Hiroshima Page 11

  Virtually every day the ABCC station wagon appeared in the schoolyard. The staff handed out large paper cups to children, had them bring in stool samples, and then loaded the children in the station wagon and drove off. The visits by the station wagon were strange. When we asked the teacher, she refused to answer: “I don’t know!” Several pupils from my class were also taken off. When they came back, we asked them, “Anything good to eat at the ABCC? What are they checking for?” They complained, “They didn’t give us anything to eat. They stripped us, drew blood, and examined us—down to the tips of our weewees. Embarrassing!” We agreed among ourselves that “America’s doing something strange.” I wasn’t alone; at that time no resident of Hiroshima understood what the ABCC was up to. Some of our neighbors were even threatened and taken forcibly to the ABCC to be checked.

  Boys’ War

  Even before it dropped the atomic bomb, America knew well that radiation affects the human body. Moreover, it built two types of atomic bomb—uranium and plutonium—and, taking advantage of the war, dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experimenting on hundreds of thousands of living people. On learning this later, I trembled in anger. I think America has no right to censure the Nazis for their cruelty—Auschwitz and other concentration camps—to the Jews. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America carried out a cruel experiment on living people. Moreover, it imposed on survivors a permanent terror: atomic bomb disease brought on by radiation. I couldn’t escape the thought that America’s humanitarianism and democracy were a sham, shallow and suspect.

  As each year passed, the ABCC’s station wagon came more frequently to the schoolyard and picked up more and more children.

  On September 19, 1945, GHQ promulgated its press code, making it illegal to inform the Japanese about the realities of the atomic bomb.[2] It itself was diligent in collecting data in Hiroshima. Any number of times I saw U.S. units setting up instruments in the ruins, measuring distances with surveying instruments, taking notes, and conducting all sorts of research. When we saw U.S. soldiers, we went up to them and bantered, “Daddy! Mommy! The flash-boom left me hongree! Hongree!” Perhaps feeling sorry for us, the U.S. soldiers tossed us chocolate and gum.

  Towering on the opposite side of the river from the school, the wreck of the Atomic Bomb Dome became a great playground for us brats. With jungle gym skills, we climbed up and down the dome’s outer walls. Standing atop the dome and looking in all directions, we could survey a vast sweep, off to the Inland Sea in the distance. Hiroshima lay spread out at our feet, and looking down, we understood well—with our bird’s-eye view—the extent of the ruins burned out by the atomic bomb. Doves and sparrows built their nests and laid eggs in the dome’s holes and cracks. We competed to be first to climb the dome, find the nests, stick our hands in, bring back the eggs, and swallow them proudly in front of the others.

  Later one of my classmates slipped and fell from the dome and bounced off the rubble, but miraculously he survived, breaking only his jaw and twelve ribs. Thereafter a strict prohibition was issued—“No playing on the dome!” We lamented, “That accident cost us a great playground!”

  The dome and its surroundings were our yard, our turf. We knew where to find large crabs in the rock walls on both banks and around which girders of Aioi Bridge there were lots of fish. In summer Aioi Bridge became a fine diving board. The bridge pavement had ruptured, and holes had opened, mouthlike. We climbed out onto the middle supports of the bridge through those holes and dived time and again into the middle of the river. When I first stood on the girders, my legs shook because of the height. But I didn’t want my buddies to make fun of me, so I made up my mind and jumped feet first. Once I jumped, I quickly became confident and dived headfirst repeatedly.

  Among the kids in the Hiroshima region, there were two ways to dive—feet first or head first. Diving feet first, in standing position, was ridiculed as the sissy’s way. To prove your guts, you had to dive head first. If you dived head first, your buddies would respect you. As a matter of pride, I dove head first.

  When you scrambled up the sixty-foot girders,[3] danced off into the air, and your head hit the water, the impact felt as if your scalp had ripped open and gone flying in a million pieces. Holding your breath and gliding along the bottom, you saw a shocking sight. The bottom was covered with bones, and as you continued downstream, it was a river of skulls. Diving showed you just how many people had sunk to the bottom and become skeletons. I glided through the water over the bones, then surfaced. Bones covered both sides of the river bottom and lay there, in plain sight. Dig in the middle of the Honkawa even now, and you’ll turn up plenty of bones.

