Takahashi, from Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, was mobilized into a student labor unit and was at the Yokosuka military port that day. She escaped to a basement and survived, and later beheld the tragic sight of the heavily damaged Nagato, which had been regarded as the symbol of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Her interview with The Japan News was the first time Takahashi has spoken to the media about those moments of terror 80 years ago.
“When I waved to the sailors on the Nagato, which was moored at the quay, they would wave back with signal flags.” Now 95 years old, Takahashi still vividly remembers the scene at Yokosuka military port.
Takahashi and 281 other third-year students from Iwaki Girls High School, now Fukushima Prefectural Iwaki Sakuragaoka High School, were mobilized as student labor in November 1944 and departed for Yokosuka. Takahashi was assigned to the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, where she began living in a dormitory with four others. Ten people from two teams, including Takahashi, went to a small hut directly above the dock every day. “We scraped the sides of metal boxes and painted numbers on them with green paint,” Takahashi recalls. Information was strictly controlled, and even now, she does not know what the boxes were used for.
The Nagato was moored in front of her workplace. It had been the flagship of the Combined Fleet during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 8, 1941 (Japan time), and was a symbol of the Japanese Navy. For Takahashi, it was also the ship aboard which her elementary school teacher had served, and its imposing presence filled her with emotion.
The U.S. military, which had occupied Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands, began full-scale aerial bombings on the Japanese mainland around November 1944. The largest air raid on Yokosuka, with hundreds of U.S. bombers, began on the afternoon of July 18, 1945.
“I had finished eating my lunch and was working in the afternoon,” Takahashi recalls. A loud alarm sounded, and they were told to evacuate to the basement. When a hatch under the floor was opened, a rope and iron ladder leading to the basement of the dock stretched straight down. The dimly lit interior of the dock seemed to lead to the “bottomless pit.”
When 10 students reached the second landing halfway down, the ground suddenly shook violently. “Mother!” “God!” everyone screamed. A bomb had fallen near their workplace. Takahashi recalled, “The ladder swayed like a swing, and I thought, ‘This is it.’”
After a while, there was a loud voice from above saying, “Come up!” When they climbed up and came out, the workplace was completely destroyed. The students jumped out of the broken windows. Some fell onto green paint that was splattered about, and their clothes became covered in it.
The students were told to “go to the mountain air-raid shelter” and started running. Takahashi said, “A young soldier from the Kaiten human torpedo unit appeared and carried me on his back. Nine others followed behind, crying.”
As dusk fell, Takahashi stepped outside the air-raid shelter to find the landscape completely transformed. There were large holes in the ground, and muddy water was flowing everywhere. When she approached the dock where the workplace was located, the Nagato was severely damaged and listing. Many of the ships that had been anchored there had sunk and were nowhere to be seen.
According to the book “Yokosuka,” an official history of the city, the Nagato was hit by bombs on its bridge and other areas. More than 40 people, including members of the Nagato’s crew, are said to have been killed in this air raid.
On August 15, the war ended. Three days later, Takahashi boarded a crowded train with her classmates and returned to her hometown.
At the end of the war, the Nagato was the only Japanese battleship still operational. After being seized by the U.S. military, it was used as a target ship in atomic bomb tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 and sunk.
Takahashi agreed to an interview because her children told her, “With fewer and fewer people testifying about the war, Mom has a responsibility to tell the story.”
Amid postwar turmoil, she worked as a substitute teacher at an elementary school for about two years before getting married. She raised three children and was blessed with four grandchildren.
Her house, severely damaged in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and later reconstructed with its original materials, is over 130 years old. Small shrines and a Buddhist altar are lined up in her home, and every morning she offers water and rice and prays for those who died in the Pacific War, saying in her mind: “The war was terrible. Please rest in peace.” Then, with the hope that war will never happen again, she repeats, “Daijobu, daijobu [It’s okay, it’s okay].” For Takahashi, it’s a mantra to say, “It’s going to be all right.”
