Return--What Lurks in Showa Schoolhouses (Early Showa 40s)

Return--What Lurks in Showa Schoolhouses (Early Showa 40s)

In the early 1965's, Japan was in the midst of its rapid economic growth, and along with urbanization, school buildings were being converted to concrete. However, many old wooden school buildings still remained in rural areas. The floors creaked, the walls were stained, drafts blew in during the winter, and the summer air was hot. In particular, the "girls' restroom on the third floor" was a place where it was rumored that there was always one that "appeared" in every school.

It was late fall, in an after-school classroom. Someone said, "I'm going to go to the third-floor girls' restroom.

Hey, have you ever been in that bathroom?

Which one?"

The girls' restroom on the third floor of the old school building, on the left side.

The girls' restroom? Why are we guys going in there?

No, we're not. No, I heard a voice in there at night saying, "Give me that back."

Give it back?　Give back what?

"Well, I'm sure it's something from ...... when you were alive."

Someone said with a laugh. You really believe in that kind of thing?

But no one said, "I don't believe it.

Many of the wooden school buildings built immediately after the war had been converted from former hospitals and military facilities. Especially in local junior high schools, the restrooms were treated as "other worlds. In a time when boys were rarely allowed to enter such places, and when the presence of the opposite sex, "girls," was separated from everyday life, the girls' restroom was a symbol of the unknown and the forbidden.

The one word "give me back" does not clearly indicate the object of the request. This, in turn, invites the imagination and evokes the regrets and regrets of the departed souls. Perhaps it is something lost in the war. Or perhaps an unfulfilled love.

Twenty years after the war, the economy is improving, but the shadow of war is still everywhere. Some of the teachers were former soldiers, and the poverty of a defeated nation seeped into every corner of the school buildings. Children growing up in such an environment, while welcoming the new era of TVs and refrigerators, suddenly encounter an unidentifiable "past" in the smell of old wood.

Such "urban legends" are "ghosts of memories" born in the unconsciousness of children in postwar Japan. Voices appear in the women's restroom, a closed space where no one is allowed to enter. These were not mere horror stories, but the crystallization of children's longing for the opposite sex, imagination of death, and their culture as a community of storytelling.