This series is about the Japanese home front in and around Sasebo, Japan, during World War II. It is not a condemnation or critique of actions taken by either side during the war but rather a look at the civilian perspective of the war and the still surviving facilities that supported the war effort.

On the night of the Sasebo air raid, American B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers dropped more than 1,000 tons of firebombs over a city 2.5 miles long and half a mile wide, setting much of it ablaze. Many people sought refuge in the air raid shelters and tunnels that dotted the city. Outside one of the smaller shelters was a fifteen-year old girl in a yukata and flash hood, holding a handkerchief to her mouth to keep from inhaling the heavy smoke. Separated from her family while firefighting and then unable to escape the area, she waited outside the shelter door and watched the nearby Tono-cho elementary school, where she learned as a child, burn to the ground. Looking at the sky, Shizue Iwamoto (now Shizue Fujisawa) hadn’t imagined her night would end like this when it started.

She had been born and raised in Sasebo, and lived in Tono-cho, a Sasebo neighborhood, with her parents. For her, Tono-cho was a great place to grow up. Beside the Sasebo Kyomachi downtown, Tono-cho had a lot of shops and was conveniently near the big, modern Tamaya Department Store. The neighborhood worked its way up a slope, where her family lived in a quiet area near the upper part.

Her father was a carpenter and her mother a homemaker. The middle child of five, her two youngest siblings had been sent to Uku Island, the most far flung of Sasebo City’s islands, for safety after the bombers began targeting cities. Her oldest sister was away at a shihangako, a school for training teachers, and her older brother had worked at Sasebo’s naval hospital before enlisting and being sent to man koshaho (antiaircraft guns). He was later sent to Kokura in northern Kyushu and she was worried that he would be sent to fight overseas.

Shizue herself attended a jogakko, a girl’s high school. At the time mandatory education beyond six years was a new concept, it had just been stretched to eight and she was proud to have been accepted into a jogakko. She had aspired to become a teacher, just as her older sister had.

It was not only something she had wanted to do, but it was also practical. Her family was poor and couldn’t afford to send her to an expensive university, but the shihangako teaching schools were free, charging only room and board. This aspiration was put on hold when she was mobilized during her third year of jogakko in 1944.

Today the idea of pulling teenagers from school to build weapons may seem unusual but Japan had already begun a sort of civilian service draft¹ shortly before they began the war.

Japan was desperate for manpower. Able-bodied men were conscripted, and like in America, it was up to women to make up their numbers working back home, building the weapons they needed to keep up the fight. Girls were ideal because they couldn’t be drafted and were too young to have babies.

This is how her school books were replaced with an arc welder at the Sasebo Kaigun Kosho (Sasebo Naval Arsenal), one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s four naval arsenals. As a gakuto-doin (student draftee) she was now an employee of the great shipyard that built 113 ships for the navy and outfitted or modified even more, such as Musashi, sister ship to Yamato, the two largest battleships ever built.²

She believes her homeroom teacher is the reason she got stuck with the noxious welding job. He was quiet and calm; when the teachers decided what jobs to give their students he timidly allowed them to force the most unpleasant jobs on his. While Shizue did electric welding, other students were gas welders, iron workers, blueprint makers or worked on hull plating. Her class alone took the welding assignments.

After two months of welder training she began working in the seikankojo (pipe-making shop) that officially fabricated ventilation for ships, on Sept. 1, 1944.

The work, using an electrically-powered welding torch to fuse metals together, was hazardous and very unpleasant. She wore eye protection to keep the arc from burning her corneas and padded clothes to keep from getting burned by the torch and sparking metal, but the part she couldn’t protect herself from was the smoke. The only way to keep from inhaling the noxious fumes was to hold her breath.

Officially her parents knew that their daughter welded aluminum as that is what the government allowed her to tell them. Actually she helped build weapons. Her first job was welding the 10-liter fuel tank for boats she knew by their technical name, maruyontei, or Circle Four Boat.  It wasn’t until 70 years later she learned the name the boats were better known by- Shinyo. (“Ocean Shaker”)

The menacing name was applied to a family of small motorboats made of either wood or steel and powered by one or two automobile engines. Outwardly they looked like normal boats, but Shinyo were seaborne kamikazes.

