. My friends died because of the bombing. They were so unlucky: a bomb hit them when they left the shelter for two minutes, just to go to the toilet. I think they were stupid to leave for the toilet, though. I was shocked to hear about the death of my homeroom teacher, who died because he went to fetch the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku Chokugo), the words of the Emperor, which was considered the most important object in the school. My teacher had to take the document into the shelter, and when he went to get it, he was killed by the bomb.
Q: What did you think when the war ended? How did you feel to have survived?
A: When we learned that the war was over, I was so happy. I thought that finally peace would return to our country again. I remembered all the suffering and pain that I had gone through, and I was determined thatI would tell my future children and grandchildren about what happened and what I went through, in order to prevent it from ever happening again. That’s what I am doing right now!
I think that I am very lucky to have survived the war, and it is our job, the ones who have seen and experienced the tragic event, to pass on the disastrous effect and aftereffect of the war, so that it will never happen again.