Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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survive because he had lost access to raw material imports and depended on synthetics. Mr Hashimoto had no son, so Yoshiko would inherit the business. To ensure that there would be a man around to run it, her father arranged her marriage to thirty-one-year-old Bunsaku Yazawa, whose family owned a shop opposite their house. ‘It would be nice to say that it was a love match,’ said Yoshiko, ‘but it wasn’t. It was my father’s choice.’ Yazawa had already spent much of his twenties as an unwilling draftee in Manchuria. Three months after his 1941 wedding to Yoshiko, he was shipped abroad again. On demobilisation from the army in 1944, he was posted to air-raid duties in Tokyo, based at a primary school not far from the Hashimoto home, where his squad was responsible for demolishing houses to make fire breaks. ‘He hated the war,’ said his wife tersely.
In addition to Yoshiko, three other daughters were living at home: Chieko, nineteen; Etsuko, seventeen; and Hisae, fourteen. In 1944 Yoshiko gave birth to a son, Hiroshi, who was now the apple of his grandfather’s as well as his mother’s eye. It was a hard time to rear a baby. Food was so short that Yoshiko, undernourished, found herself unable to breastfeed. In order to get a small ration of tinned milk, it was necessary to secure a certificate signed not only by a doctor, but by the neighbourhood committee. ‘It was always coupons, coupons, coupons and queues, queues, queues. Anyone who could afford extra food bought it on the black market. Everything hinged on who knew who.’ As in Germany, there was intense bitterness between town- and countrydwellers. City folk trekked to rural areas, to persuade farmers illegally to barter food for household possessions. Yoshiko’s mother was reduced to surrendering her most cherished kimono in exchange for rice. Such bargains also demanded a struggle for a place on a train to a farming district.
The most dreaded government communication which most young people received was either a ‘red paper’, consigning a man to the armed forces, or a ‘white paper’, which committed every male and many females over seventeen to industrial labour. However, Chieko Hashimoto thought herself lucky to have a job in an armaments factory, because this entitled her to a ration of otherwise unobtainable noodles. ‘By that time, we were thinking merely of survival, of how to find the next meal,’ said Yoshiko. ‘A baby could only cry about its hunger, but mothers like me had to try to do something about it. It’s really hard to bear your child’s sobs, when you have nothing to give him.’ In the Hashimoto household, as in most Japanese families, only men smoked. The women claimed to do so, however, in order to collect a cigarette ration. This was eked out by drying itadori weed, which was then rolled in scraps of dictionary paper. Gas and electricity were available only for a few hours a day. Soap and clothing were desperately short—an unwelcome consequence was that headlice became endemic. The local cinema near the Hashimoto home kept going, but since December 1941 its patrons had been deprived of Hollywood favourites like Shirley Temple. A few little music halls stayed open, featuring performances by local comedians. The young cherished irreplaceable jazz and tango records. Those wishing to amuse themselves of an evening were reduced to singing songs in the bosom of the family.
‘We never talked about the war at home, and we knew very little about what was happening,’ said Yoshiko Hashimoto. ‘Even in 1944, the papers and radio still said that we were winning.’ Desultory efforts had been made to evacuate children and their mothers from cities, but these largely foundered, for the same reason as in Britain. Town and country children, thrown together by circumstances, disliked each other. Yoshiko spent several months with her baby son at the home of a rural uncle in the Chiba district outside Tokyo. But she hated the lack of privacy in the home of near-strangers whose every word was audible through paper walls, and returned to the city.
