Interview with my grandmother

My grandmother was born in 1935 in Ishikawa-ken. One sunny day when she was 10 years old, she went to her grandparents’ house to borrow and use a “match”.

As she got into their house, she said to her grandfather, “Can I use a match?”. And he said, “What? Sorry, we do not have such a expensive machine in our house”,

It was in 1945. Her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, did not even know what “match” was.

When my grandmother a child, her family had huge rice farm. However, the rice farms back in 40s were totally different from those in present. Each family had a farm and each family needed to do all of the farming jobs by hand and wooden and iron tools. They did not have any machines for rice planting, nor did they have a machine to polish rice which all farmers have today.

She said, “Every job was awfully hard and tiring. But nobody complained about it because we all knew that my parents needed our help”.

That was what my grandmother told me for this interview.