The boats carried 595 pounds of explosives mounted in the bow and were to be driven at 23 knots at a target. Used practically in the fight in the Philippines and at Okinawa, it was expected they could swarm out and destroy American landing ships when they tried to create a beachhead in Kyushu.

Built in Sasebo, crew training took place at nearby Kawatana, home of the conventional torpedo boat school. Alongside the Shinyo crews, other suicide attackers were trained there such as Fukuryu (“Crawling Dragon”) frogmen. While fifteen year-old Shizue was helping build these boats, boys about her age were among those trained to operate them.

Shizue knew that they were kamikazes and the pilot would die driving it, so out of respect for the life that would be lost, she worked hard to make the best fuel tanks she could. Later her work shifted to welding together the halves of kirai (naval mines) that would be deployed around Sasebo Bay.

When asked about how she felt about building weapons, she said she was doing it to save Sasebo Bay, so like with the Shinyo, she did her best. Mine-welding was difficult work and after finishing it required a pressure test. If the mine leaked, it wasn’t any good. She wanted praise for the quality of work she put out, though believes that she wasn’t good at the job and others were better.

Beside the secret of her work she kept from her family, there was another that she kept from everyone. Just because she was working didn’t mean she was done learning. She couldn’t tell her family or friends and if she was caught studying she would be scolded for wasting time that should be spent winning the war.

She did it anyway. She worked alone in an isolated room, so between welding jobs she used chalk on a steel board to practice math and kanji. When she was finished, she erased the evidence of the rebellious teenage behavior.

As a student draftee she was paid for her labor but not much. After various expenses and dues, she earned about 10 yen for a year of dangerous work. Today this is about 7,000 yen or $64.

When she was a shipyard worker her daily routine was simple. She cleaned her room before heading to work, even if she was alone, then worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. six days a week and sat down with her family at 6 p.m. for dinner. She studied alone in her room after dinner.

Despite the work schedule, she still had time to spend with friends and one of her favorite hobbies was singing popular songs. She wasn’t ever the first to know them, but she had a friend that sang them and she learned from her, such as “Aizen Katsura,” a movie theme song.

Another important part of life in wartime was the tonari-gumi (neighborhood association). If gakuto-doin mobilized children at school, the tonari-gumi mobilized every Japanese citizen to do their part for the war effort at home.

The tonari-gumi has long been a part of Japanese culture. Previously they’d been informal voluntary groups of neighbors helping each other and performing upkeep on communal areas. The government took advantage of this and made membership mandatory in 1940.

The specifics of what a tonari-gumi did varied from place to place. At its core were meetings where government information, such as new policies and propaganda, were disseminated and citizens learned practical skills like air raid defense, how to stretch rationed items and how to supplement with non-rationed ones. They performed community policing, and supported savings bonds and material drives, which could also be mandatory to participate in. Patriotic activities could include making imon-bukuro comfort bags or senninbari for servicemen. Hers controlled distribution of some rationed food items such as vegetables and soy sauce to their members.³ In some locations they also controlled the distribution of rations cards, which allowed members to buy food, or distributed rice among their households.

Shizue’s association was composed of 15 families and meeting attendance, like membership, was mandatory. At least one family member had to attend each meeting, though everyone not at work was required to attend. Usually this would at least be the family’s mother or grandmother.

Whatever way the tonari-gumi did not support the war effort was performed by a different mandatory membership organization. Shizue was a member of Dai Nippon Kokubo Fujinkai (Greater Japan Women’s’ Association), which was an organization for the mobilization of women, the instilling of womanly virtues and providing morale to the troops. Its function overlapped with tonari-gumi in many locations.

While your average citizen may not have thought about it, this system also ensured that neighbors where policing each other in maintaining compliance with national policy and proper, patriotic behavior.

