Through Hell: A Childhood Story

This is my mother-in-law's story, which I promised to write. It's a story about how governments decide to start wars, and people suffer for it. In this case, the government was Japan and the Japanese people paid the devastating price.

I'm going to call her Maki; that's not her name, but it's a family name and I want to respect her privacy by at least not using her actual name in this retelling of her story.

Maki was born in 1938. Her father was a businessman involved in import-export and her mother was a beautiful young woman who loved to sew her own clothes so she could dress in western style. There are pictures of her wearing suits even when many people were still wearing traditional kimonos. The pictures also show Maki, dressed in western-style coats and leggings. Before she was six, she had two younger brothers, one who was four and one who was two. In the pictures, they are fine, healthy boys.

But then, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the world fell apart for Maki. And between the beginning of the war and 1944, her father also developed tuberculosis, which was epidemic at the time. At first, the family stayed together, but by the time Maki was six, in 1944, her father was in the hospital and all the first and second graders were being evacuated from the city to the countryside to try to protect them from the bombings. Maki was sent to stay at her maternal grandmother's farm, ironically near Hiroshima.

I don't know much about what it was like for a six year old city girl, being sent away from her mother and father and brothers to a life totally unlike the one she knew, but I know that however bad it was, it got worse in 1945, just a few months before the end of the war.

The United States had stepped up the bombing of every major Japanese city, trying to bring an end to the war by any means necessary.

One day, Maki's mother, Chibi, had gone to visit her husband in the tuberculosis hospital. Her sons, who were 4 and 2, stayed with their grandmother.  That day, the bombs rained down on their home, and Grandmother and both of the boys were killed.

Only the fact that Chibi had gone to visit her husband saved her life, or Maki would have lost her mother that day, as well.

As it was, the news of the death of his mother and his young sons was too much for her father, who was already near death from the tuberculosis, and one week after the bombing, he died, as well.

When Maki's mother came for her and she learned of the death of her father, Grandmother, and brothers, she had literally lost everything in her childhood world except her mother. And her mother had lost not only her husband and sons, but her
house, her income, everything. and Maki was seven years old. All of Japan was full of homeless, starving people, just trying to survive.

As it happened, Maki's aunt, Chibi's sister, also had contracted tuberculosis and possibly polio as well. (I'm not clear on that, but both were epidemic at the time.) At any rate, she was very weak and had become paralyzed from the waist down, and she had two small children of her own, a girl and boy slightly younger than Maki. She and her husband needed someone to help take care of her and of the children, and Chibi and Maki needed food and a place to live. So they moved in with Chibi's sister's family and Chibi took care of them all.

It was a difficult time for even the most healthy Japanese people after the war, and for someone ravaged with disease, it was impossible. By the time that Maki was 9, her aunt died. Then there were two broken families: a man with a young son and daughter, and a woman with a young daughter, and it was easy to decide that the best thing to do was to combine the two families. And so Chibi married her second husband, and he became Maki's adopted father, and his children became not only her cousins, but her adopted brother and sister.

At nine years old, Maki had seen what war can do. She had lost her father, her Grandmother, her brothers, her home.  The war had ended, and she and her mother had begun again. Then, she had gained a new father, a new home, a brother, and a sister.  All the world had gone to hell and back again, and she had been along for the ride.

Until this weekend, my husband had never known that his mother had two brothers killed in the war. He knew that his grandfather, who died in the 1990's, was his mother's adopted father and that her natural father had died, but he did not know the circumstances. It was only when we were looking at pictures and Rose and I asked who the babies were in the happy family pictures that this part of the story emerged.

Later, Maki's adopted father, who was a very good father to her and remained married to her mother for over 50 years until his death, worked on the official US-Japanese commission to study the effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. This was in the 1950's. A young doctor came to work with the commission and Maki met him there, and they fell in love and married. They had two daughters, Maho and Yuki, born in Japan, and then they moved to America in the 1960's, in time to have their son, my husband, Takesi, who is known to everyone as Ken, in Augusta, Georgia, in 1969, the first of his family born in America.

Dr. Akamatsu was a very distinguished man who won many honors. In the pictures, he looks young and is often shown in social situations, looking happy and relaxed. My husband does not remember him that way. He remembers him later, when he developed cancer and was usually in pain, so his memories are mostly of a less happy nature. He died when Ken was 8.

Then, that remarkable woman who had already lived through so much, was left with two teenage daughters and a son to raise alone. She had spent most of her time with the other Japanese wives in Augusta, and spoke English still with some difficulty. She had always performed the traditional role of the Japanese housewife. So what did she do?

She put two daughters and a son through high school, and when her daughters were in medical school and  her son was near high school graduation, she went back to school herself, became a lab technician, and worked at the Medical School of Georgia for years until she retired last year.

After Ken graduated college and he and I were together, she actually signed up for ballroom dancing classes, and this quiet, retiring woman became so good that she and her dance partner won awards in dance competitions for a number of years. (And she was in her 60's then!)  Over 20 years after her husband died, she also started dating an older man, which lasted for 10 years until he recently ended the relationship. It was her only relationship in 40 years of widowhood.

Now, she is 70 years old. She looks, maybe, 50. She takes art classes and is a very good artist. She translates for visiting Japanese doctors, students, reporters, and dignitaries, and is active in her circle of friends. Sevaral times a year, she travels to Japan to take care of her mother.

And her mother, Chibi, who survived the loss of her mother-in-law, husband, two sons, and sister within the space of 5 years? She is 94 years old, and although she is in a nursing home now and in extremely poor condition,  she lived in her home and was very independent until she was over 90. And she has remained beautiful her whole life.

Do you begin to see why I have so much admiration for my mother-in-law? She is an amazing woman, and there are more stories of her life to be told. And more yet to come.