Sadao Hirano

I was born in Funakoshi (present Funakoshi, Aki-ku,) on October 17, 1932, as the second son of my father, Shigeto, and my mother, Chieko.  We were a family of eight.  I had three brothers—Masanori, two years older, Takao, seven years younger, and Tsutomu, fourteen years younger; and two sisters, Kinuko, three years younger and Michie, ten years younger.  As a farming family, my parents grew barley, sweet potatoes, daikon radishes and pumpkins.  We older children took care of our younger brothers and sisters and helped our parents in the farming fields since we were very young.

In 1931, the year before I was born, the Manchurian Incident took place. Then in 1937, the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and in 1941, the Pacific War began.  Japan had entered what we called the “Fifteen Years’ War.”  All my life until I was 12, when the A-bomb was dropped and the war ended, Japan was in the state of war.  Although I knew the situation, it didn’t feel real to me, because I was too young, and the battlefields were outside of the country.  My house was in a hilly area in the countryside surrounded by nature, so I innocently played outside every day.  Sometimes, I walked to the nearby beach wearing rice-straw sandals I made and collected shellfish—short-neck clams, giant clams, Japanese blue crabs and Japanese mud shrimps.  Those clams and crabs were food for my family but collecting them was fun for children like me.

Everything in our lives was for the war effort.  As food and supplies gradually became scarce, the rationing of rice, vegetables, matches, soap, sugar and salt started, and my parents had to deliver farm produce they grew to the government.  The neighborhood association decided the amount for each farming family to deliver, according to their field size.  As the assigned amount to deliver became bigger, the meals of my family at home changed.  We dried sweet potato vines and radish leaves for preservation and rehydrated them to add to cooked rice.  Sweet potatoes were our staple food at that time.  However, farming families in the countryside like us were still better off than people in the cities.  People from urban areas often came to my neighborhood with their backpacks, in which they had their kimonos to exchange for food.

I entered Funakoshi Elementary School when I was six.  In 1941, elementary schools changed their names to national schools, so our school became Funakoshi National School.  The curriculum became more militaristic and was required to thoroughly abide by the Imperial Rescript on Education.  In the morning assembly, our principal would assure us, “Japan has never lost a war, such as the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War.  Even if we are about to lose, there will surely be a kamikaze or divine wind to save us.”  “Look at the world map.  Japan stands like a bow drawn toward the U.S.A.”  When seeing a departing soldier off in front of his house, we children waved small Japanese flags shouting, “Banzai!  Banzai!”

Everything in our daily lives was related to war.  At school, boys had a fake wooden gun shooting event on Sports Days, in which boys divided into two teams shot each other in a smoke screen.  Girls practiced fighting with bamboo spears.  “We are a hundred million fireballs.”  “Extravagance is the enemy.”  “One drop of gasoline is a drop of blood.”  “Never stop fighting until we have crushed our enemies.”  We learned those phrases every day and, even though we were still small children, we believed that we had to fully cooperate in the war effort as a nation.

Sometimes, at school we prepared comfort bags for soldiers, which included chocolate and caramels, which we hardly saw or ate.  Also, if we thought it would please the soldiers, we also added things we received by chance or by rationing.  We were told that we had to be unselfish because soldiers were fighting for us. 

Later I heard that almost none of those bags we had prepared reached soldiers at the war front where soldiers starved to death.  It was said that approximately 60% of our soldiers did not die in battle but by malnutrition and starvation.  Transport ships were sunk on the way to the war front, especially in the Bassi Channel, the waterway between Taiwan and the Philippines. U.S. submarines were on the watch for Japanese transport ships and sank them there, so the channel was called the “graveyard of transport ships.”

In March, 1945, I graduated from Funakoshi National School, and entered Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial School (present Hiroshima Commercial High School).  However, the school buildings had been confiscated by the Army, painted in camouflage and turned into the Army Ordnance School, Hiroshima Branch.  So, we commercial school students used the buildings of Hiroshima Higher Normal School (presently Minami-ku, 2.0km from the hypocenter) instead.  At school, there were no classes.  Every day, we were mobilized to help farmers in their fields, to do farm work in the East Military Drill Grounds, which were used as farming fields then, or to go to places in the city for building demolishing work.  There, we pulled down buildings surrounding important buildings to make open spaces to prevent fire caused by air-raid from spreading.