My Recollections of World War II
By Sui Iseki

These are the recollections of Sui Iseki, who was a typist at the Kawatana Naval Factory, which manufactured Type 91 aerial torpedoes. Kawatana is a small town in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, located partway between Sasebo and Omura along Omura Bay. This area was a hotbed of wartime production, primarily of aircraft and their associated weapons.

Sui is my wife’s grandmother and we’d hoped to get together and talk about her wartime memories one day, but unfortunately she passed away in 2017 at the age of 91. She had written this document but had yet to submit it for publication in a local newspaper. We are presenting it now in English so that her memories can be shared as widely as possible.

This is not a singular story but rather a collection of standout memories and I believe not necessarily written in chronological order. Any error in this story is mine, as Sui has passed we have had to guess on her precise meaning at a few points but we believe that this translation is accurate and faithful to her original intention.

Since we have no pictures of her from this time, I’ve drawn Sui as she would have looked in her late teens.

1942 Autumn

(Sui was about 16 when she began working at the Kawatana Naval Factory.)

I heard that a naval factory would be built in Kawatana.

“Factory? What’s it for?” I asked.

“Torpedoes.”

A factory with a saw-tooth roof was built in a large land area and many barracks were built around it. People who lived in homes nearby had them commandeered by government order. The families were collected and moved elsewhere.

I was advised to work for the factory, so I did immediately. New workers came from every Kyushu prefecture, Honshu’s Kansai region and Shikoku. Before the factory was built my town’s population was a little over 14,000 but increased to 50,000 after it was built.

It was the first time to work in a naval factory for me. It was military, with a very strict atmosphere and rules.

This is not for me! I thought. But I couldn’t leave.

After awhile I got used to the atmosphere and it became a normal part of my life.

One day a patriotic military song was suddenly played. It was announce that our navy group had sunk two enemy ships in the Marianas battle (Battle of the Philippine Sea). Everyone clapped their hands and celebrated the victory.*

We were given hard black manju and I was very glad, but I thought it was mo tai nai (“a waste”) to eat it alone, so I took it home and shared it with my family.

These are some of the people who also worked at the factory; these photos are very rare because they should have been destroyed at the end of the war. (Courtesy of Emi Furukawa)

These girls are drafted high school students from Hirado Taka Womens’ School. “Drafted” high school girls were used a lot in factories during this time. (Courtesy of Emi Furukawa)

Tsushima Girl’s School student draftees (Courtesy of Emi Furukawa)

One day while washing 30 people’s wooden lunch boxes at the beach a big octopus came up to me to eat the leftover food inside and I caught it!

Then I went to the worker’s barracks where the workers were proudly singing songs from their homes and talking about home. I could relax. At the time it was hard to get a satisfying meal, we ate just a little soybean, corn and wheat with strained soybean leaves. Rice was scarce. Every day we ate wax gourd with salt.

Katashima Torpedo Testing Facility Ruins; today it is a preserved city park.

We used danbebune, wide flat-bottom barges, to move new torpedoes from the factory to Katashima Hasshashikenjo (Katashima Torpedo Testing Facility). The barges were good for moving heavy cargo short distances.

Lots of workers would go see the torpedoes off; when they arrived at Katashima we had a feeling that was an amalgamation of hope and fear. We prayed our torpedoes would pass their test. A female student from Kagoshima said the qualification made her feel like crying.

“Keep pace and leader keep to the right! Something-something factory workers 20! We’re leaving! As you were! Eyes front!”

I hated that.

I was discussing it with a friend when I asked, “Shall we secretly climb the hill today?”

“It’s good, let’s do that.”

We snuck out the office’s back door and made our way to the winding, trackless mountain path.

Suddenly a big voice shouted, “Hey, wait!”

We were surprised and stopped. It was the kempeitai, military police.

“I’ll inspect your government property, give me what you have,” he demanded. He was going to inspect our government-issued tools and items to ensure they were within regulations and not worn out.

I presented him my bag with bokuzukin (firefighting flash hood) and handkerchief for first aid. He then gave us full body checks for contraband, but found nothing. He struck out in failure. I was scared.

We built an underground evacuation factory in the mountains. The upside-down U-shaped tunnels were almost complete and the machinery for building torpedoes installed but the work was slowed by air raids. Every morning the air raid siren sounded and everyone evacuated into the safety of the bunker; we complained that we couldn’t work like this!

The evacuation factory tunnels of Ishiki-cho today

The Omura Naval Aircraft Factory (21^st Naval Aircraft Factory) was opposite us across Omura Bay. One day in the bunker we saw fire rising from that factory. It was being hit by an air raid and we realized that it’s just an easy, small jump from Omura to Kawatana!**

“Next they’ll come to Kawatana!” Someone said. “You should run away immediately!”

So I did! I jumped from the bunker and ran at top speed up into the mountainside, but Kawatana was not attacked.

Good grief. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I was exhausted from the heat and digging the bunker. I went back to the factory and visited the office for lunch. The cooking section personnel said that today there wasn’t enough food for everyone.

He told me to “please endure” and handed me three small potatoes.

“I’m starving!”

For a while I stared at the potatoes. I changed my mind about the situation when I realized the cooks would feel bad so I ate them.

As well as digging the tunnels Sui also had to help assemble torpedoes in them as well. During one of her visits to the tunnels around 2012 she told her grandson that if given the components she could still assemble a torpedo from memory.

According to her son-in-law, she saw her first B-29 while hiding in an air raid shelter. Looking up she saw the silver airplane and thought it looked beautiful.

Even if I did my best, the day finally came. The morning of Aug. 16 was good. There was no air raid. No more being told “run away!” “Hurry up!” No more kempeitai.

I was talking with my friends in the office when my supervisor came in. He directed us to take all the important papers up the upper path and burn them.

“What?!”

Until yesterday, these had been treated so carefully! They were such important papers. Then I felt it.

Oh, we lost.

We did as we were told and watching the smoke disappear between the trees my tears began to fall. I had to say goodbye to the typewriter I’d been using for a long time now.

Visiting where we shot the torpedoes (Katashima) reminds me of that scene.

Torpedoes.

Japanese ships.

Trucks.

I lived in very hard times with many other factory workers. Sometimes we laughed. I will cut that out as a good memory.

Torpedoes were test fired from this pier at the Katashima Torpedo Testing Facility.

After the war Sui married and eventually opened her own kimono shop. It had been suggested she should learn English and take up clerical work for the occupation forces but she declined because she thought Americans wouldn’t be around that long. Both her daughter and grand-daughter have since married American Sailors stationed at Commander, Fleet Activities Sasebo.

*The U.S. lost no vessels during the Battle of the Philippine Sea (Jun. 19-20, 1944), but Japan lost three carriers. Japan also lost more than 500 aircraft to the American’s 123. Sui’s factory manufactured Type 91 aerial torpedoes, which were dropped by bombers such as the Mitsubishi G4M (“Betty”), Nakajima B65N (“Kate”) and Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Judy”), hence the cause for celebration at their factory.

** She is likely referring to the Oct. 25, 1944 air raid which was the first of several attempts to take the Omura aircraft factory out of commission. 59 B-29s out of Chengdu, China, struck the factory. One B-29 crashed on takeoff and another was ditched over China after the mission. 300 people at the factory died in the bombing.