Wartime Evacuation Day

What Is Wartime Evacuation Day?

Every June 30th is "Wartime Evacuation Day" (集団疎開の日, Shūdan Sokai no Hi) in Japan. On June 30, 1944, the cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo adopted the "Guidelines for Promoting the Evacuation of Schoolchildren" (学童疎開促進要綱) — a program to move elementary school children, mainly in the third through sixth grades, from major cities to rural areas to protect them from air raids. More than 400,000 children were evacuated from cities including Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, making it one of WWII's most significant impacts on Japanese civilian life.

The Gakudō Sokai Program

The government encouraged families to send children to relatives in the countryside, but for children with nowhere to go, schools evacuated together as groups (集団疎開, shūdan sokai). The first group left Tokyo on August 4, 1944, followed by children from Okinawa and Osaka, and from Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Amagasaki, Kobe, and the cities of today's Kitakyushu, with most departures concentrated before the end of September. The children lived communally under teacher supervision in rural temples, inns, and other accommodations. In March 1945, the government decided to continue the group evacuation for more than a year, and many children stayed away from home until after the war ended. Although some host areas were well provisioned, most suffered food shortages, and homesickness and hunger made the evacuation deeply challenging for the children who experienced it.

The Evacuation's Human Impact

The experiences of evacuated children — the separation from parents, the unfamiliarity of rural life, the fear and loneliness of wartime childhood — have been extensively documented in memoirs, literature, and film. Some children lost the families they had left behind in the cities, for example in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, and became war orphans while still away. On August 22, 1944, the evacuation ship Tsushima Maru, carrying schoolchildren from Okinawa toward Nagasaki, was sunk by an American submarine near Akusekijima in Kagoshima Prefecture, and many children lost their lives.

Children and War

The wartime evacuation program is remembered in Japan as a testament to the human cost of war and the particular burden it places on children. June 30th is an occasion to reflect on the experiences of those children — now elderly — who were separated from their families and spent the final year of WWII away from home.

Fun Facts

• The word "sokai": "Sokai" was originally a military term for widening the spacing between troops so they would make a harder target. Late in the war, it came to be widely used for dispersing city residents and factories to the countryside.
• "Grave of the Fireflies": Studio Ghibli's 1988 film, directed by Isao Takahata and based on Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story, depicts two siblings struggling to survive after losing their home and mother in the 1945 air raids on Kobe. It is widely regarded as one of cinema's most powerful portrayals of children in wartime.
• Letters home: Collections of letters written by evacuated children to their parents — preserved in archives and family collections across Japan — provide intimate testimony to the human experience of wartime separation that statistics cannot convey.