G09U, Shanti Snyder ‘99, Kiyoko Matsuzaki, Family friend, 1934, Akita, Hokkaidō
Kiyoko Matsuzaki is a good friend of my mother, and I was able to interview her in November 1997. She was born in Akita in 1934 and moved to Hakodate in Hokkaidō, where her mother lived, when she was seven years old in 1941. She had a younger sister who was left with her uncle in Akita. Her father had died in 1940.
Matsuzaki-san’s mother remarried three years after her husband’s death, and she had two more children. The first child died of dysentery in 1944, a year after her remarriage. There was no medicine to treat this disease, and penicillin for tuberculosis was unknown until the American Army arrived. Yet even then, the only ones who could afford to buy penicillin were the wealthy ones. Therefore the death of children was frequent.
Her mother’s second child (by her second husband) was born in 1945. The boy met his own father for the first time in 1948, when the father came back from Karafuto (Sakhalin), where he was held by the Soviet Red Army for three years after Japan’s surrender.
Matsuzaki-san said that everything was scarce during the war: food, school utensils, and necessities for living. Yet this was normal to her, because everyone was poor except for a very few wealthy people. The wealthy ones could afford to buy medicine, and their children wore new shoes instead of wari-zōri (straw sandals). They were wealthy because they had illegal access to food, because everyone was supposed to have only a restricted amount of money. The rest of the money was confiscated and held by the government. Food was equally distributed by the government depending on the number of people in each family, and it was not legal to buy food without ration coupons.
Matsuzaki-san went to school in Hakodate. There were over 70 students of the same age crammed into a classroom made for only 30-40 students. All of them were stressed because of the lack of space. They also lacked pencils, paper, and textbooks. Pencils were used until they were only a few centimeters long. Then the students coiled a piece of paper around the pencil stub, making a cylinder so that they could continue to write with it. They didn’t have glue, so they used a tiny amount of cooked rice to stick the paper onto the pencil. These were called sakku.
Paper could not be wasted. Student notebooks (o-chōmen) were lined with boxes and hard borders, but everyone had to write from the top edge to the bottom, ignoring the boxes and margins. For calligraphy lessons, there was no hanshi (thin paper used for calligraphy), so they used newspapers. Western factory-produced paper (seiyōshi) was used only for tests. Textbooks had to be shared by at least two students.
Matsuzaki-san remembers a school day when she was in Grade 6 of elementary school. The teachers told the students that they were not going to study that day. The students were all delighted to hear this, but they all had to wear aprons and walk to Mount Hakodate. All of the children had to collect rocks from the mountain and carry them in their aprons, and they walked all the way to Akagawa Airport, where they piled up the rocks to make a runway for airplanes. This went on for two days. This is an example of child labor, or teishintai.
Matsuzaki-san had the choice to end her schooling after eight years, because compulsory education through middle school did not become a Japanese law until 1948. She graduated from school when she finished 8th grade in 1946, because she had to help her family with their hard life, since her mother was a single parent. There was no government subsidy then to support single parents. At first she didn’t have a real job, so she went to trade her family possessions to get food for her family. She went to Aomori on the ferry to trade rice for apples. Living conditions did not significantly improve even after the war ended.
She said that during the war, there wasn’t any variety of food because of the rationing system, and rice was always scarce, but Hokkaidō had a lot of potatoes and pumpkins, so they always had something to eat. She had to collect a certain type of grass and dry it out for food. She also recalls that she had to dry the used tea leaves (chagara), which were collected from homes to feed the Army’s horses. By the time she got married in 1956, the ration system had ended.
I asked Matsuzaki-san about the damage in Hakodate during the war. She told me that there was a big air raid and bombing from the sea in July 1945. The fortified area in Mount Hakodate was bombed from the sea, and all of the ferries that connected Hakodate with Aomori at Hakodate Pier were also bombed. One of the major employers, Hakodate Dock Company, didn’t make any warships, which was one reason for the weakness of the Japanese Navy.
She told me of an amazing experience. At some time before July 1945, she was evacuated to an area about eight kilometers outside of Hakodate close to the sea, because she had heard of bombings and fires within the urban area of Hakodate. One day in July she returned to her house in the city to get something that she had left in the house. It was already close to midnight when she was heading back, and she lost her way. She walked along the shoreline, because she knew that it would ensure that she walked in the right direction. All of the lights were out because of the blackout rules. She saw a glowing light near the shore, and she thought it was strange for any light to be lit at night. She walked closer to the edge of the sea, and she was astonished to see the Aomori ferry burning with red-hot flames. She remembers the name of the ferry: Dai-jū-hachi Seikan Maru. She couldn’t tell if there were any passengers on the ship, but she didn’t even know why the ship was on fire. She felt the heat of the flames, even though the ship was far away. She said to me that she would never forget the heat that she felt, all alone, as she watched the ship burning all night. “It was so hot that I couldn’t stay there,” she said. She witnessed the terror of war.
She explained how ignorant everyone was, including herself, about what was really going on, because the military headquarters (Daihon’ei) controlled all of the information broadcast on the radio. Only a few people were able to afford a radio, and the information was passed on by word of mouth, so it was altered by the time it reached the third or fourth person. This meant that no one knew if any of the information was accurate or not.
This is how she learned of the end of the war in August 1945. Near to her evacuation place was an Army camp. The soldiers who were assigned there didn’t have enough food, so they stole potatoes from farms in the middle of the night. On August 15, all of the soldiers headed for Mount Hakodate. She thought that they were going to pray to win the war at Hachiman-gū Shrine, because August 15 was the shrine festival (matsuri) day. Then some soldiers came to see her, each with a handful of rice that they had received that day. They all had stomach problems, and they asked to make the rice into porridge (okayu). She and the others made porridge with the rice that they had brought. Then the soldiers told her “The war is over. We are going home.” They gave her a can of fish, and they left as soon as they finished eating.
Matsuzaki-san says that she can imagine what North Korea is like right now, having experienced World War II. She also says that “Because of the scarcity of everything during the war, I can’t throw anything away, whether it is food or clothing—I guess that’s why I got so fat!” and laughed. She also commented on the lack of morality when survival is at stake: “If there is only a little food for my family, and the family next door has none, I still wouldn’t share it with them.” I asked what she would do if there was a scarcity of food in the future. She said that “the younger generation would have the hardest time to deal with that reality, since they have never experienced scarcity of anything, in modern Japan where there is a surplus of everything. People don’t have to worry about what they will eat tomorrow.”
I agree with Matsuzaki-san. The world today is too comfortable for the younger generation, who do not know how to put up with the lack of anything. The only time they will come to realize this is if a crisis situation actually comes.