The monsoon of Showa 20 must have been comparable in Grandmother Yamamoto's mind with only one other natural disaster, a volcanic eruption in Kyushu during the latter part of the nineteenth century when ashes fell on Hashirano for days. The downpour of the monsoon rains was such that the villagers expected a flood and the Yamamotos started raising some of the household items several feet off the ground as a precaution. When the flood came, it was more devastating than anyone had expected. The torrent coming down from the mountains broke the village levee changing the river's course. Obaasan was sick when the flood hit and so Hinako carried her grandmother on her back as she ascended the stairs. The water was rushing into the house at such a speed that it seemed to be a race between Hinako and the water to see who would reach the second floor first. Hinako and Grandmother Yamamoto beat the water, but it had reached within inches of where Hinako and her grandmother had made it to safety. Others lost their homes and even their lives. The village elders called for each household to help look for bodies. Hinako went out for two days in search of the bodies by herself and Takeko, who was now a teacher, went to make sure her school and students were okay. On the third day they teamed up in their search that took them to neighboring communities down the river:
"By the third day, the bodies we found were maggot infested, bloated and unrecognizable," recounts Hinako today. "I had nightmares for days after that search operation. We had even less food after the flood, but I couldn't even eat what little we had. My stomach turned to jello at the thought of eating. My skinny body became even worse and my arms and legs looked like chopsticks...not a very pretty sight. Then came the clean up operation. I was unable to attend school [in Iwakuni] because the railroad bridge had been torn down by the rushing water and debris causing the one and only train to stop running for a time. We had three feet of stinking mud in our house which needed to be carted away by hand. I drilled a hold on one side of a flat piece of wood and tied a rope on to it. Then, I piled the board high with muddy dirt and pulled it out of the house. By the time all of us [from the neighboring houses] dumped all the dirt and mud into the main street, portions of the street reached up to the second story of our building. Eventually many convicts were put to work removing all the dirt into what used to be the old river [from where it had changed course], creating new fields for those who lost their own when the river changed course. My 'big shot' Uncle Akimoto who lost more land than others was also the biggest recipient of this new land."
This natural disaster seems to have foreshadowed a far greater disaster that was coming.
Just before the atomic bomb was dropped, Hinako saw dozens of planes flying very low in the sky filled with silver strips (radar blockers) and millions of leaflets drifting down to the ground. The school children were taught that if such a thing occurred, the class president and vice president were to gather up the leaflets and hand them over to their homeroom teacher. "We were forbidden to read any of them. However, again I was curious and read everything. The leaflets said that if we did not surrender, something terrible would befall our country. They did not specify what exactly was going to happen."
As the war raged on and the prospect of Japanese victory seemed more and more desperate, school children were enlisted into the war effort. Some thousand students were enlisted to help grade a new airfield that had been built over mulberry fields (mulberry leaves are fed to silkworms and these fields were expendable whereas the rice fields were considered too valuable throughout the war to sacrifice even for an airfield). The students marched about stomping the ground to level it while singing war songs for rhythm, with little concern for the meaning that lay behind the words. The war ended before the airfield was ever finished.
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Takeko at the time
she was mobilized
to work in the
factory welding
oxygen tanks for
the war effort.
Her headband indi-
cated which group
she was working
with, and her arm-
band was an
identification for
security purposes.
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Takeko worked in a factory welding oxygen tanks in her last year of Jogakko along with 1500 other classmates. "Putting all my thoughts behind me as an American citizen, I worked hard just to prove to the other students that I too was a good student. I had pride in what I did (I was president of my class of 150 students). I had no choice but to do the best work... My thoughts were of only one thing and that was to return to the United States where I belonged with my family. I worked extra hard so I could meet that goal one day. I can say, one good thing came out of all this work at the factory was that I did learn how to weld quite efficiently."
Hinako's school was turned into a factory for grinding lenses. Her job was not to work on these lenses, but to go into the mountains where she would cut open a pine tree and set a can at its base to collect pine tar. Later the pine tar was refined into airplane fuel, however it was never an adequate replacement for petrol. Whenever Hinako would hear a Japanese war plane fly over head and the engine seemed to make an unusual, sputtering noise, she would say to herself, "Uh oh, he's using your pine tar Hinako!" On August 6, Showa 20 (1945), she was walking through a valley meadow on her way to collect pine tar from the trees in the mountains, when in the broad daylight there was a bright flash "one thousand times brighter than any lightning flash." She was frightened, but it went away just as fast as it had come so she continued to walk on her way when a loud thunder, that matched the lightning flash of earlier in intensity shook the earth beneath her. She jumped into an irrigation ditch as fast as she could fearing that the world was ending. From the valley ditch she saw a black cloud appear over the other side of a nearby mountain. After awhile the top of the cloud turned white. Hinako ran home and everything looked fine except for some tiles which had fallen from the roofs of houses here and there. Of course she later learned that the cloud was much further than she had initially surmised.
Beginning in Showa 19 (1944) Takeko had started teaching in a town called Mishyo Mura east of Iwakuni. She taught third grade children for two years and fifth grade children for one year. Fortunately the war was not formally propagandized in the classroom so Takeko was never put in a position of talking about the war to her pupils. One morning she was in the school auditorium where the teachers and student body were assembled to listen to the principal when a bright flash of light filled the room. Nobody knew what it was but it was daylight outside and it was a sunny day so it couldn't have been lightning. A few minutes passed and so the principal began to speak again. Suddenly a loud thunder sounded and the windows of the auditorium shattered. Everyone scrambled to get under what chairs there were in the auditorium since most of the students had simply sat on the floor. Suddenly sirens signaling that the enemy was attacking sounded and the teachers began to assemble their students to take them to class-assigned dugouts. Everything was quiet except for the sirens as Takeko lead her thirty-seven students to the dugout. After the sirens stopped they began to cross a field that separated them from the school building and everyone noticed an enormous cloud in the direction of Hiroshima but no one knew what it was. [Iwakuni is approximately 18 miles from Hiroshima. Hashirano is another 2-4 miles or so from Iwakuni-Shi. Mishyo Elementary School is about the same distance south east of Hashirano.]
