Yoko's Diary

by Paul Ham

  Winds buffet my temporary home

  Bearing news that darkens the night

  And the frosts chill even my bitterness.

  3.

  A terrible nightmare it has been

  My spirit, once tested, is now glad.

  On a morning free from the horrors of war

  I talk with a friend, gazing at the eastern sky

  And tears burn my eyes.

  When he returned home bearing this song as a gift, our father discovered that Yoko, who should have been there waiting for him, had been killed in the atomic bomb blast. Although it was originally a cheerful melody composed in a major key, Father rewrote the melody in a minor key, and thus it became a sad song that mourned his daughter’s death. Both the sheet music and the lyrics shown here were composed by our father.

  – Kohji Hosokawa

  Japanese lyrics to the song ‘Beloved Daughter’.

  Sheet music for the song ‘Beloved Daughter’, which Yoko’s father composed in Shanghai on 23 February 1946.

  Tribute from a brother

  The letter from Hatsue Ueda

  Immediately after the atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945, hospitals, schools and other facilities located in the suburbs of Hiroshima became emergency relief centres. One after another, the injured were carried to those relief centres in military trucks or boats.

  Amidst all the chaos, Yoko, who was critically injured, was lifted into a relief truck and taken from atomic-bombed Dobashi to a relief centre located approximately 10 kilometres away in the science laboratory of the Kannon Village National School in Saeki District, Hiroshima Prefecture; she was admitted at around noon.

  A young local housewife called Hatsue Ueda nursed Yoko and attended her deathbed in the last hours of her life.

  While she was taking care of my sister, Mrs Ueda tried to contact Mother in Miyajima several times. However, in all the chaos, she was unable to reach her. Meanwhile, Mother spent a sleepless night at home and then the next day, on the seventh, hurried to the relief centre after word finally reached us from the village office.

  For her part, Yoko waited anxiously for Mother and breathed her last, lonely breath that night, clinging to Mrs Ueda’s hand and calling out for our mother.

  At the sight of Yoko’s lifeless corpse, Mother suffered the deepest sorrow imaginable and was prostrate with grief.

  Mrs Ueda, who had experienced something most people would never imagine in their worst nightmares, described Yoko’s condition and last moments in a letter she wrote to Michiko Kigami, a friend who lived in Miyajima, the same small island where Yoko lived.

  Later that year, Ms Kigami sent us the letter. Mother cried and cried when she read it. For the rest of us who no longer cry, the letter is a reminder of our profound grief.

  7 August 1945

  Dear Michiko,

  Yesterday was a terrible day in Hiroshima. I know it is strange that I am suddenly writing to you now. I trust you were not injured? I pray that you somehow managed to escape and returned home safely. We have all been terribly concerned about you.

  I hope that your family in Miyajima was unharmed.

  How are your dear father, mother, aunt and grandmother? I trust they are all still doing well. All of you are in my thoughts.

  We, thank heavens, were all unharmed, so please don’t worry about us. Our shoji screens and other things inside our home were destroyed, so we escaped with only our lives. My younger brother and sister had been permitted to rest at home, as they were rather unwell, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

  Right now, there are about 150 people at Kannon School. I went there to do relief work yesterday evening. All members of the women’s and young women’s associations have been mobilised. At the relief station I came across a person who said she was from Miyajima. When she told me where she was from, I felt very attached to her and nursed her injuries so that I didn’t have to leave her side.

  She was very badly injured; her whole body was covered in severe burns and it was obvious that she couldn’t be saved, so I just did everything I could for her. She just stared at the clock, waiting anxiously for her mother to come and see her. I had someone at the village office telephone her home in Miyajima, so we waited and waited for her mother to come, wondering whether or not she had arrived yet.

  I don’t know how many times she asked me, ‘Isn’t Mother here yet?’ and I comforted her by saying, ‘She’ll be here soon. Be strong and stay with me, okay?’

  When she asked me to give her water or green tea, or stroke her back, or rub her chest, or drum lightly on her chest, or hold her hand, or fan her because she felt hot, I did as she asked and held her hand in mine.

  I waited like that with her for her mother to arrive, but in the end, she died before her mother could get there.

  She died while the doctor was taking her pulse.

  I simply have no words to express how sad it was.

  That poor, poor, poor girl!

  Then, while I was caring for her, it occurred to me that you might also be out there somewhere, injured, like her, and I couldn’t stop worrying. When you get home safely, please contact me immediately as I am very concerned.

