Childhood Memories of Our Evacuation during the WWII (by Marchan)

Our school was evacuated to a hot spring resort in the mountainous district of Nagano prefecture.
It was at the end of the summer of 1944.
At that time, I was nine years old and in third grade at elementary school.

Our school dormitories were in hot spring inns and we were separated by school year and gender.
Our dormitorys innkeeper was the village headman.

I think that the school teachers, matrons and innkeepers might indeed have had a difficult time because of the serious food shortage, due to a sudden influx of people, like us, into such a small village.

Therefore, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to all of them for having taken care of us.
However, various serious problems seemed to have occurred in our evacuation school.
Moreover, such trouble was actually secretly dealt with, and it did not filter down to the parents.


Spread of epidemics

My favorite boy was the class monitor.
He was a child of a sunny disposition and he had big bright eyes.
One day, he came down in a very critical condition with encephalo-meningitis, an contagious disease.

However, the villages around there had no doctors.
Therefore, our school nurse rolled him up in a futon and put him in a kind of push-cart and took him to the hospital, which was far away from the village.
According to a young school nurse, he was softly crying "Mother help me" as he was being taken to hospital.
But he unfortunately died on the way.

At that time, encephalo-meningitis seems to have spread to many areas.

Also, typhoid fever flared up in our girls dormitory and therefore we had to be completely isolated.

This meant that we couldnt go to the village school and nobody could visit our dormitory.
Only a member of the Takarazuka Girls' Dancing Troupe came to console us.


There was so much sickness everywhere.

One day, our teacher told us that we would have special checkups in the afternoon, and that we would have to go to a room specified beforehand by the matron.

In the afternoon, the matron called the girls names out one by one, and the first girl entered that particular room.

After she came out, we surrounded her and asked what kind of examination it had been?
All she said was that we would understand when we went in, and she left hurriedly from the place.
We gradually became uneasy while waiting.
I understood her feeling when my turn came.

In short, at that time, a certain kind of venereal disease was present among some children, and that was the examination we had to undergo.

I think that this kind of inspection was too harsh for such young children.

Fortunately, none of my classmate seemed to have been infected.

When I think back, this infection must have come from the public bath at the hot spring.

Of course, our parents never knew about this.
However, I think that it was a blessing for them not to have known, because even if they had known, they couldnt have done anything about it.


Please kill me.

One day, I went to the Teachers Room on some pressing business, which was also a tatami-mat room.

The room had a paper sliding door, so I could not knock on it.
From the corridor, I called out my name and asked if I could come.
After a while, a male teachers voice replied that I could.

When I entered the room, there were two teachers there, male and female. The male teacher was in charge of everything, while the female instructor was responsbible for the homemaking course.

The female teacher was only wearing underwear.

When I came into the room she burst into tears and said to me Please kill me. I have done what was never necessary to do.

At that time, I didnt understand what had happened and what she had said.

Honestly speaking, I do not like to criticize those teachers and its no wonder that they did immoral acts due to their living under such difficult situations.

Therefore, in this respect, I am afraid that what I have written here should have been kept hidden.
However, I have dared to write this because I wanted everyone to know the truth.


By Marchan