On the third day after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Takeko learned that a request for volunteers had gone out for assistance to help in that city. Takeko and another teacher volunteered to go. They took a train in the direction of Hiroshima, but the train would go no further than Hatsukaichi, which was three station stops prior to Hiroshima. It was a very hot day and they continued on by walking until they reached the outskirts of Hiroshima where they saw scorched trees. They decided to turn back however when they were overcome by the terrible putrid smell that filled the air and the sight of dead bodies floating in a river. After the war, a blister raised on Takeko's lower leg for no apparent reason, when it healed an unusual scar was left behind. She attributes this scar to her experience because there was no other logical explanation for it.
When the emperor spoke to the Japanese people over the radio to announce the surrender, it was the first time they had heard him speak. Although his announcement was in a dialect reserved for the Imperial Court, the Japanese people could still understand his message. Takeko and Hinako never blamed the emperor for the war. They reasoned that the only time he spoke to the people was to surrender, and that all the other war pronouncements were made by others, the military. Looking back now, they say "He was just a figurehead."
Even after the war, the food shortages that afflicted Japanese families did not disappear for some time. During the American Occupation, Douglas MacArthur promulgated the "Land-Lease Law", a landholding reform law, Grandmother Yamamoto was no longer allowed to lease her land. As a result, Takeko, Hinako and their paternal Uncle-in-law, Uncle Nishikawa, tried their best to plant and harvest rice on one of their fields for their own consumption. Their inexperience proved to be an enormous burden to overcome (Uncle Nishikawa had lived in the city and knew nothing of farming) and the yield from the harvest was dismal.
Hinako would trade matsutake, pine mushrooms, which she had gathered from the land her grandmother owned on the mountains surrounding Hashirano village for rice grown by her classmate's family. Her friend lived in a rented house during the week when she attended school, but Hinako would have to travel over seven miles and up the side of a mountain to this friend's house during the weekend to consummate these transactions.
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Yamaguchi Ken-ritsu
Iwakuni Dainichi Kooto Jogakko
Due to shortages during and after the war, students were not able to
obtain the cloth for their serge skirts so they gradually began to use
material from kimonos to make pants. This became practiced
throughout the country and is noticeable in the unusual patterns of
pants in this picture. Pictures in the centennial anniversary of the
Hashirano Shogakko show that the girls began wearing these pants
around Showa 16 (1941) and the serge skirts only begin to
return in Showa 23 or 24 (1948-49).
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After the sisters had survived the war impediments to their hoped for return to their home of America continued to arise, not the least of which was serious concerns of mortality. While still a teacher, Takeko fell ill with pneumonia. In their concern for their teacher, her students came and visited her. Her illness was so severe that her friends prepared for her death by weaving her a straw futon as was the custom of the time. In the fever of her illness she revealed secrets to her younger sister that her conscious reserve would have otherwise kept secret, but Hinako was still surprised when a male teacher that Takeko visited and in explaining his concern for her welfare added that he wanted to bring issho-sake. Issho-sake was always exchanged at the time of marriage engagements so his meaning was clearly understood. Hinako feared that this would mean she would not be able to return to America with her sister so she tried to convince her sister's suitor that such a thing was impossible. When her efforts seemed in need of support she asked another teacher who was renting a room at their house during this time to explain their situation to the man. In the end she was successful.
Marriage, in fact, had twice threatened the sisters' return to America. Obaasan believed that it was right for girls to be married at a certain age. In preparation for that time she had negotiated with Takeko's maternal aunt, (Urata) Akimoto, to have Takeko marry her maternal cousin whom she had met in seinendan (the Community Youth Group). Aunt Akimoto believed strongly in maintaining the purity of the blood through intermarriage and consolidation of wealth that the Urata, Akimoto, and Yamamoto families possessed and such a marriage would support this goal. Issho-sake were exchanged by the two families and Takeko was engaged. Her fiancé went off to fight in the war and in retrospect it can be said that he miraculously returned.
In Showa 22 (1947), Takeko began working as an interpreter for the British administered Iwakuni Liaison Office that was set up at a former Japanese military air base in Iwakuni. She was earning more (her salary was ¥800 a month!) than she had been as a teacher and had hope that this position would aid her and her sister in getting back to the U.S. Takeko paid for Hinako's Jogakko education and the bulk of the household expenses which were also met in part by the money earned from renting out a room in their house. The British soldiers helped Takeko as they could and she eventually received a postcard from her family in America with a photo on the obverse side. Takeko sent three or four replies to her family which were eventually forwarded by the American Red Cross, but it took months before her letters were finally acknowledged. Grandmother Yamamoto was upset by Takeko's efforts to return to the U.S. with her sister, but Takeko was determined and finally earned the support of her Uncle Taichi who had initially sided with her grandmother. Takeko went on several trips to distant Yokohama and Osaka to make travel arrangements to get new passports for herself and her sister so they could go home (Takeko and Hinako's birth certificates were lost at the beginning of the war along with all the other documents, papers, and books that had English words on them, and their passports were virtually destroyed in the flood). When in Osaka, Takeko would visit her elder sister, Lily's brother-in-law who was stationed there as a member of the U.S. military occupation forces. Aunt Akimoto and Obaasan suspected some sort of impropriety because they didn't believe that he was married, though he was, and the marriage between Takeko and her cousin was called off.
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