[Eric in the Ozarks]

We lived in Japan in the 1950s. Our maid, Masako, was a 10 year old in 1945, forced to work in a munitions factory in Yokohama. The building had a large red cross painted on the roof.
The building was hit anyway by the bombing of early '45 and after the fires were brought under control, she was put to work salvaging some of the machinery which was set up in caves dug into the soft sandstone bluffs.
12 years later, I played with my Japanese playmates in those caves and repeated words and phrases Masako taught me. In about 1959, a little kid got hurt in one of these caves and the MPs ordered all of them to be cemented shut. All of them were closed with one exception near our house. This was an occupied cave where a poor Japanese family still lived. The front of the cave was covered with tin, with a tiny smokestack through this wall. They heated the place with a single hibachi stove that burned a pressed chunk of charcoal located under the low dining table. The family sat around this table with a heavy quit covering their legs to stay warm.

[tanuki]

My mother and her siblings were fortunate. The way that poor family lived reminded me of how they lived, in a cave shelter dug out of volcanic sand by her grandfather, during the war. Afterwards, their neighborhood had survived the firebombing relatively intact and they were able to just move back. A lot of families did not have that luxury and it doesn’t surprise me that some may have taken longer, if ever, to bounce back.

What happened to Masako was pretty typical how certain social strata were treated. I don’t think that if she came from a ‘good’, ie, middle-class and/or ethnically pure, family she would not have had to work in a factory at her age. Having known plenty of ladies like her, she must have been a lovely girl and a real survivor.