The Miracle Baby: Hope in War

After a long and exhaustive courtship, I, a U.S. Naval member stationed in Japan, was finally allowed to marry my Japanese fiancé, Chizuko. The year was 1969, and the place was Sasebo, Japan. I had spent considerable time learning the Japanese language from the University of Maryland, Far East Division in the preparation for my proposal “through” her immediate family. That’s not to say that there were several in her family who still held strong objections to our union.

As my mother in law and myself became more comfortable talking with one another over time, she began to include me in more intimate conversations about her family. She had referred to my wife as her “miracle child” many times; an expression I thought had referred to the fact that her daughter Chizuko had been born rather late in her mother’s life, in her mid-forties in fact, long after Chizuko’s brothers and sisters had grown up and left home.

One day I questioned her about that expression, asking her if having a child that late in life created any additional hardship for her at that time, especially since her pregnancy would have extended throughout that period of the war when Japan itself was coming under constant bombing attack by the Allied Forces.

“No”, she said. Even though food and medical care was scarce during the time of her pregnancy, their location high in the hills surrounding Sasebo had spared them from most of the effects of the bombing, even though Sasebo was a well known shipyard, and had been under regular bombing attacks.

A-26’s, B-25’s and P-47’s had been bombing the Sasebo Naval Shipyard on a regular basis from the end of July up to the second week of August of 1945, but my mother in law admitted that they apparently had very good aim, as most of the damage seemed to be confined in and around the shipyards itself.

The city’s civilians were left to watch the carnage and devastation from the hillsides, all the time hoping that their loved ones working at the harbor would return home safely. Sometimes they did; sometimes they didn’t. The inhabitants had become very philosophic about the concept of war and personal sacrifice by this time, as so many relatives and neighbors had been lost in the conflict, never to be heard from again.

On August 8th, Sasebo was inundated with leaflets falling from the sky, let loose by Allied planes during what everyone expected to be yet another bombing raid on the shipyard. Rumors of some horrible tragedy occurring at Hiroshima had been trickling in to the city of Sasebo for the past couple of days, as all forms of contact with that city had come suddenly to a halt.