K01B, Pamela Bernard ‘02, Tomohisa Ōishi, Uncle, 1935, Yokohama: Nishi-ku, Kanagawa: Hadano-shi
I interviewed Tomohisa Ōishi, who is my uncle, my mother’s oldest brother. He is 65 years old and was born in 1935.
During World War II, he lived in a place called Sengen-chō, not far from Yokohama Station in Nishi-ku. When war broke out against the United States, my uncle was in the first grade of primary school. The school year had started in April, and the war started in December. By the time the war ended, he was already in the middle of fifth grade.
I had thought that he had missed almost the whole of his elementary school years, but he didn’t. During the war, he had moved to a place called Hadano, which takes just about an hour by train from Yokohama. His relatives lived there, and so his family moved to Hadano to escape the bombing. This included his mother (my grandmother), his father (my grandfather), and their four sons (my uncles). My mother is the youngest of six siblings, and she and her younger brother were born after the war. They moved right after their house had burned down in Yokohama, in Sengen-chō. Everything in Sengen-chō was burned, except one temple, called Kōfuku-ji. When they heard the air raid sirens, they ran to a nearby hill called Sengen-yama. Since the surrounding areas were burning very quickly, they thought the safest place was to be on top of a hill. He said that it was still in the afternoon, but it looked almost like midnight with all the smoke.
I asked “What scared you the most, and what was the most tiring event that took place during the war?” He replied that there were too many tiring events, but the sound of the air raid sirens had scared him the most. He did not know when it would come, and when it came, they needed to run and hide in caves called bōkūgō (air raid shelters) in Japanese. It was difficult to stay in the dark for so long. Sometimes he forgot that he was in danger and was eager to search for light. When the bombing started, he forgot that he was hungry and wanted to be neither outside nor inside. “I wanted to be nowhere. I just wanted to disappear with my family and myself to a safer place.” When he came out of the bōkūgō, he saw a different view. “Some houses that I had seen before I heard the bombing were gone. The owner of the house hurried to the place where his house had been and stood in terror.”
He also said that they had a very limited amount of food. They ate sweet potatoes, but they weren’t as sweet as the ones we have today. They were more dry, and they tasted of smoke more than ordinary potatoes, because of the fumes in the air! They also had pumpkins and soybeans (daizu). They ate the beans by draining off the oil and frying them. Rice came almost once per week. It was called haikyū, which was distributed for free, but only once per week. With that rice, they made okayu (gruel) with a combination of rice and potatoes or pumpkins. Some people had to even make the okayu more watery by adding water or hot water depending on the season.
When he went to school in Hadano, the principal of the school said that it was too dangerous for the kids to stay. So students from third grade through sixth grade had to move to a safer place. They found another house somewhere near Hadano, so they moved again. At the same time in Yokohama, there were no longer many houses left. Instead, people were looking for some kind of a material that could make their air raid shelters stronger. The caves, or bōkūgō in Japanese, were important, so that the people could hide and protect themselves from the bombing. However, my uncle said that “Unless the cave is made strong enough, even one bomb which will hit close to it will make the cave collapse in one second.” Some rich people had made caves with good materials, and so they were safer, but people couldn’t run to the best cave during the bombing. They could just manage to run to the closest one.
Burakumin (hereditary outcastes) were people who collected leftovers from the war and built houses to live in. Those houses were very dirty and could collapse easily with only a little bit of rain. The land was covered with a little bit of grass, but the rest was just dust and smoke. Little children walked on these dusty roads, searching for food to eat. This went on until the end of the war. My grandmother on my father’s side had moved to Argentina during the war, so my uncle always says that she was lucky. But he appreciates that he was able to live safely in a house during the war.
The saddest thing that happened to him was losing some of his friends. His very best friend was killed, although he has about seven to eight friends who lived throughout the war. They still have a good relationship, but they never really talk about the war. That is because there were some of them who lost their parents and other family members during the war. Now they are still living in Sengen-chō near Kōfuku-ji temple. It is quite near to where they were first living right before the war. It is about a five-minute walk from the house where he is living right now. Also his second-oldest brother is living in Sengen-chō almost in the exact place where the house was burned flat.