Grandmother's sister had three daughters who lived on the mainland in Hiroshima working as nurses at a hospital there. Grandmother had been born in Hiroshima, which was about an hour's train ride from Kyushu. Sadakazu sometimes went to visit his cousins.
I was enrolled in school in Kyushu as a fourth-year student — the year I had completed in Tokyo before I was accepted to Friends.
As a city girl, I stuck out awkwardly among the country kids. I found it difficult to walk in black patent leather shoes across the round slippery rocks that lined the river. The children in Kyushu wore zori and would remove them to walk barefoot across the rocks.
When heavy summer rains fell, the three rivers that surrounded our town would swell and overflow, flooding the entire area. I witnessed a cow mooing helplessly from the top of a shack as it floated away toward the ocean. Snakes swam past and sometimes ended up perched in odd places like the branches of a tree.
In school, I once stood up for a girl who was crying because she was being picked on by a group of older boys. Her face had red spots all over it from the Mercurochrome that her mother had dabbed on her to treat an itch. Although I was nervous about confronting the older boys, I felt I had to do something so I walked over and stood next to the girl. I told the boys that they should be ashamed of themselves for picking on her. The sight of me scolding them in one of my Auntie's Shirley Temple-inspired outfits must have been a bit of a shock because the circle quickly broke up and went away. The girl stared at me, speechless.
Eventually, I adjusted to country life. A medical doctor's daughter approached me one day and we soon became good friends. She sometimes invited me to her parent's home. It was the biggest house I had ever been inside at the time. The neighborhood kids taught me how to fish and dig in the river bottoms for clams. I learned how to weave zori out of rice stalks and would take them to local stores to sell for money. Kyushu provided a peaceful break from the stress and constant danger that we had faced in Tokyo. We were safe in the countryside while Tokyo burned.
We stayed in Kyushu for one year. Although life in Kyushu was much safer, I was homesick for Tokyo and often cried and begged to go back to the city. My family got tired of hearing me and eventually decided to move back to Tokyo. The war was still going on at the time and I was fourteen years old when we returned to the city.
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Forged In Fire: Stories of wartime Japan
Non-FictionForged In Fire is the true story of a young girl's childhood in pre-WW II Tokyo; her schoolgirl dreams; the violence, starvation and desperation of wartime that drove her family out of the city; and the American Occupation that shaped Japan's future...
