Yuriko Hayashi

On December 8, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, starting a war against the United States in addition to being in a state of conflict on the Chinese mainland.  I was five years old then.  Around that time, it gradually began to be difficult to buy food.  My father sometimes visited Mitsuboshi Seika, a confectionery manufacturer, which he had done contract work with, and got some kanpan, or hardtack, and biscuits.  In our front yard we had many Japanese bantam hens to produce eggs.  My duty was picking the eggs they laid under the veranda every morning.

In 1943, when I was six, I entered Danbara National Elementary School, but I could rarely go to school because of my weak constitution.  Almost every time, I fell down from anemia at the morning assembly on the school grounds.  I often had swollen tonsils with a temperature over 40 degrees Celsius.  I went to the neighborhood doctor almost every day, so I don’t remember studying and playing with my classmates at school back then.

In 1944, my brother Tatsuo left home at 16, volunteering to be a Naval Aviator Preparatory Course Trainee.  He had done very well at school, and his handwriting was excellent.  Six boys including him volunteered from his school, Shudo Middle School.  An article with a picture of their press conference appeared in the newspaper.

In the spring of 1945, learning Tatsuo was in Kagoshima training as a naval kamikaze pilot of the Japanese Special Attack Units, my mother decided to go there to see him.  She got on a fully packed train at Hiroshima Station for Kagoshima, taking my younger brother and me with her, even though our nanny Kobubaba was in our house to take care of two of us.  Because cities all over the country were bombed at that time, Mother must have been scared that her solo journey to Kagoshima might be the last time she saw us.

At present it takes less than three hours from Hiroshima to Kagoshima by bullet train, but back in those days, trains stopped at every station and sometimes wouldn’t move for a while once they stopped.  I can’t remember how many days it took.  Moreover, we had to be standing the whole time on that fully packed train.  My mother was carrying Katsutoshi on her back, who wasn’t two years old yet and was wearing a diaper.  There was no room for my mother to change his wet diaper.  I vividly remember the back of her silk kimono were turning pink. 

At the airfield of the Japanese Special Attack Units in Kagoshima, my mother’s request to meet Tatsuo was rejected, as she had feared.  She must have resolved to see Tatsuo there by all means because she took up lodgings nearby.  Every day, she visited the airfield to ask to meet him, leaving Katsutoshi and me at the inn.  After all her efforts, she was never allowed to see him.

As the war continued, air raids on Japan’s mainland intensified.  Major cities such as Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya were air-raided one after another.  People in Hiroshima feared that their city would be the next and began to evacuate their valuable household goods and furniture to their relatives in the rural areas.  I don’t know why, but my parents didn’t evacuate anything.

Our neighborhood association made an air-raid shelter on the bank of Kyobashi River.  Once an air-raid warning sounded, the whole family would rush into the shelter with our air-raid hoods on.  In the beginning of 1945, many cities throughout Japan were bombed, so in Hiroshima, it was decided to evacuate elementary school students from third through sixth grade.  Those students who had relatives in the countryside were sent to live with them, and those who had no relatives were evacuated in groups with their teachers to temples and other facilities outside of the city.  My parents didn’t have me evacuated because they wanted to be together with their weak daughter as long as possible.

Air-raid warnings sounded very often, mostly night.  When American bombers came flying over Hiroshima, several searchlights swept across the sky from the west and the east of the city.  Anti-aircraft guns would shoot down the bomber where those search lights intersected.  Once, watching from the air-raid shelter, I saw a bomber being shot and crashing into the river.