Kiyomi Kono

I took an exam to be a teacher when I was in the fourth year of the girls’ school.  At that time, the result was shown by each subject, and I failed only in music.  After graduation, I entered a dressmaking school in Miyoshi for two years.  Then I worked as a substitute teacher at elementary schools for two years and got married at the age of 20 in 1951.  My husband was a civil servant employed by Hiroshima prefecture.  He lived and worked in Hiroshima city.  I worked hard from morning till night in Yoshida as a wife for my grandmother, mother, and 2 sisters in-law.  Though I was born in a farmers’ family, I never had done farming.  That caused me big trouble and I spent hard times with unfamiliar farm work.  However, I thought it was normal, watching my eldest brother’s wife at my parents’ home. 

In 1952, I had my first daughter and my second daughter in 1956.  I delivered both of them at home with the help of a midwife.  When I delivered my first daughter, the midwife couldn’t come in time.  It’s hard to believe now, but at that time, pregnant women made a futon with burned straw and delivered babies on it.  I did both of my deliveries that way.

After my second delivery, my condition wasn’t good for a long time.  Because there were no good doctors in Yoshida where I was living, I went to a hospital in Hiroshima city.  Then I decided to move to my husband’s house when my second daughter was one-year-old.  In 1959, I delivered my first son at Hiroshima Citizens Hospital.   I took my own Futon to the hospital.

At that time, there was a reconstruction boom in Hiroshima.  As the Local Autonomy Law was enacted  in 1947, Hiroshima prefecture could not be directly involved in the reconstruction of the city’s buildings.  In 1949, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law was enacted.  My husband, an employee of Hiroshima prefecture, moved to the city office with a few colleagues and formed a Building Guidance division with city employees.  Despite his busy days, he qualified as Architect of the First Class in 1956.  He was skilled at structural calculations, and I remembered him doing structural calculations late at night.  In 1965, Professor Shigeo Sato of Hiroshima University was asked by the city to investigate the way to reinforce the A-bomb Dome.  My husband started a research group with the Professor.

In October, 1965, one of my neighbors told me that my husband fell in front of the entrance to my house.  Though I called an ambulance quickly, the crew said that he probably wouldn’t survive.  It was a subarachnoid hemorrhage utterly out of blue.  He was only 38 and I was 34.  But now I think that he was exhausted both mentally and physically because his mother died shortly before, and he went to Yoshida every weekend, in addition to his hard work.  Moreover, our second daughter, a third grader, had a traffic accident, having her leg broken and her head injured.  She was hospitalized for three months. 

I started working as a city employee later.  I worked till I retired in 1994 at the age of 63.