B06, Kaori Mayama ‘86, Mr Imasaka, Neighbor, 1943, Burma [Myanmar], Hiroshima
In May 1985, I interviewed my neighbor, Mr Imasaka, who passed on many interesting stories about the war.
I was born in 1943, right here in Yokohama. I was too young to remember anything clearly about the war. But my relatives and friends had many interesting stories. In particular, my father lived in Hiroshima. He and his relatives were soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army. Most soldiers from Hiroshima were sent to China, but some of them were sent to southeast Asia.
One of his relatives was sent to Burma [Myanmar], but he continually ran away, since he hated the war. He hid behind a truck so that his commander wouldn’t find him. He was a small man and physically weak. He didn’t eat very much. Whenever he had to march along with the other soldiers, he couldn’t catch up. Weak soldiers were left behind if they failed to catch up with the rest. Yet in his case, his friends came back to help him at night. This continued for a long time, and finally his friends told him to remain inside a small hut. But there were many people there who were mentally damaged. He was so frightened that he ran out to catch up with his corps. Because he had immigrated to Hawaii, he was able to speak English. Once he returned to Japan, he got a job using his ability. He came back and was a military officer. Not all people survived like he did. He was luckier than they were.
Because of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima was destroyed, and many people were killed. My father was a soldier, and even after the surrender, he stayed with the army and worked to burn dead bodies. He collected corpses and brought them to one place to burn them. Of course, there was no crematory, so usually he used a destroyed building, because some walls remained. He poured a tank of gasoline over the piled-up bodies, and they all burned at once. Many people who survived the bombing watched that. There was no medicine left, and after a few days, those people died and were also burned. My father wasn’t paid for this work. Yet he continued doing it for three months after the war.
Ironically, many years later, I got a job during the Vietnam War, washing the bodies of dead American soldiers at Yokohama City University Hospital.