  Apparently, the girl who passed away was Yoko Moriwaki (thirteen years old), a Year 7 student from Kenjo. She had been in the Dobashi area doing labour service. While the doctor was taking her pulse, he said, ‘I’ve heard that this girl is the music teacher’s daughter.’ When I asked her if she knew you, she told me very clearly that she did. I asked her if she lived near you, and she said, ‘Yes.’

  You must know her well too.

  Her mother must be grieving and terribly distraught that she arrived too late. The girl wasn’t even wearing her school uniform because it had been burnt right off her body.

  If you do see anyone from her family, please let them know that although the facility was rudimentary and the nursing treatment only basic, she received the very warmest care from everybody. We did the very best we could to enable her to pass away peacefully.

  She died at 11.24pm on 6 August.

  My dear Michiko, please contact me with news. I am anxiously waiting to hear from you.

  Please give my regards to your parents, your grandmother and your aunt.

  Yours,

  Hatsue Ueda

  Present-day Dobashi, the area where Yoko and her classmates were doing labour service when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. (Kohji Hosokawa)

  Yoko, rest in peace

  With each year that passed after the war, things gradually settled and returned to normal, and Japanese people found themselves living in a new peaceful, prosperous world. For a long time in this new world, there were two people I fervently hoped to meet.

  One of those was Kazuko Kojima, a resident of Kawasaki, who wrote and contributed the section to this book called ‘Memories of that time’.

  Mrs Kojima, whose maiden name was Fujita, was a Year 8 student, so she was one year above Yoko at school. Like Yoko, she lived in Miyajima, and travelled to Kenjo with her each day. At my younger sister’s funeral, she pinned her silver Kenjo school badge to the robe that my sister had been dressed in. When Yoko was admitted to Kenjo, Japan was in the grip of an extreme materials shortage, so the only school badges available were plain ones made of aluminium. For that reason, Yoko was yearning to wear the enamel-plated silver badge that she so admired.

  Knowing how Yoko had admired it, Mrs Kojima – Kazuko Fujita, as she was then – removed her own precious badge, which was irreplaceable, and pinned it to Yoko’s robe with trembling fingers.

  I was at an impressionable age, and for me this was an unforgettable act of compassion. Later, I moved around a lot with my job, but only the years passed; my desire to meet Mrs Kojima again remained the same.

  In 1988 I was able to make contact with Mrs Kojima thanks to the NHK production Girls in Summer Dresses, which was broadcast throughout Japan. This allowed me to finally meet in Tokyo the woman who had made Yoko’s
dream come true, and to express my gratitude forty-three years after the event for her kindhearted deed.

  The second person I had longed to meet was Hatsue Ueda, the woman who had cared for my dying sister in the last hours of her life at the relief centre.

  Using the few clues contained in the letter that was eventually passed on to our family by Mrs Ueda’s close friend, in October 1992 I finally managed to locate and visit Mrs Ueda, who was living in a rehabilitation centre on the outskirts of greater Hiroshima in Kure.

  At that time, Mrs Ueda was already in her seventies, but despite her age she was a beautiful, elegant grey-haired woman with a sharp mind. I took out the old letter, which my deceased mother had so treasured, and Mrs Ueda was astonished to see her own handwriting, which had faded and changed colour over the years. Dabbing the tears from her eyes as she spoke, she told me in a clear voice about that day many years before.

  The following November, I took our father, who was convalescing at home, and my wife to meet Mrs Ueda a second time, and Father was also able to thank her.

  Father passed away nine months later at the age of eighty-four. I am so glad that I was able to arrange for him to meet Hatsue Ueda before he died.

  It appears that my sister was promptly hospitalised and cared for at the relief centre, so the last hours of her life were peaceful.

  I have also found some comfort in knowing what happened to her, thanks to Mrs Ueda.

  Many of the teachers and students who were bombed and died together in Dobashi that day disappeared without a trace, and their remains have never been found. I have heard that stones collected from a beach of the Motoyasu River, beside the A-bomb Dome, were placed underneath some of the graves of Yoko’s classmates.

  The year of this publication in Japan, 1996, marks the fifty-first anniversary of the atomic bombings. The number of people alive today who have physically experienced the atomic bomb grows fewer with each passing year. I believe that those of us who are left behind have a duty to write and tell people about the hell on earth that we witnessed and the futility of war, so that people know the truth.

  I would like to dedicate this book to all of the schoolchildren who were scattered like flower buds, believing in their country right to the end, and the teachers who died while trying to save them. I would also like to take this opportunity to respectfully pray for the repose of their souls.

