During the war, many men were sent to the battlefield daily, so women, children and the elderly, left behind on the home front, began to lack materials with which to manufacture weapons and ammunition, or even to produce food. At that time, students weren’t allowed to study leisurely at school. Each school, above the secondary school level, formed a hōkokutai, or national service squad, and were mobilized and pressed into service at the war plants. The elementary school students went to the village farms to perform their labor service.

In our school, the seniors of the women’s technical college were stationed at the Narumi plant and other classes went to one in Kōta. They stayed at the plants, bravely flinging themselves into the production operation wearing monpe and a towel around their heads. The senior class of the women’s technical college held its graduation ceremony in September, six months earlier than normal. At that time, the students of the girls’ vocational school took to the field after three hours of lessons every day to tend to farming, cultivating the meadows, mountains, and marshes to increase food production, or went to the family homes of soldiers to help them with their farming.

It was around noon on December 7th, 1944(Shōwa 19) when the battle became even more dire and the clouds hanging over the country became thicker and darker. Our school building was terribly damaged in the Great Mikawa Earthquake. All connecting passageways and the entrances were destroyed, and, unfortunately, one of our students was crushed to death by the collapse of school buildings. One more bright future was taken, never to return.

While for about a month we could do nothing to repair the buildings without help, it was approaching four o’clock in the morning of January 12th, 1945(Shōwa 20) when a second, stronger earthquake hit, severely damaging all the buildings. The epicenter of both earthquakes was in the area near the Yahagi River. All of Hazu and a corner of the Southern Hekikai District were wiped out, with many killed. The aftershocks of those quakes spread all along the Tōkaidō and other distant places. However, afraid of spreading panic and to guard the morale of the soldiers at the front, the authorities didn’t broadcast or report it as big news on the radio or in the newspapers. It was an era of strict government censorship and constraints on press freedoms.

In April 1945(Shōwa 20), almost our entire student body was mobilized. Although the new term had started, the freshmen students spent their school life devotedly putting the school back together following the earthquakes, serving the community, and fleeing the air raids. Starting that summer, not only Nagoya, but also Toyohashi, Okazaki, Ichinomiya, and Toyokawa became targets of the enemies’ airplanes and were rendered burnt-out ruins. All around Atsumi Peninsula, throughout the night, people, including many university students from Tokyo, devoted themselves to desperate preparations for the defense against the landing of the American forces who had a huge range of resources at their disposal.

On August 15th, 1945(Shōwa 20), the war was declared over. Japan had managed to escape catastrophic downfall and annihilation, but we were still in desperate straits. People were on the verge of starvation, speechless, aimless, paralyzed, and in complete collapse.