World War II period

The World War II period is the backdrop to Hideo Harada’s childhood displacement: while his father was away on military service, Hideo and his mother left Asakusa for her family home in Tochigi. His father’s return from the Philippines in 1946 reunited the family and brought them back to their Tokyo neighborhood, but the war’s disruption remained part of the family history Hideo carried into adulthood.

Family Life Before and During the War

Hideo was born in Asakusa in 1939, the first child of a sushi chef and a kitchen helper who worked at the same restaurant. His family lived in an apartment near Tawara-machi Station. His father served two stints in the army, one before Hideo was born and another afterward. The account does not specify the timing or circumstances of either stint in detail, but it places the second period of absence in the family’s wartime history.

Toward the end of the World War II period, with his father still away, Hideo and his mother went to stay with his maternal grandparents in Tochigi, north of Tokyo. The move separated the child from his familiar Asakusa home at a time when his father was absent as well. In Hideo’s later recollection, the wartime years are registered through this family separation and change of place rather than through accounts of military action.

Repatriation and Return to Asakusa

After the war ended, Hideo’s father was repatriated from the Philippines in 1946. The family immediately returned to Asakusa. That return marked a resumption of life together, but it unfolded in the difficult conditions of postwar Japan. Hideo remembered his parents gathering whatever edible ingredients they could obtain and selling them in the black market as “Vitamin Stew.”

Hideo, then in grade school, often helped. He particularly remembered watching his mother thicken the stew by stirring a mixture of flour and water into a large, bubbling pot. This domestic image gives the family’s postwar survival a concrete form: the return from wartime separation led not to an effortless restoration of their former life, but to improvised work in which the child participated. The steam rising around his mother’s face became part of the sensory record through which he later narrated his childhood.

The Postwar Years and Their Consequences

Around the time the Korean War broke out in 1950, Hideo’s father found regular work again as a sushi chef at a shop in Nihonbashi. His parents nevertheless liked living in Asakusa, so the family continued renting there. The sequence distinguishes the World War II period from its aftermath: military absence and evacuation belong to the wartime recollection, while the black-market cooking and his father’s return to regular work belong to the years that followed.

In January of the following year, when Hideo was twelve, his parents were struck by a car in front of the International Theater while his father was riding his mother on the back of his bicycle. Both died at the scene, and the hit-and-run vehicle was never found. Hideo recalled being told that it was a black sedan; an uncle later speculated that it might have been a jeep belonging to the American Occupation, which he thought could explain why the police did not pursue the case. These conflicting accounts belong to the postwar aftermath, not to the World War II period itself, but they mark how abruptly the family life restored after the war ended.

Later Memory of the Wartime Home

Decades later, Hideo’s return to Asakusa brought the childhood setting of these memories into the present. He had not visited for years, and he hesitated to walk toward the streets most closely bound to his early life with his parents, fearing that a surviving trace of their home might release emotions he had kept contained since their deaths. His recollection of the family’s wartime departure and postwar return is therefore attached to a particular neighborhood, not simply to a date range.

That connection between memory and place became more painful when Hideo learned that the apartment building associated with his parents had been demolished. The site was an empty lot, its summer weeds making the vanished building’s absence newly visible. On a later visit to the family grave in Aichi, he brought incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums, then prayed alongside Mamiya. He thought of returning with the chopsticks his parents had used at their last meal. The gesture links the early family history that began in wartime Asakusa to Hideo’s later effort to preserve his parents’ presence through memory and objects, even as the neighborhood itself changed.