Then a first grade pupil at the Naha National School

I couldn't swim, but I still jumped down into the ocean It felt like forever before I hit the surface of the water I was a first year pupil in the advanced course at Naha National School when I boarded the Tsushima Maru. I heard about the evacuation from Okinawa at a gathering in the morning of the second day of the summer classes. The principal told us, “The situation in the war has become grave around this island, so you pupils need to be evacuated to mainland Japan. Your teachers will go with you. The evacuation will last until March next year. While you’re away uou'll have all sorts of new experiences - seeing snow, trains and cherry blossoms.” 　 After the principal's announcement I heard that most of my friends had already applied to be evacuated, so without getting permission from my mother, I told my teacher that I too wanted to go to mainland Japan with them. I talked with my parents about the evacuation later that day, and surprisingly, they didn't disagree with me. They might have been relieved to hear that we would supposedly be going on a warship. 　 In the morning on the departure day, all of us evacuees were at the pier at the Naha Port by the appointed time of 8:30am but there were no signs of departure, even after lunchtime. It was not until after 4:00pm in the afternoon that we heard somebody calling out to us saying, “Come on board!” That is when we got into some small fishing boats, five or six of them each shuttling seven to ten people at a time out to the Tsushima Maru. 　 When our boat got close to the Tsushima Maru, I was shocked by the huge size of its hull and was rather scared to see that the ladders up to the deck were just some kind of rope ladders. I had never expected that I would have to climb up such a steep gradient swinging in the air like that. I regretted being there, but there was no way back, so I just climbed up the ladder without saying a word. 　 The first thing we had to do on the ship was undergo survival training. An instructor, who seemed to be a sailor, gathered 30 to 40 of us together to deliver his message. He gave each person a pillow-like square life preserver, and showed us how to use it. Then he pointed at the stacks of rafts beside the captain’s cabin and said, “Those may save your life. Remember those white rafts. Our crew will throw them down to you in the sea in the case of an emergency.” On the night of August 22, 1944, I woke up I hearing somebody shouting, “Jump into the ocean off the port-side deck!” There were crowds of people shouting and panicking around me. I was woken up when someone stepped on my hair. Until then I was asleep on the deck, but I hadn't realized that a torpedo had hit our ship. 　 I followed a line of people in the dark. When I reached the upper deck I saw a queue of people trying to get down the stairway to the side deck. That’s when I jumped onto a water tank down below. Mr. Toma was standing on the tank with some children beside him. He said, “When you see a white raft, jump onto it when I tell you to.” 　 Three of my friends came after me. We held hands and encouraged each other to jump together. The next moment, Mr. Toma shouted, “Here’s a raft - one, two three!” When I jumped into the sea on the count of three, I heard my friends calling out my name. They hadn't jumped with me. My time falling through the air was the longest few seconds of my life. I was braced ready for the impact of hitting the surface of the water, but it didn't seem to come for quite a while. The moment I felt the seawater around me I realized that the current was very fast, and that I could do nothing to resist it, so I missed the rafts and just floated away. I couldn't swim at all, so I would have drowned if I hadn't been wearing a life-preserver bag on my chest. 　 All I could do was struggle to stay alive. I could hear people shouting and calling for help all around me, but there was nothing that I could do to help them there in that dark ocean. I was really lucky to have been able to catch hold of a raft. I saw something white floating by and it reminded me that there were ropes attached to the rafts, so I searched desperately for those ropes. I caught one and swam to a raft and tried to climb up onto it. The raft was unstable so I couldn't get on it by myself. There seemed to be someone trying to climb up on the other side of the raft, and that stabilized it enough for us both to get on from each side. There on the raft, I started thinking about the other people on the ship - I could hear them shouting. Then I heard something slam into something else, but I couldn’t see anything, it was pitch dark. I thought that the ship must be sinking and knew that I could do nothing about it. Just a moment later, I heard the sound of something being propelled very quickly through the water. It was another torpedo heading towards the Tsushima Maru, which was already on fire. Then there was a booming sound, and a last plume of flame before the ship went down. 　 I don't remember how much time past, but my mind lost focus for a while. Tears started to flow at the thought of all those people who had been on the ship. I looked around the surface of the ocean for them but there was no one to be seen. It was all in total darkness. There were two other people on our raft, a soldier and a young lady with braided jet-black hair. 　 On the second day, our raft experienced stormy weather. We were on the edge of a typhoon and did not know if we would be able to survive it so we carved the date and our names on the raft to leave proof that we had survived at sea for two days after the attack. 　 I think it was 26 August, after a few days of stormy weather, we saw an airplane up in the cloudy sky. The soldier took off his white shirt and started waving it at the airplane. The airplane circled us twice and then disappeared away into the clouds. Two or three hours later, I saw a naval vessel sailing toward us. It looked just like a floating piece of leaf on the waves. Two sailors from that vessel fastened lifeline ropes onto their loincloths and jumped into the rough sea to rescue us. That night on board the naval vessel, I felt no hunger or anything like that, just a huge sense of relief.

With the series of interviews of the survivors from the tragedy of Tsushima Maru starting, she did an interview with NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. She was very calm and her descriptions were very clear. She must have been a tough and calm person to be able to revisit the horrible experiences she had had in her life. 　 It left a very strong impression on me that she had very clear memories about the horrible things that happened that night of the attack on the Tsushima Maru, but she didn't remember all of the things that she was doing that same day. At the end of the interview, she told me that she thought that she would only be able to talk about the outline of the Tsushima Maru tragedy, but that she was relieved to have been able to tell us some details during our interview.