NAGASAKI -- Junko Wakiyama, a Nagasaki local culinary expert, continues to hold cooking classes at the age of 89, dedicated to preserving Nagasaki's traditional cuisine. Her motivation stems from her experiences during the World War II and postwar food shortages, as well as the atomic bombing of her city.

At a Nov. 15 event at Nagasaki Civic Hall, Wakiyama served "Urakami soboro," a traditional dish made by simmering thinly sliced pork, carrots, burdock root and other ingredients in a sweet and savory sauce. Watching attendees savor the dish, she commented, "During times of food scarcity, we couldn't enjoy such fancy meals. It's important to appreciate the abundance we enjoy now and avoid wasting food, and each of us must consider how to prevent another era of scarcity."

In February 1945, Wakiyama's father, Etsuji, died of tuberculosis at age 42. Her mother, Toshiko, who was a home economics teacher at the then Nagasaki prefectural girls' high school, raised Wakiyama and her four siblings. Toshiko passed away in 2001 at the age of 92.

The Nagasaki bomb was dropped on the city when Wakiyama was an 8-year-old third grader at the primary school attached to the then Nagasaki teacher training school. At the moment of the explosion on Aug. 9, 1945, she was at home in Nagasaki's Narutaki area, about 3.3 kilometers southeast of the bomb's hypocenter. She was looking out of the second-floor window to spot U.S. aircraft after hearing an air raid siren when she saw a parachute and a flash. She lost consciousness and later found herself collapsed at the entrance. She and her siblings fled to a "tunnel" on the grounds of what is now Narutaki High School, waiting for their mother, who was aiding bomb victims.

Wakiyama escaped major injury, but about half of her classmates from Urakami perished. The atomic bomb destroyed the teacher training school, leading to the closure of its primary school. Wakiyama subsequently transferred to Irabayashi Elementary School that September. Until around November, makeshift cremations using scrap wood were conducted in Irabayashi's schoolyard. When Wakiyama picked up stones in the schoolyard, she would often find human bones.

During this time, children all looked emaciated, and their report cards noted "malnutrition." Given all this, Toshiko was determined to nourish her children. She often said, "You can eat anything but stones." Wakiyama and her siblings would bring home wild plants that seemed edible.

Wakiyama fondly remembers her mother's dishes, such as "suiton" dumpling soup with wild plants and "jiaozi" dumplings made with sardine paste. Despite the scarcity of sweets, "sweet potato soup" made by stewing sweet potatoes was a treat. They would even eat the boiled dried sardines used for broth in miso soup, something that would normally get thrown away today. "My mother taught us that with creativity, anything could be delicious. The sardines' guts were bitter, but I can feel now how much she wanted us to get protein," Wakiyama recalls.

Seeing her mother, Wakiyama thought, "If I get a home economics teaching license, I'll be able to stand on my own." After graduating from Nagasaki Higashi High School, Wakiyama enrolled in the home economics department at the then Nagasaki University faculty of arts. She chose "quantitative analysis of amino acids in dried sardines" as the topic of her graduation thesis.

As a home economics teacher, Wakiyama taught nutritional science at high schools, junior colleges and universities. Since 1993, she has held cooking classes for adults and, since 2005, for school trip students, sharing her experiences during famine. Taking from her mother's teachings, Wakiyama tells the participants, "Root vegetables can be eaten with their skins, shrimp with their shells and cabbage with its core."

Wakiyama said, "It will be too late if another era of food scarcity comes due to war or environmental issues. Precisely because we don't have to worry about food today, I want people to reconsider the value of food."

(Japanese original by Naoki Soeya, Nagasaki Bureau)