  Rest in peace, Yoko.

  Goodbye Yoko

  Yoko’s diary is a small voice in the great world, one little girl’s record of her life in a war zone. Like her friends, she takes it for granted that this is how she must live and behave. She never questions, or resists, or disobeys. She is a model of obedience and selfless duty.

  Is this the result of her parents’ insistence? Or is this Yoko’s own response to the larger pressure all around her, of the war effort, her teachers, the state propaganda and the constant demands on children to work harder? It seems the answer is all of the above. Her diary reveals a little girl who is always eager to please, to do her duty, to satisfy the adult world.

  Yet she also genuinely believes she is doing something worthwhile: that if she works harder she will help bring her father home, win the war, and save Japan. She believes in herself, never suspecting that her ‘self’ has been ‘programmed’ by state propaganda.

  Yoko never reflects, as many Japanese adults did in private, that her efforts are in vain; that the war is lost and defeat inevitable. In this sense, she represents the triumph of the government’s plan to weld the young to Japan’s dismal last stand against the Americans.

  Yoko is a feather in a hurricane.

  – Paul Ham

  Acknowledgements

  On the eve of the publication of this book [in Japan in 1996], I would like to express my deep gratitude to many people for their understanding, encouragement and hard work.

  These include Kenzo Kamei, Masafumi Yamazaki, Kazuko Kojima, who was in the year above my sister at Kenjo, and Masako Kajiyama, who was in the same year as Yoko, and all of the students who participated in the Hiroshima Study Trip, a special course offered by Hosei University Girls’ High School. Thank you for taking time out from your busy schedules to contribute to this book.

  I would also like to thank the Principal of Hiroshima Minami High School, Takaaki Nakamura, and the Minami Yuho-kai Alumni Association for providing me with various materials.

  I am so grateful to Hiroshi Harada, Director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, for allowing me to take photographs of archived materials.

  Special thanks must also go to Junko Kawamura of the Minami Yuho-kai Alumni Association, the writer Mitsuko Ohno, who was one of Yoko’s seniors at Kenjo, and Kazuko Shishido, who was in the same year as Yoko. These people provided information about what Kenjo was like in those days.

  At this late stage in my life, I am deeply moved to be finally able to publish this book thanks to the support I received from so many people.

  Thank you all so much.

  – Kohji Hosokawa

  About the authors

  PAUL HAM is the author of several highly acclaimed non-fiction books, including Hiroshima Nagasaki, a moving account of the period of history that led to the atomic bombings of these cities. Part of Paul’s research for Hiroshima Nagasaki involved travelling to Hiroshima, where he met Kohji Hosokawa, Yoko’s brother, and first learnt about Yoko and the diary she had kept faithfully in the months leading up to the end of the war. Paul was born in Australia, has a masters in economic history from the London School of Economics and divides his time between Paris and Sydney, where he lives with his wife and son.

  DEBBIE EDWARDS has a masters of translation and interpreting, and has lived and worked in Japan and South Korea. As well as Japanese, she speaks Korean, Indonesian and Mandarin Chinese. She now works as a freelance translator and lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter.

  Copyright

  The ABC ‘Wave’ device is a trademark of the

  Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used

  under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.

  First published in Australia in 2013

  This edition published in 2013

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  English language introduction and explanatory material copyright © Paul Ham 2013

  Original Japanese language publication diary and additional material copyright © Hosokawa Kohji 1996

  English language translation of original Japanese language text copyright © Deborah Edwards 2013

  Moral rights in the copyright are asserted in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Moriwaki, Yoko.

  Yoko’s diary: the life of a young girl in Hiroshima during

  WWII / translated by Debbie Edwards; edited by Paul Ham.

  978 0 7333 3117 6 (pbk.)

  978 1 7430 9631 4 (epub)

  For secondary school age.

  Subjects: Moriwaki, Yoko – Diaries.

  World War, 1939 – 1945 – Personal narratives.

  Students – Japan – Diaries. Child labor – Japan – Anecdotes.

  Hiroshima-shi (Japan) –
History – Bombardment, 1945.

  Hiroshima-shi (Japan) – Anecdotes.

  Other Authors/Contributors:

  Ham, Paul. Edwards, Debbie.

  940.53161

  Cover and internal design by Matt Stanton, HarperCollins Design Studio

  Cover images: Yoko Moriwaki (front) and Yoko with other shine maidens (back) supplied by Kohji Hosokawa; all other images by shutterstock.com