  When the tide ebbed in the Honkawa, I’d hurry home, run sixteen inches of thread through a needle, tie the ends around a matchstick, and head back to the river with a small round net eight inches in diameter. I’d go in on either bank where there were lots of bones. Freshwater shrimp two inches long came and went through the empty eye sockets of skulls and swam among the bones. I’d aim for large ones with the net and string my catch through the midsection on the thread. I’d lose myself fishing for crayfish, squinting, until the thread was full of crayfish or until it became impossible to see the bottom at dusk.

  When I went after crayfish with the net from behind, they’d jump backward and into the net all by themselves. No one taught me that, but I knew they always scuttled backward. The crayfish were particularly thick where there were lots of bones. They’d fattened on corpses. The crayfish I brought home we skewered on bamboo spits, roasted, and ate as a family. They supplemented our deficiencies of protein and calcium. The crayfish got fat feeding on corpses, and we ate them, so it didn’t feel quite right—as if we were cannibals.

  My playground was the black market stalls that sprang up cheek by jowl, like mushrooms after rain, at the Atomic Bomb Dome and along both sides of the river near Hiroshima Station. In this black market, all sorts of people were active. In particular, the atomic bomb orphans who gathered in large numbers at Hiroshima Station caught my eye.

  Some seven thousand orphans, alone in the world because their parents and relatives had all been killed, were cast adrift and wandered the burned-out ruins of Hiroshima. Clad in raggedly clothes, grimy, scrawny, their filthy black bodies exposed, they clung to repatriated soldiers and passersby begging for food. Those unable to get food became malnourished and collapsed on the pavement, unable to move. If passersby stepped on their heads, they barely opened their eyes; they’d lost the energy to show anger. The orphans teemed in the plaza in front of the railroad station; each morning several died.

  In winter the orphans poked holes in large metal drums, threw in the charred remains of telephone poles and branches from the trees that lived on in the ashes, burned them, and slept in circles about the drums. Watching those orphans, I trembled. Had Mom died, I too would have been orphaned and become one of them, malnourished and unable to move. My survival was a matter of sheer luck: I simply couldn’t think otherwise. I gave thanks that Mom had survived.

  At one time in the postwar era, Hiroshima led the nation in juvenile crime. To survive, the orphans either became lone-wolf thieves or banded together in groups and entered the underworld. For those orphans unable to commit crimes, the only end was malnutrition, collapse, and death. Only a small fraction of the total number gained entry to the several orphanages that were set up; help for the atomic bomb orphans was extended only seven full years after the atomic bomb was dropped. During that time the orphans persevered, wandering about the burned-out ruins and leading desperate lives.

  By 1952, kids who had been sixth graders at the time of the atomic bomb were already young men. There were people who preyed on these adult orphans. Gangsters seeking turf in the new Hiroshima got involved, and in the postwar era, fierce gangster wars took place. In those gang battles many adult atomic bomb orphans died. They were sweet-talked—“Kill one of the other gang’s leaders, and we’ll make you one of our leaders.” They were as expendable as bullets:
they jumped into fights, took return fire, and were killed. Because atomic bomb orphans had no parents and no relatives, no one complained when they were killed. So the gangsters found them very useful. I heard any number of stories of children who lived lives of leisure before the war, were orphaned by the atomic bomb, and after the war were in and out of jail.

  What bitter days and years the orphans spent! I was deeply angry at the war and the atomic bomb that made the weak—only them—endure so bitter a fate. Those guys, war leaders who started the war and those who dropped the atomic bomb, no longer merited the word human being: I really wanted to kill them all.

  August 15, the day of Japan’s defeat: on that day, our true war began.

  Reduced to the Status of Beggars . . .

