H08U, Sayako Huff ‘00, Namie Hasegawa, Grandmother 1936
On November 13, 1998, I interviewed my grandmother. Her name is Namie Hasegawa, and she was born on September 13, 1936, so she was almost nine when World War II ended.
I had heard war stories from my grandfather and how terrible it was. He had volunteered for the Army when he was about to turn 16. He was too young to actually fight in the war, and the Americans had already destroyed so many Japanese planes that his job was to go collect the dead bodies and pile them up. He explained how it was hard to overcome his hatred, and also he was afraid that the day would come when he would also be one of those dead bodies. He survived the war but unfortunately he died of cancer last year, so I couldn’t interview him. Instead I asked my grandmother.
She didn’t remember very much, because she was young, but she remembers hearing the air raid alarm and running towards the shelter near the ocean for safety. Her father was too old and her two older brothers were too young to go to war, so they all stayed together. This saved them from being separated or left behind. Her parents were farmers, so they had plenty of food compared to other people. She said that she was quite lucky in this way: no one in the family had to starve.
Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t have direct contact with dead bodies, so she wasn’t really frightened of death, but every time the American planes flew over their house, she held on tight to her mother for support. After the war, people from the city came to trade their possessions for food. Even after the war, she did not have much trouble getting food, and the Americans did not occupy the place where she lived, so she had no trouble with foreigners.
But like everyone else, she had lice in her hair. To get rid of the lice she had to go to a special hospital that was far away from her home. There they got a powder called DDT. This killed the lice in her hair. Lice were so common back then, because they had no soap or anything to wash their hair with. Also she said that people who wanted tobacco had to buy tobacco leaves. She remembers that she and her brothers and sisters wrapped tobacco leaves in paper to make cigarettes for her father. They would compete to see who could make the most tobacco.
In this interview, what shocked me the most was hearing about lice. However, since there was no soap or anything else to wash with, it’s obvious that you would get lice in your hair. This made me thankful for the safe world and peaceful environment that I am in right now. This leads me to the conclusion I made after hearing my grandmother. These stories should be passed on to our generation and to the next generation, so that we will never have a war again. We need to know how bad it was and how quickly we could lose people important to us. Because we don’t have direct experience of war, we need to be taught thoroughly to prevent it from happening again.