One of her favorite patriotic duties was seeing off draftees. When a member of a tonari-gumi household was drafted families and friends would see them off with a small parade. The tonari-gumi followed behind the draftee, the group leader holding a giant hinomaru flag, another member with a large banner bearing the new soldier or sailor’s name and the rest waving small hand flags as they sang patriotic songs all the way to the train station. The more friends and family to join in, the merrier and the greater number of flags, the greater the honor. New sailors went from Sasebo Station to the Sasebo Chinjufu naval district and soldiers took the train to Omura for training.

After the Allies began bombing Japan every civilian, child and adult alike, were now required to be trained and ready to handle disaster from the skies at a moment’s notice; it became a requirement to carry a bokuzukin (flash hood), a triangular bandage and a first aid kit at all times when not at home. Tonari-gumi held firefighting training which taught the neighbors how to form a bucket brigade, use sand, and bamboo hitataki fire-hitting mops to fight fires. Armed with the bamboo hitataki she would fight back against the most technologically advanced aircraft ever built.

Building weapons and preparing for bombings, she knew it was a dangerous time and was afraid of dying.

Shizue came home from another tiring day at work on June 28, 1945. That was the other thing her parents knew about her job. She welded aluminum and it was tiring. There were nightly air raid alerts, so she usually slept in her regular clothes, but it was raining tonight and the clouds were heavy, so she believed the bombers wouldn’t attack. She went to bed in a yukata, a light summer kimono, expecting an easy night’s rest.

Her sentiment was shared by Sasebo’s air defense command center. All of Kyushu’s air defenses, aircraft, radar, antiaircraft artillery and rockets, were coordinated through Sasebo in a secret bunker under the Imperial Japanese Navy headquarters just a few miles from where Shizue slept. It was assumed Kumamoto was the most likely target that night and so local defenses were not on high alert.

Around midnight the droning of 580 Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engines flying 10,000 feet overhead woke Shizue. The bombers were already over the city and an alarm hadn’t been raised.

By the time the air raid sirens began to wail it was too late. Sasebo had six searchlights to illuminate the threat and 80 anti-aircraft guns to fight it, but clouded skies masked a formation more than one hundred strong, and the defenses were ineffective as the bombs began to fall. The cluster munitions came down dully in the night sky and broke apart, each a canister for dozens of individual incendiaries in hexagonal pipes.⁴

Seeing bombs hit the street she grabbed her firefighting gear and sprung into action. She was confident she could put out the fires with her hitataki.

Fighting fires started by firebombs is different, and more dangerous, than regular firefighting. Though similar in appearance, not all the firebombs used against Sasebo that night where the same. Some were filled with pyrogel, a jellied gasoline and magnesium mixture and others were magnesium alloy incendiaries which after impact spewed like a flare continuously for up to eight minutes before burning out. Compounding these dangers was the munitions’ last surprise. Some didn’t go off when they landed but had a time delay and would detonate minutes later, when firefighters like Shizue arrived on the scene to stop the blaze. As she went out to stop the fires bombs would continue to fall during the 80 minute air raid.

Shizue attacked the flames with her hitataki. Her family scattered as they also fought the fires. She was alone and afraid, but kept fighting. A single bomb fire was easy to put out, but with the area saturated by bombs the fires grew together until they became what she called a ‘sea of fire.’ It was time to stop fighting and get to safety.

The sea cut her off from the nearest air raid shelters so she attempted to flee Tono-cho. Passing dangerously close to burning buildings she first tried to get over Tono-cho’s hill, but fire blocked the way. Then she tried to get to nearby Ko-Sasebo, but again the fires hemmed her in.

While she tried to escape she thought about her nine-year old brother and three-year old sister that they’d sent away for safety. If they had been here, she thought she couldn’t have escaped because she would have to go back for them. At some point she realized that she was bleeding from a small arm injury. She didn’t feel it happen and there was no pain, so she ignored treating it and continued looking for a way out or a shelter.

