My Childhood (Senior Female version)

My Childhood

  

  I was born in 1949 as the first daughter of my father Teruo and my mother Haruko.  1949 was the 24th year of Showa.  It was the year of the cow according to the Chinese zodiac.  My birthday is August 23rd.  

I am a Virgo according to the Western zodiac.  Virgo means 'virgin' in English.

   My blood type is O.  My father is also type O.  But my mother is type A.  A person with blood type O is supposed to be outgoing.  But I was not so outgoing in my childhood.  I was a rather shy girl.

   Three years later after I was born, my brother Yasuo was born.  

   When World War II ended in 1945, millions of soldiers returned to their homes from the battlefields worldwide.  Many of them were young and unmarried.  They were eager to marry and start families.  The married men were also eager to have babies.  In the next fifteen years, so many children were born that this generation was nicknamed 澱aby boomers・in English.  

   In Japan, this generation is defined more narrowly as the people who were born between 1947 and 1951 and named "dankai no sedai" in Japanese by a writer, Taichi Sakaiya, in his book with that title.  

   

  My father was twenty-seven years old when I was born.  He was a first year student at a prestigious university in Tokyo when the Pacific War broke out.  In the first few years, college students were exempted from being drafted.  In 1943, this exemption was lifted and the graduation of seniors was shifted from March 1944 to September 1943.  Thus many bright young college students were sent to the battlefields in what is called Gakuto Shutsujin, which can be translated 'College Students into Battle.'

  My father was drafted into the air force after his shifted graduation at his senior year.  He was appointed one of the 'Kamikaze Divine Wind' pilots.  Many of his friends and fellow pilots were killed in the Kamikaze suicide dive-bombing.  My father was also destined to die in the Kamikaze attack.

  However, fortunately just before his mission was to be performed, the war ended virtually on August 15th and officially on September 7th, with Japan's unconditional surrender by accepting Potsdam Declaration.

  My father could come back alive from the war.  He had majored in civil engineering.  Since he had graduated from the college, he could get a job at a construction company.  It was when he was twenty-three years old.  

  At that time, it was common that the parents who have sons or daughters of marriageable age ask matchmakers to arrange a marriage.

  My father was introduced to his prospective wife, my mother, by the wife of his superior of his department in the company.   He liked my mother at the first sight.   After having gone out for three months, my father conveyed his intention to get married with her to the matchmaker.  My father's job, his income and his academic background were good enough for my mother to be willing to accept the marriage proposal.

  They got married in a Shinto shrine by a Shinto priest.  My father's superior and his wife served as the official go-between at the wedding ceremony.

  At that time only six years of elementary school was compulsory and only the best and the brightest advanced to the middle schools under the prewar old educational system.  And the middle schools were not co-educational.  Boys went to boys' middle school and girls went to girls' middle school."

  At that time very few girls attended college.  There were no co-educational colleges.  And there were very few women's colleges.  The graduates from girls' middle schools are most highly educated women at that time.  My mother was one of them.

  As I heard from my mother, the admission to those girls' schools was fairly competitive. The candidates had to take the entrance examinations.  Her class teacher gave special supplementary lessons to those who would take the entrance examination to girls' middle schools.

  The educational policy of girls' middle schools was not career-oriented, but to produce good wives, wise mothers.  Fortunately or unfortunately for my mother, she became a good wife for my father and a wise mother for us.

  I don't remember much about my toddler days.  My memory went back to my nursery school days.  At that time, there was no kindergarten in my town, either private or public.  There was only one public nursery school.  All the children in my neighborhood attended that nursery school.

  I attended the nursery school for two years until I entered elementary school at the age of six.

  When my brother was three years old, he and I went to the nursery school together.

  The teachers at the nursery school were all female.

The head teacher was a plump lady in her early-to-mid-fifties.  She usually wore a blouse and a skirt. She always wore a friendly smile for all the children. We all liked her very much. When one of the children wet his or her pants, it was always the head teacher who took care of that child.  There were some two-year-olds who still wore diapers. It was also the head teacher who changed the wet diapers. I think it was because only she had had the experience of baby rearing.  Neither my brother nor I wet our pants, since we were well taught by our mother how to handle the toilet as soon as we stopped wearing diapers.

  

  In the nursery school, when the weather was fine, we could spend lots of time on the playground outdoors. There was a slide, jungle gym, sandbox, seesaw, two swings, and two horizontal bars, one of which is a bit higher than the other one.

  Many of the children liked playing in the sandbox.  We dug in the sandbox with a shovel and made a small pond.  We put water in the pond from a pail.  We also built castles and houses. Many of the boys liked playing on the jungle gym.

  Another favorite of mine was a swing. When one of the swings was not occupied, I played on the swing.

When another girl or boy was swinging on the other swing, I tried to swing higher than the other.  When I swung so high up, I felt scared and closed my eyes at the highest point of my swing. I could open my eyes only when I swung down.

  On the first day when my brother started his nursery school, I showed him how I could swing up high on the swing. He was fascinated with my swinging so high, and wanted to be able to swing himself.  So I put him on the swing and pushed him. At first he was so scared, and jumped off the swing. But he quickly learned how to swing high, and it became his favorite play.

  

  One popular games among the girls was a group version of skipping rope. In this game, two players hold the ends of a three to four meter rope and turn it as the other players jump, one at a time.

  The rope turners start by swinging the rope away from the jumper, then making a full circle that will pass over the jumper's head.  As others in the group look on, each jumper in turn stands just outside of the whirling rope and steps in as it is about to hit the ground.  

  Then the jumper hops over the rope with both feet as many times as possible. When the jumper misses, the turners stop whirling the rope. The jumper who has missed becomes one of the turners, and they resume swinging the rope.  Then another jumper steps in.  I was so good at skipping the rope that I seldom had to be a turner.

  In wintertime, when it had snowed the previous night and the playground was covered with freshly fallen snow, we had a snowball fight.  We threw snowballs at each other.  It was fun.  When we were tired of the snowball fight, we built a snowman. We used pieces of charcoal for its eyes and mouth, and a carrot for its nose.

  When it was rainy, we played indoors.  Some of the boys played soldiers with swords made of newspapers.  Some of the girls liked to play house, asking some boys to join them to play the part of a father or brother. Some boys and girls liked playing doctors and nurses together.

  Teachers sometimes advised us to play shop with play money, using toy vegetables and fruit. Teachers also taught us how to make origami.  We folded sheets of paper into many kinds of figures; cranes, helmets, frogs, and swans.  I was the expert at cranes.

My brother was no good at origami.

  When he failed to fold paper, he crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it on the floor.

  

  I think we had a lot of fun at our nursery school.  I still remember those happy days with kind teachers and the broad smile of the head teacher.

  I sometimes wish I could return to those days, when we were innocent and had no worries.