L03U, Shamin Haga ‘04, Shōko Narita, Friend’s grandmother, 1936, Aomori
I interviewed my friend’s grandmother on November 9, 2002. Her name is Shōko Narita. She was about five years old when the war started, and she told me about the harsh, severe lives people lived during those days.
Q: Where and when were you born? Do you have any siblings?
A: I was born on January 21, 1936, in Aomori prefecture, and I also lived there until I was 18. My family consisted of my dad, mom, and my little brother who was two years younger than me.
Q:What did your dad do for a living? What kind of food did you eat?
A: My dad was a very skillful, dexterous person, and he made clothes and little objects and sold them for living. Since there was such a scarce amount of rice and people were poor, we could not afford big meals. In those days, we mixed a lot of daikon, mame, and daizu (radish and soy beans) into little amounts of soft rice and ate it as okayu (gruel). We also ate nekomanma, which was a mixture of miso soup and rice together.
Q: What was your life like before the war?
A: Everything was fine, although we were not wealthy and didn’t live a wealthy life. Everything was just normal. My dad went to work the same time we went to school, and he walked with us halfway, because his work was on the way to our school. After school, my brother and I went home, and we ate dinner with the entire family together. It was just an ordinary life I was living.
But then, we started to sense a war coming between the U.S. and Japan. Since we wanted to be prepared for the war, we made a huge hole underground as a bomb shelter (bōkūgō) so that when the airplanes came to bomb us, we could hide in the hole. We also took some amount of rice and stuffed it in our pants and bags.
Q: Were you scared?
A: Since I was young at that time, I didn’t completely grasp what was going on, but I remember being scared every day. The thing that my family were all scared of was to get a conscription summons in the mail, which said that Father would have to go to the war. Every single day, I dreaded checking my mailbox because of this. Then one day, the paper finally came, and we were all shocked. My dad had to quit his job and go to the war in January of 1945. I was petrified by the possibility that he could lose his life in the war, and we wouldn’t be able to say goodbye.
Q: What was it like when you had to see your dad go off to the war?
A: My family all went to the station, and when I saw him get on the train, I felt that my dad was the most courageous man in the whole world. I tried to act strong and thought to myself that it wasn’t only me whose father was going away. But I couldn’t stop the gush of tears from overflowing from my eyes. I truly felt at that time that my dad wasn’t going to come back, and I said farewell to him in my heart.
Q: How did your family survive without your dad?
A: Luckily, my mom was working so we were able to afford some things and survive. It was very hard, because we didn’t have a father in the house to protect us from any harm. At night, we couldn’t turn the lights on, because of the bombs. At this point, I didn’t have the desire to want anything. The only thing I wanted was for the war to end and my father to come back. The children who lived in Tōkyō had to evacuate to the countryside during the war. It was an extremely busy, tough age.
Q: How was school during the war?
A: Although school should be a place of learning and study, instead we were learning to prepare for the war and how to get ready for it. Since almost everyone’s father had to go off to the war, we all felt the same and connected. My schoolmates and I grew really close. We were all helping out each other in a way so hard to describe in words. Since we had such a small amount of paper, we used every little space we could until the paper looked black and worn out. We also used extremely old, ragged, crumbled textbooks. Even though this stage in my life was the toughest, it certainly will be the most precious, because this was the time when I became extremely close with my friends, and learned the meaning of life: that it’s not easy, and it’ll only get better if you try to share and cope with the people around you.
Q: Did your dad come back?
A: It had already been four years since my dad went off to the war, and he still hadn’t come back. A lot of my friends’ fathers died in the war, but some of them returned safely. My neighbors said things like your father is probably dead already. At this point, I fully gave up on hoping my dad would come back. The war was already over. “Where else can he be?” I thought. But then one day, my mom went out and checked the mailbox when she hurriedly came back inside the house and yelled at us, “Papa ga kaete kuru yo!!!” I was speechless. She had just gotten a letter saying that my dad was going to come back on February 21, 1949. I was so happy, my eyes filled with moist watery liquid, and it drained out of my eyes like a waterfall. My mom and brother and I went to the station and waited for my dad’s arrival. After a lot of men came out of the train, I quickly was able to spot my dad. Although he had become very thin and slender with a great amount of grey hair, he was still the same dad I knew four years ago. My family and I cried and we all hugged. This was the happiest day in my whole life.
Q: What did you think of the Americans?
A: What surprised me was that the Americans sent numerous boxes to Japan containing cans of fruit, jam, and other food after the war. Before this, I thought of them as extremely scary people, but it was very benevolent of them to send us all these foods we’d never eaten before. I thought of the Americans differently after that. After the war, Japan was a disaster, and it took a lot of time to rebuild Japan’s beauty. But through the Japanese people’s eagerness to reconstruct Japan’s beauty quickly, we were able to make Japan as it is now.