Trapped in Tono-cho, she made for the small air raid shelter she and her neighbors had built near their house. It was smaller than the Tono-cho tunnel shelters in the hill under the school. When she got there, it was already full of people who had fled the fires.⁵ Nowhere else to go, she waited out the aftermath of the air raid outside the shelter door. She was alone in the middle of a burning city, trying to keep from choking on smoke with a handkerchief, had no idea where her family was, she was bleeding and afraid of dying in the fire.

While out there she saw her elementary school burn as well as a large house near hers. It had been converted to a dormitory. Did any of the men inside survive the night? She never found out.

Eventually morning came, the fires died out and she had to get back to work, air raid or no air raid. Some classmates were missing so she and the others decided to visit the homes of those who didn’t show up. She checked on a friend who lived in the next neighborhood over and found her house had collapsed. She never saw her again and does not know if she died.

Nearly half the city burned down, but Shizue’s home survived. She still had a roof over her head, but when she saw people who’d lost their homes eating in the streets, she was envious of them.

At this time, the government strictly controlled the food the civilian populace had to eat. Rationing limited what a family could purchase and was based upon factors such as people’s age, gender and occupation. It had begun with direct government control over food distribution in 1940 and year by year almost every food item that could be rationed was. Now food could only be purchased at an authorized location and Sasebo’s burned down during the air raid. This led to a food shortage.

Her relatives on Uku Island had tried to help by mailing food, but it was confiscated by the police en route. Welding for the naval arsenal, she was luckier than most and was fed a meal at work.

One day she took a train from Sasebo to the adjacent town of Haiki then walked to another town, Egami, to go door-to-door asking to purchase rice from any families with food to spare. She rounded up five kilograms then walked six miles home. She avoided the train for fear her rice would be confiscated at the station by the government. Another time she travelled to Miya village but found no rice to spare so she purchased sweet potatoes instead. Overall, at this time the easiest food to come by were radishes, the fat, white daikon.

She knew of the first atomic bomb by noon of Aug. 6, 1945, just a few hours after the bombing had occurred. Not knowing what it was, it was referred to as shin-gatabakudan, the “New Type Bomb.”

Several days later Nagasaki was hit by the second atomic bomb. Like Sasebo, Nagasaki is hemmed in by mountains and this contained the blast far more than Hiroshima’s. Unknown to her and her family, her brother had been transferred from Kokura and changed jobs from artilleryman to eiseihei (medical orderly). He was now stationed in Nagasaki at Inasayama, which did not take damage from the attack, and so he was among the medical first responder to enter the irradiated blast zone.

He continued treating patients in Nagasaki until after the war ended. Healthy for most of his life, he would die of a very late onset of atomic bomb-related illness 60 years later.

Shizue was still welding naval mines right up until the war ended. She was off on Wednesday, Aug. 15 and was at home, but she’d heard people say a big announcement was going to be made on the radio at noon. Her family couldn’t afford a radio so she didn’t learn about what was said until around 4 p.m. when she heard rumors about the broadcast, that it had said the war was finished. People said the radio transmission was unclear and hard to understand. She guessed the military may have tried to interrupt the broadcast.

It didn’t happen, but her assumption was correct in a way. The night before, a group of army officers had murdered the Emperor’s captain of the guard, and using forged orders entered the Imperial Palace in an attempt to capture the recording and take the Emperor into “protective custody” so as to continue the war until the 100 million “shattered like a beautiful jewel.”

And she believed she still needed to shatter. She was a gunkoku shojo, a patriotic military girl defending Japan after all. She’d heard military men where committing seppuku on the steps of the imperial palace. The soldiers had tanto, a short sword. Her home in Tono-cho was conveniently located neat Tamaya Department Store which had many blacksmiths and shops selling tanto, the blade would be easy to come by.

She was alone in this belief at home as her parents didn’t feel dying was necessary, they were over 40 and hadn’t been called to serve.

“Is this real?” She thought to herself. That evening her family sat at home together and wondered what to do. Night was falling and they were unsure if the blackout curtain could be taken down… were they still necessary if there is no war?

Her question was answered by a bright light coming from her neighbor’s house. Relieved, she uncovered their windows and turned on their home’s lights too.

Though her school burned down, Shizue was able to finish junior high in Hiu, a few miles away and eventually became a teacher.

