Growing up during the War in the Pacific...

Kengo Adachi and his granddaughter Diane

I was born in a small port town called Rikuzen Takada in the Tohoku region, Japan, in 1926. By the time I entered elementary school, Japan had entered a war of aggression in China. In spite of the war, our daily life was rather peaceful. As my father was an ophthalmologist, he had high hopes of me becoming a doctor. However, when I moved up to junior high school, I started to have a defiant attitude towards my teachers because of the extreme strictness, playing tricks on my teachers, wearing baggy clothes on purpose.

When I moved to third grade, I had plenty of problems with many of my teachers who glared at me and I got scolded really often. There was a Physics teacher though who tried to understand me and I am even now grateful for what he did for me. After school, he taught me interesting things about Astronomy and Physics that, in fact, weren’t in our textbooks. By that time, I was very eager to study those topics. In the same way, I learnt a lot about integral calculus and differential equations and realized how impressive Mathematics could be.

When I was in second year of high school, Japan entered the Pacific War on December 7th, 1941. My high school was one of the strictest. We received hard physical training and there were officers who were in charge of our military education. They also kept an eye on all the teachers, even on the headmaster. If anyone dared disobey the officers, they were strictly punished. I remember that English teacher who taught his students the right definitions of liberalism and democracy; he was fired...

In 1942, the American army counter-attacked (Battle of Midway in June and Battle of Guadalcanal which started in August); the Japanese army got weaker. As a result, our military education became even stricter. Knowing so many young soldiers were being killed was very upsetting. How could I best serve my country in this desperate war situation? The officers had managed to make me believe how admirable it would be to become a kamikaze… One officer asked me : "You have a remarkable physical strength, good eyesight, and you rank high in the class so why don’t you become a soldier? Why not think about serving your country? Does dodging bullets scare you?" So I left my high school to attend the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, aged 17. This was in 1944.

Our training at the Academy was so cruel that I still dream about it sometimes. Over one three week period, I received corporal punishment over two hundred times… The good thing though was that I could continue my studies. It was the only school that allowed English lessons (normally, learning the enemy’s language was forbidden). It was part of the military strategy elaborated by the Head of the Academy, Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi. Inoue and other instructors, I heard, were anticipating the possible defeat of Japan, so they selected by competitive examinations 3,400 students out of 60,000 candidates, to educate them for the development of post-war Japan. Well, as a young naval officer, I felt totally desperate when I realized that we had little chance of winning the war...

Our Academy was on Edajima Island, south of Hiroshima. On August 6th 1945, we saw a tremendous flash and heard a deafening explosion. We thought our powder magazine warehouse had been attacked, but then we saw a huge mushroom cloud from the window of the gunnery class: it was the explosion of an atomic bomb… A Physics teacher later explained to us that an A-Bomb, the size of a matchbox, had the power of a thousand ordinary bombs.

On 2 September 1945, Japan surrendered. I was so terribly shocked that I didn’t know what to do. A teacher told me: “The reason why Japan has lost is because our technology is less developed than that of the Allied Forces. We must invest in scientific and technological research to rebuild our country. If you like science, I recommend you go to University”. I made up my mind to study Physics.

My health got very bad because there was very little food at that time. Finally, I passed my exams after much effort. For almost fifty years, I worked happily at the University as a researcher and professor of Magnetism. My youth was sacrificed by the War in the Pacific, but, looking back, I think I am rather proud of my life.

Article by Diane PAGANO