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A Childhood Memoir of Wartime Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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I was born in October 1936, and my first clear recollections are those of the Nishi-Ōkubo neighborhood of Tokyo around 1939. Akira and I lived with our grandparents in their big house set in by a granite gate. I knew that my parents were in Paris but never missed them. Diagonally across from our house to the left were the homes of Yoshinobu-chan, Chika-chan, and Mitchan. A street stretched perpendicular to our house. On the right was the Kibōsha (a nice-looking building used by Korean rights activists) and then the home of Yatchan. Yatchan's older brother Sato-chan went to middle school. Yatchan's younger brother Yotchan was not yet school age. On the left, across the street from Yatchan's house, was the home of Sakudō Naoko-chan. She had a little brother nicknamed Kō-bō. Later, the Maebashis moved into the large house next to ours. They had three children: a fourth grader who might have been named Hidehiko, a girl my age called Reiko-chan, and a younger brother who was probably named Kunihiko. One day, my brother and I were in a second-floor room with a large desk. Hidehiko gave us a dictation test. Among other things, we had to write the characters for “bu-un chōkyū o inoru” (I pray for your good martial luck).
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1 Akira is two years older than Kyoko. Their parents Keishirō, a journalist, and Naoko, had left for Paris in 1939, eventually returning to Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok and then by boat perhaps to Niigata before arriving in Tokyo by train. They had just boarded the Trans-Siberian when they heard the news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Keishirō would leave shortly for China, where he would spend the war years. Their maternal grandmother Tsukamoto Man raised Kyoko and Akira while their parents were in Paris and lived with the Iriye family thereafter. (Kyoko poignantly describes her grandmother's death in the poem “Three Landscapes” included in the Review of Japanese Culture and Society XXVII special issue.) Their maternal grandfather Tsukamoto Tetsuzo (1881-1953) was a leading teacher of Chinese and Japanese classics and a prolific author whose works included widely used study guides and annotated readers of the classics. Kyoko's first teacher of the classics, he was an aficionado of calligraphy and kanbun poetry (poetry written in Chinese).
2 Narimune, in the western suburbs of Tokyo, was then mostly rice fields.
3 Nasu no Yoichi (1169-1232) was a famous archer who fought on the side of the Minamoto clan in the Gempei War (1180-85). In a passage in the Tale of the Heike, the Taira placed a fan atop one of their ships and dared the Minamoto warriors to shoot it off. Nasu no Yoichi, seated on his horse in the water, did so with a single shot.
4 Beginning with the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, sixty-four Japanese cities were eventually destroyed by bombing and napalm, creating tens of millions of refugees and destroying much infrastructure including railroads, roads and bridges.
5 The Battle of Okinawa, which raged most fiercely from mid-April to mid-June 1945, was the bloodiest of the Pacific War for the Japanese as well as U.S. forces, and took the lives of one quarter to one third of the Okinawan population.
6 A planned exhibit on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was canceled when the U.S. Senate, outraged at plans to include the charred lunchbox of a Japanese child, voted unanimously to replace the nuanced historical presentation of the bombing with a single object: the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima.
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