N02, Noboru Itō ‘07, Yukiko Azuma, Grandmother, 1930, Ōita
On October 29, 2005, I interviewed my maternal grandmother at her house. Her name is Yukiko Azuma, and she is 75 years old.
Q: How old were you when Japan entered World War II?
A: The year was 1941, right? So I was about 11 years old. I was the fifth child in my family. Right before the war began, my mother died. I remember her last words: “I want to eat watermelon.”
Q: What kind of changes did you see right after the war started?
A: All of the expensive things in our house started to disappear, because we had to sell them to get money to buy food. We had no other choice for our survival
Q: Where did you live at the time, and where did you move for evacuation?
A: We lived in Nakano-ku in Tōkyō, but my brother, my three sisters, and I decided to move because of the U.S. aerial bombing of Tōkyō with the B-29 bomber planes. My school playground was once attacked by a B-29, but I was in the bathroom, so I was fine. When I heard the first siren, I felt confused because I had no clue whatsoever about what was happening. Anyway, my family had been separated, and my older brother, because he was a first lieutenant in the Navy, went to war. My oldest sister had married another Navy officer and stayed in the Tōkyō area, but she was not affected by the Great Tōkyō Air Raid (Dai-Kūshū). My other two sisters moved to the Hiroshima area, just outside the area in which the atomic bomb was dropped. And I, myself, moved to Ōita in Kyūshū.
Q: What was your life like during the war?
A: There was not a lot of food for the whole group in Ōita. We were very hungry, because the government distributed an equal amount to all people, and we could not buy much. If more was needed, then we had to buy it from other people at a higher price. Also we had no new clothes or shoes, and all of the clothes that I wore were the ones passed down from my sisters, so I never got new clothes. I really wanted new clothing. Another fact was that in order to go to school, we had to make our own bags. We just had no money to buy bags for ourselves. I could not go to school on the train. I had enough money, but the number of trains was limited, and most of the trains were for military use. Also some of my friends were sent to a Yokaren, a military school where 14-year-old boys were taught how to fight in a war, and my other friends and I were always worried about them. My seniors had moved into the military, and most of them never came back. We had to cover the windows of our houses black and turn off the lights, so that we would not be seen by the U.S. airplanes. I never felt scared though, because I always thought that my friends were always with me. But because we did not know when we were going to die, we always moved in uniform, so we would not look bad when we died (laughing).
Q: What was your happiest memory during those days?
A: Well, I made most of my friends there in Ōita, and we always used to share food among ourselves. In the group that I stayed with, there was not any stealing or fighting. Everyone was nice to one another. We never left anyone alone, and we never bullied anyone. If somebody was bullied, I would have probably bullied that person (laughing).
Q: I understand that you had fun, but did you go through any hardships?
A: No, not really. I might have felt sad then, but now that I think of it, I don’t remember the bad memories. The only sad memory that I remember was that my mother died. That’s it. I never felt sad leaving my family.
Q: What kind of differences did you see between the years before and during the war?
A: Well, I can say that the time before the war was very peaceful and felt easy. There were not any problems throughout the time. But during the war, it was not easy. We always had the same lunch, Hinomaru-bentō, which had a small amount of rice, and an umeboshi (pickled plum) in the middle, so it looked just like the Japanese flag. Also many phrases became popular, for example “Luxury is your enemy” and so on.
Q: Can you tell me what happened to you at the end of the war?
A: After the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I left Ōita and went back to Tōkyō. But on the way, I met my two sisters in Hiroshima. At the same time, I saw the remains of the city of Hiroshima. I remember it as a flat plain, with no buildings or anything. I stayed for the night and then went back to Tōkyō. But of course my house had been burned down by the Tōkyō-Dai-Kūshū. After all of my brothers and sisters returned to Tōkyō, we decided to cultivate a farm, in order to make food for us to survive. We used other people’s land, because everything was burned down, and we had no idea whose land was whose.