There was another force which had an important influence on the girls' lives during the war years. The militarists who had taken over the government ushered in an authoritarianism that reached down to the grade school level. Much as if they themselves were in the military, students had to stand in rigid attention whenever they asked a question about a lesson or to be excused to go to the restroom. Twice annually, there were school assemblies to honor the Showa Emperor (Hirohito): Tencho, the emperor's birthday which fell on April 29th, and Kigen, the day used to commemorate the foundation of the Empire which fell on February 11th. The students assembled before the school principal on these sacred days and bowed as he raised an altar that housed a portrait of the Emperor behind its closed doors. The altar doors were slowly opened with a creaking sound made louder by the silence, so that the Emperor could symbolically look out over his subjects. Everyone remained bowed throughout, that is save one, Hinako. Her curiosity got the best of her and she had to steal a peek at the Emperor's picture which she did. She remembers that he wore a sash that was draped across his chest and he held a sword in one hand. Takeko, like most of the other students, never saw the photo in those days.
"I just wanted to see what 'God' looked like," recalls Hinako. "Before the war, it was drilled into our heads that our Emperor was God himself. I will bet that others also looked, but they would never admit to it. Anybody caught looking would have been severely punished."
The bombs that were dropped by the American planes during the war were often incendiary bombs that proved fatal to the traditional wooden homes when they hit them directly. One of these bombs landed in the street near Uncle Taichi's home in neighboring Marifu. Fortunately only debris from the explosion hit his house though this still destroyed part of roof and a portion of the main structure, but no one was hurt.
Not surprisingly, the heaviest brunt of the war was felt by the two increasingly larger municipalities in the region, Iwakuni and Hiroshima. Near the end of the war the air defense of this part of Japan was completely gone and American fighter planes flew low to the ground. There were oil tanks in Iwakuni that were targeted by these low flying American planes and a Shogakko was located in their path. On several occasions newspaper accounts would tell of grade school students who were injured or killed as they tried to run for the cover of the forest in the hills near their school after the air-raid siren went off.
While she was attending school in Iwakuni, Hinako she saw American B-29s fly overhead. The students were instructed to run for cover in the trees of the mountains. Hinako, who was standing out in a clearing, saw one fly close enough to the ground that she could make out the "USAF". She stood there and thought to herself, "please take me home!" One of the teachers ran up to her and pushed her against a wall for her own safety while reprimanding her for daydreaming.
Another time the girls heard an American pilot had been shot down nearby. The pilot bailed out of the plane avoiding instant death but a crowd of angry villagers beat him severely. When Takeko heard the story she wondered if it was someone she knew or even a relative, but had to keep her thoughts to herself. Such were the complexities of war and the predicament fate had placed the sisters in.
Uncle Taichi was a retired naval officer and wasn't called into active duty during the war. Most of the girls' classmates' fathers were similarly too old to be called into service. Another uncle, Urata Tetsuo, who became an Akimoto also served in the war. Tetsuo was their mother's youngest brother. Their mother's oldest sister had married Akimoto, who became sonchoo of Hashirano. Akimoto never had a son and so when Tetsuo married his daughter, he adopted the Akimoto name through the tradition of yooshi. Small Imperial Rising Sun flags were once distributed to Hinako's class and they were instructed to write on them, using a fude (calligraphy brush in this era before the ball point pen was introduced in Japan), a brief message to someone in their family or whom they otherwise knew was fighting in the war. Hinako, reflecting more of the fact that she was impressionable rather than her true sentiments, wrote "Death is Honorable." She never did learn about Tetsuo's war experiences because it wasn't considered polite to ask, even after the war, and such stories weren't shared with teenagers or children in any event.
Inspite of the secrets of the war, the fate of some was made clear. Grandmother Yamamoto rented out a couple of rooms to a sensei (teacher) who happened to be a fervent nationalist during the war. After he enlisted in the army, he was seen off at the train station by the two girls and their grandmother. He held a shiny sword in his hand and saluted the three women as he left for Manchuria never to return again. And then there was a neighbor of the Yamamotos. There were two girls in this household that were about the same age of the Yamamoto girls and they had a brother who served in the war in the South Pacific. He never returned and later it was learned that he had died of starvation.
To protect themselves from the bombing, Obaasan organized the two girls to dig a large hole in their backyard which they covered with wood and then placed straw, dirt and weeds on top to conceal it from up above. "We used this hole when there was an enemy plane in the vicinity to protect ourselves from direct gunning." They would rush to the hole at all hours of the night, and since Obaasan's knees were nearly crippled from arthritis, sometimes they had to carry her: "I can still see grandma with tears running down her face when we had to take her with us into the dug out." The hole was not large enough to be very comfortable for the three women when they tried to huddle in the hole, but it provided some sense of security.
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