  The days of our hunger stretched on and on. When I’d walk in the black market, I’d stare in wonder: “Wow! All those goodies!” Steamed rolls made of brown rice, dumplings, candy, rice cooked with red beans. Swallowing my saliva, I’d look around. Skin was still attached to the meat on skewers, and it betrayed the fact that dogs and cats, too, were being turned into food. All this was too expensive for us to buy, and the prices made us gasp. But it made us feel good simply to see it. I had to wonder at the strange state of the world: even when everyone was hungry and starving to death, if you just had the money, you could buy and eat all sorts of luxury foods.

  The spiels of the charlatans selling patent medicines were fascinating: “Let me show you how effective this medicine is! I’ll let this terribly poisonous snake bite my arm. Then I’ll show that I’ll recover quickly simply by applying this salve!” Listening to it, thrilled, for hours at a time, I kept waiting to see the snake actually bite the man. But it was only a pitch for the medicine, a dodge. Street performers—the monkey man, the swordsman—flourished in the black market. It was my favorite place.

  When there was a break in Mom’s work and she had the time, she took me with her, and we went selling. Carrying a knapsack, two or three pieces of clothing to barter, and coins, we’d make the rounds of the farmhouses in Gion and ask, “How about letting us have some of your potatoes and rice?” The overbearing attitude of the farmers at the time was enough to make you puke.

  In the yard of a farmhouse, Mom would bow and scrape like a toady and beseech the farmer, “Can’t you please spare ten pounds of potatoes or a five-gallon bag of rice? I beg you.” Standing on his veranda and looking down at Mom, the farmer would puff on his pipe and glare at her, putting on airs, and shout angrily, “Get out!” Mom still begged desperately. As I watched from behind, my stomach would churn with bitterness toward the farmer and sympathy for Mom. A child of that farmer came out onto the porch chewing on a steamed potato and glared at me with hateful eyes. He let the potato he was holding fall to the ground, mashed it with his sandal, then pointed to the yellow lumps of potato and taunted me, “You want it, don’t you? Then eat it! Eat it!” Trying desperately to suppress the urge to fly at him, I put up with the humiliation: I won’t forget that day as long as I live.

  Mom and I walked from one farmhouse to the next, begging, “Won’t you please spare us some food?” But the farmers never went easy on us. We met only crafty farmers: grabbing the clothing Mom held out, they’d say, “What makes you think this is worth ten pounds of potatoes?” They’d try to take advantage of our plight and get Mom’s good clothes for a few potatoes.

  When evening came and the farmhouses were only silhouettes, we’d reach the end of our tether, our feet dragging along the paths between paddies. Mom would whisper, “We’ll try one more house. If that’s no good, we’ll give up and go home.” We’d aim at the lantern of one of the farmhouses scattered in the distance. Giving in to Mom’s desperate entreaty, that farmer said, “I had set it aside for seed, but your persistence is too much for me.” We stuffed potatoes pulled out from beneath the veranda into our knapsack. How long the road home seemed! And how heavy our legs, as we shouldered sad thoughts! The farmers swaggered so because they realized that having food gave them that privilege. Even my child’s mind thought: the time will come when you get yours!

  Nor can I forget the day we had no fuel. Dragging a handcart, Mom and I went to a woodlot in Koi to gather windfall wood. Gathering dead branches and tying them in bundles, I rejoiced with Mom, “This’ll last us two weeks!” We shouldered the bundled branches, making many trips to carry them to the entrance of the lot. And just as we finished, a stolid, middle-aged farmer appeared and thundered at us, “Hey, you! Who gave you permission to come here? You can’t take dead branches without permission!” He insisted to Mom, “Leave the branches and get out!” Mom asked whether he couldn’t share the branches with us, and he said no, brusquely. We’d come to the lot early in the morning, and we’d worked so hard to collect the bundles, carrying them in exhaustion to the gate at the foot of the hill. To leave them made me resentful beyond endurance.

