‘Education Changes People’: 92-Year-Old Fusae Kaneda of Katase Reflects on Wartime Schooling

Fusae Kaneda, now 92 and living in Katase, says she was among the first cohort of students in the national school system created by the 1941 National School Order. She remembers being taught militaristic and emperor-centered doctrine—told that the emperor was a god and Japan was a divine nation—and required to stand rigidly at morning assemblies. Kaneda reflects that education has the power to change people and implies that what she and her classmates were taught shaped their beliefs during the war years.