It was at the end of November 1945(Shōwa 20) when my second son, Seiki, who had played the role as a prefectural counselor in Inner Mongolia, came back to Japan. From January 1946(Shōwa 21), Seiki came to play the main role in running the school, with his wife, Yoshiko, as both professor and director at the women’s technical college.

In October 1946(Shōwa 21), my husband, Sanzō, visited the Ministry of Education to offer Seiki’s inaugural greetings and to attend to other school duties. Shortly after Sanzō returned from the Ministry of Education, he suddenly fell ill and passed away around eleven o’clock that night. Seiki was inaugurated as chief director and president of the technical college.

At that time, we faced the inconvenience of having no lecture hall, so we began construction on one. The project was a flat building of 125 tsubo(413.22m²) built at a cost of 1,500,000 yen. Subsequently, it was March 1947(Shōwa 22), as we were planning to initiate the repair and the renovation of the school buildings, that I was suddenly “banished from the teaching profession”.

The reason given was that I had been appointed to the Aichi Prefectural Social Education Committee in 1938(Shōwa 13) and had, for the subsequent five or six years, lectured about the material economy, the domestic use of life’s necessities during wartime, advocating the recycling of scrap material to produce clothing and making a staple of unpolished rice. I believe that lecture would have been extremely common to any country at any time, but it seemed to be regarded by the occupying forces as my having been involved in the national war effort.

Having no choice but to abide by the ruling — isolated from and having no interaction with society — I was supposed to feel a sense of remorse. It was March 1949(Shōwa 24) when — just as I had been — Seiki was dismissed from the teaching profession for having been a wartime counselor for the Mongol United Autonomous Government, a puppet of the Japanese Empire. While I had never heard of two teachers being dismissed from one school, we had no recourse.

During that time, my first son, Kiyoshi, who had been detained for three years after the war, was released back to Japan from Manchuria and was immediately inaugurated as chief director. Before too long, my banishment was lifted and I returned as school principal.