She lost most of the vision in her left eye because of her time welding and working in the industrial environment, and other classmates contracted lifelong illnesses. Since this stemmed from her own teacher failing them, she determined to always protect her students. For most of her career she was not allowed to tell them why she felt this way.

As a teacher she was closely monitored by the board of education and forbidden to ever speak of her wartime experiences, receiving a scolding if she ever slipped. It was difficult keeping it to herself but in 1978 Sasebo’s Katari Tsugukai, an association which passes down the story of the Sasebo air raid, was formed and she was finally able to speak freely about it. She traveled from Okinawa to Hokkaido sharing her experiences and meeting with other former student laborers. She surprised them all when she told them what she did and never found another student who was welder.

She retired from teaching in Sasebo after 36 years and today is the Katari Tsugukai lore keeper. She believes she has to continue, to keep going, to leave her experiences for the next generations in the hope that people will no longer make war.

Notes

1 According to Daily Life in Wartime Japan, initially the call up was just men and women ages 16-25, two million in total, in late 1941. In 1943girls 14 and older were beginning to be mobilized. By March 1944 three million were mobilized and labor service in the ironically named Girls’ Volunteer Corps or similar organizations was mandatory. (Japan had a lot of mandatory patriotic organizations whose purposes and functions overlapped so which organizations a person were required to join depended on locality.)

2 Shizue was fortunate that a large military industrial complex was near her home, other gakuto-doin where shipped far from home to live and work in industrial facilities. For example, Michiko Fisher (nee Takahashi) and 158 of her classmates were sent from their homes in rural Shizuoka to work in a Kawasaki engine plant near Kobe. Fisher’s autobiography is Survivor.

3 Some details on Sasebo tonari-gumi activities came from an interview with Reisuke Ejima, Katari Tsugukai member and air raid survivor. Tonari-gumi meetings were held on the 8^th of the month (in honor of the Dec. 8 attack on Pearl Harbor and other locations) and training was held weekly. Ejima was to work as a gakuto-doin in an active elementary school/munitions factory (it was both at the same time) but it burned down in the air raid just days before he was scheduled to begin.

4 Three kinds of incendiaries were used during the air raid, the M-74 pyrogel bomb in E-48 clusters, the M-50 magnesium bomb in M17A1 clusters and the M-76 ‘block burner’ pyrogel bomb. Described in article are the M-74 and the M-50; an example of the latter is on display at the Katari Tsugukai’s Sasebo Air Raid Reference Room. The M-50 was chosen for its effectiveness against both industrial and residential targets and could have a time delay, which is why I highlighted its functionality in relation to Mrs. Fujisawa’s firefighting. During our interview she specifically mentioned being worried about fire bombs on a time delay. The last kind of bomb was specifically for industrial targets and so it would be unlikely they were used against this part of town.

5 According to Ejima a lot of people panicked and forgot their firefighting training. The fires grew too big, too rapidly and so they immediately went to seek shelter while Shizue continued to fight the fire.

Resources / References

Daily Life in Wartime Japan by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco (Kyushu Defenses)

Japanese Destroyer Captain by Capt. Tameichi Hara (Shinyo)

TM 3-400 Chemical Bombs and Clusters (M50 and M74 incendiary bomb)

Popular Science May 1945: “How We Fight Japan with New Incendiary Bombs…” by Volta Torrey

Another good book on Japanese civilian life is Japan at War by Haruko & Theodore Cook and a short memoir by another gakuto-doin is Survivor by Michiko & Frank Fisher. For a well-researched work of fiction on the subject I recommend the manga In This Corner of the World by Fumiyo Kouno.

 

The Japanese Homefront Series

The Sasebo Air Raid (Sasebo Peace Museum/Air Raid Reference Room)
Shizue-san the Welder
Sasebo Air Defense Command Center
From Beginning to End (Hario Wireless Transmitting Station and Uragashira Repatriation Center Museum)
Kawatana, Home of Shinyo and the Fish-Shaped Water Bomb
Safe at School (Mukyudo)