Sixteen-year-old Ryoichi Sekine and his father lived together in the Edogawa district of eastern Tokyo, with a young rustic cousin named Takako Ohki helping with the housework. Ryoichi’s mother and one sister had died some time earlier. A younger sister had been sent to live with relatives in the country. The teenaged Ryoichi found little to enjoy about the war. First, his ambitions to train as an engineer were stifled as schools devoted diminishing attention to learning, ever more to military training. By late 1944 his class spent most of their days working on an anti-aircraft-gun production line at the Seiko factory. Study of the English language was banned, except for technical terms. Young Ryoichi, like so many of his generation, felt that he ‘missed a chance of the fling which every teenager wants to enjoy’. His father was an optical engineer who worked for Minolta and Fujifilm. Association with military technology caused Mr Sekine to be well-informed about the war, and very gloomy about it. The food shortage caused the family to spend hours haggling for beans and sweet potatoes with crusty farmers outside the city. Lacking soap, they scoured their dishes with ashes. One day, a large black object fell from an American plane overhead. They were frightened that it was a bomb, but it proved instead to be a drop tank jettisoned by a US fighter. When Ryoichi strolled curiously over to examine it, he found himself savouring the stench of aviation spirit as if it was perfume, for petrol had become rare and precious.
The war progressively penetrated every corner of the lives even of children. Schools emphasised the destiny of young Japanese to become warriors. Ten-year-old Yoichi Watanuki, son of a Tokyo small businessman, suffered an embarrassing tendency to feel airsick when lofted on a swing in the playground. A teacher said to him scornfully: ‘You won’t make much of a fighter pilot, will you?’ Pupils were shown caricatures of their American and British enemies, whose defining characteristics appeared to be that they were tall, ugly and noisy. There were shortages of the most commonplace commodities. Celluloid covers for exercise books vanished; rubber-covered balls were replaced by baked-flour ones, which melted when it rained. Everything metal was requisitioned by the armaments factories: even spinning tops were now made in ceramic. Art classes drew military aircraft, music classes played military music—Yoichi did his part on an accordion. School outings stopped.
Every community in Japan was organised into neighbourhood groups, each mustering perhaps fifteen families. Yoichi Watanuki’s father had always supported the war. His playmate Osamu Sato’s father, a former naval officer, belonged to the same neighbourhood group. Mr Sato was bold enough to declare from the outset: ‘Japan should not have started this war, because it is going to lose it.’ Now, Yoichi heard his own father say gravely: ‘Sato was right. Everything is turning out exactly as he predicted.’
In the summer of 1944, as the threat of large-scale American bombing became apparent, evacuations of city children were renewed. One morning at Yoichi’s school assembly, the headmaster demanded a show of hands from all those who lacked relatives in the country to offer them shelter. More than half fell into this category. They were informed that their education would thenceforward continue at a new school in Shizuoka Prefecture, south of Mount Fuji. A few days later, a bewildered and mostly sobbing crowd of children gathered at the station, while behind them on the platform stood their parents, likewise tearful, to bid farewell. Flags were waved, the train whistle blew, mothers cried ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ in circumstances utterly different from those in which Allied soldiers were accustomed to hear the word. The children departed for a new life.
It was not a happy one. They were billeted in a temple in densely wooded mountains, bitterly cold in winter. Water had to be carried from a nearby river, and the children were obliged to wash themselves and their clothes in the icy flow. Lice became endemic. Their teachers, all women or old men, were as unhappy as their charges. Yoichi and his companions discovered one day that a delivery of sweet cakes—by now a rare delicacy—had somehow reached the school. To the children’s disgust, teachers ate them all. They were constantly hungry, reduced to stealing corn or sweet potatoes from the fields. If they ventured into the nearby village, farmers’ children broke their schoolbags and mocked them with cries of ‘Sokai! Sokai!’ ‘Evacuees! Evacuees!’ When Yoichi took a hand helping with the rice harvest, he felt shamed by his clumsiness in wielding a sickle, his own uncut row of plants lagging many yards behind those of deft rural companions.
His father made occasional visits, sometimes bringing food. When Yoichi’s mother gave birth to a new baby, Mr Watanuki bought a cottage near the temple in which his elder son’s school was housed, where the family might be safer. This proved a sensible precaution. Soon afterwards their Tokyo house was burned out in an air raid, and the whole family adopted rural life. They were safe in the mountains, though shortages of food and fuel relentlessly