My Experience of War in Fukui City (2)

　
The atomic bomb attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but at that time I didn't know about terrible stories so much. After we began to able to talk freely, we knew about a true story. On August 15 when the War was over, I was at home. A notice for circulation passed our home because at noon the Emperor talked to everyone and we had to listen to the radio. Everybody got together in front of a radio. I didn't understand at all because I was a child. I heard the Emperor's high voice. Till his talk was over, everyone stood up and didn't move at all and listened to the radio.
Adults talked each other that Japan was defeated by the War or the War was over.
But in the middle of the situation I was young and so I went to the Asuwa river to swim with a towel and a bathing suit with my friends as usual because they said to me "Let's go swimming!".
On our way home all of us said each other "If Americans come to Japan, they put oil onto or into people and houses and make a fire　and all of Japanese people will be killed."
But we enjoyed swimming as usual and went home. After the night curtains for blackout were taken off, it was light in the rooms. American soldiers came to our village once or twice after the War was over, but we didn't have things which were rumored.


It was strange that the Japanese way of thinking became opposite. Those who were proud before weren't proud of themselves and people suddenly said opposite things (quite different from before). By an agricultural land reform straw rice- bags which were piled up the place in a front door in our house every year had gone. Rice paddies which were produced by tenant farmers before belonged to theirs. My family could manage to make a living because they were a village headman and a postmaster and they had mountains. It was very changeful for my grandparents and parents.


I and my elder sister cleaned up our house for rent in Fukui city with my father after it was burnt down. We pulled a trolley and carried lunch boxes for 3 people and walked towards Fukui city. It took 16 kilometers from our home to Fukui city. My father made a plan for coming to Fukui city by bicycle later.
When I and my sister sat on a river bank and had lunch because we were hungry, a hungry mother and child came up to us and said to us, "We want to share food a little with you because we have had no meal since yesterday."
We gave lunch for my father to them because we felt they were miserable.
I and my sister were proud of our very good behavior because they were very pleased with it. When my father caught up with us later, we told him about it. We were scolded by him strictly because my father had no lunch. We didn't understand why we were scolded in spite of our very good behavior.
I couldn't understand that was why? why? for a long time, but it took a long time that I was big enough to understand it.
My father told me to tell a house mother of my dormitory about the reason and to take lunch for him because my father came to Fukui city, but he had no lunch and couldn't work. I felt like crying and was ashamed, but I visited a house mother of my dormitory to ask her to take lunch for him. Fortunately I could get boiled rice with only dried plum in a big lunch box from her because her baggage was put in my house in countryside to escape from the War.
The experience was a big lesson for me how I lived in the future. I should have had a solution to help a miserable mother and child and leave lunch for my father and finish working as schedule.
It was dangerous that we fell together by our way. We didn't have a good idea because we were children. My father didn't scold us so much because how we solved a problem was difficult for us.


I didn't remember before the War was over, or after the War finished, but my eldest sister cleaned up spots of my mother's chest of drawers and gave it a lift in a cart as a trousseau and she married a man who lived in the same village. 2 elder brothers of her husband went to war and died. Therefore he didn't go to war and was alive.
Her wedding dress was woman's working pants. She is 80 years old now. I remembered that a long time after she got married, her parents prepared wedding dress for her and she had her picture taken. Japanese wedding dress means Japanese traditional wedding kimono (the bride pure white silk kimono called "shiromuku" including "Bunkin Takashimada"-the bride wears a Japanese-style wig done in the bunkin takashimada style with a white cloth headdress.)
After the War was over, we took lessons in our dormitory which was escaped from fire and a temporary house for some time.
After that Japan obeyed MacArthur's orders and the 6-3-3 system of education began.
A girl's school and boys one were mixed and it changed a coeducational school though boy's and girl's friendship was like sin.
A girl's seat was surrounded by a boy (front, behind, left and right ) like a splashed pattern because boys and girls got along with each other early. After that the school district system began in order to get rid of difference in academic standards among schools. Some people couldn't help leaving a school which really wanted to enter.
I felt sorry for them. I graduated from a senior high school in spring in 1954.
I was tossed about a system and change of the times in my young days.

Written in Sept. in 2005.

(The end)