<Begin Segment 8>

[Translated from Japanese]

TY: Was it close to school, the dormitory?

AT: It came with school, within the school building. There was a gym and that was large. A long time ago, we had the Russo-Japanese War, and they bought the building and repaired inside, and then, they put desks and made it into a school.

TY: How was the building used during the Russo-Japanese War?

AT: Wood, there were only pieces of wood. Nowadays they spent some money. Just wooden boards there. It used to be the Eiji Hospital. The Russo-Japanese War, they brought injured soldiers to Hiroshima, but there weren't enough hospitals, so they built this hospital immediately. So they took them, the Russo-Japanese War, into Hiroshima, and everybody, there were so many who were injured then. So they recuperated themselves there. Then, after that, a teacher who was adopted to the family in charge of a temple, and he was devoted to the education for girls, so he bought and repaired the building and installed all the desks, so he did. The teacher was called Mr. Nagai. He was a monk, but he did so because he had fun managing a school rather than being a monk.

TY: Was it the temple of the Jodoshin-shuu?

AT: Who?

TY: The monk, Mr. Nagai.

AT: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Mother and others said that I should go there if the teacher was a monk. Since it was called shintoku [Ed. note: Shintoku means advancing virtue.], and they told me to go to the school called Shintoku Jikka Girls' High School.

DG: So the reason why your mother recommended it was because you were going to do things like this.

AT: She told me to do it? No, not particularly, she never forced me. She said, "If you say you want to learn, then you should go learn it," and let me learn things.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.