  We learned afterward that the farmer had known we’d entered the woodlot and were collecting firewood. And smiling tightly, he’d waited until we’d carried the wood to the gate. He was a schemer, making us work and profiting dishonestly from our work collecting the firewood. Complaining about having labored to no purpose, we went home, pulling the empty handcart. I can never forget how wretched we felt. Among the brothers, it was I who went most often with Mom. Mom’s sad bitterness in all these cases is seared onto my retinas.

  From our house in the ruins we’d looked out in all directions over a panorama of ruin. But soon huts covered it, and our panorama closed in. People who had evacuated came back to the ruins, and our house, too, was enveloped in sounds of daily life. Naturally, as the number of people increased, there was competition in gathering wood for fuel for daily living. Such boards and trees as remained in the ruins disappeared quickly. Akira and I dug in the ruins and collected charcoal, and we dug up the stubs of telephone poles that had burned down. A scant six feet of telephone pole remained unburned underground. It took a day to dig out a pole and cut it up with a saw. Desperately we poured energy into collecting fuel. But even those buried telephone poles became the object of competition, and soon they disappeared from the ruins. Each day was a struggle for survival.

  After a while our classrooms at school, too, got blackboards on the walls, courtesy of contributions from all over the country. With rows of two-person desks and chairs, the atmosphere began to be that of a place of learning. But there weren’t enough desks to go around, so three of us sat at the two-person desks, each trying to establish his own workspace. There were endless quarrels. For textbooks, we received some dozens of sheets of coarse paper, mimeographed; we took the pages home and each made a book of our own design and finally had one textbook apiece. There was no glass in the windows, and the cold wind blew through the classroom. As we shivered, 1946 came to an end.

  Year of Anger

  Nineteen forty-seven is especially unforgettable, the year that remains forever in memory. On January 1 of that year, in the middle of winter vacation, all pupils were compelled to go to school. Intending to play hooky, I had wrapped myself in my blanket, sleeping on, but a classmate came and lured me: “If we go to school, we’ll get red-and-white candy.” Hearing that, I rushed to school. When, tempted by food, I reached the school, all the pupils were lined up in the schoolyard. Dressed in a cutaway, the principal stood on the podium used for morning exercises. Wearing formal clothes, PTA officers, local bosses, and teachers were lined up in the front. The order came: “All together now, face east! East! Face His Majesty the Emperor in his palace in Tokyo and wish him Happy New Year! All together now, bow deeply!” And all the pupils bowed their heads reverently. The teacher walked around instructing us, “Don’t raise your heads until I give the word!” I was astonished at the scene. Dad had told me what a horrible thing the emperor system is: that the war had begun at the order of the emperor, that as a result we were burned out by the atomic bomb, many people were killed, and even now many injured bomb victims were suffering and groaning. I was stunned at ho
w little awareness about the war the principal, teachers, local bosses, and parents showed: to want to thank that emperor, still unpunished, and to delight in making the pupils bow to the palace! With great difficulty, I repressed the urge to thunder, “You people—how stupid!”

  Once we’d finished bowing to the palace, we sang the anthem, and in each classroom they handed out the red-and-white candy. On the way home after we were dismissed, I ate the candy at one gulp. I told myself that if I turned it quickly into shit, fertilizer for the field, even the hated candy would serve a purpose. And I went home yelling words that were popular then among the children: “I, your emperor, have farted. You, my subjects, smell it. Hold your noses and step back! Proclamation signed and sealed!”

  Someone once said, “War turns small children into adults overnight.” It’s really true. If you’re thrown into the cruel situation of having to fight a life-and-death struggle, it stands to reason that the pampered days of childhood vanish instantly. I came naturally to have eyes that see the dishonesty of human beings, distinguish façade from reality. Akira often admonished me, “You’re a twisted one! You have to be a bit straighter!” If you asked me, I was expressing the reality behind the façade, and that made me appear twisted, not at all childlike. I was old for my age. In the teachers’ presence I played the role expected of a child, I behaved with calculation.

  The anger of December 7 of that year is engraved on my heart.

  Saying, “Today I have an important assignment for you!” the teacher passed out a large sheet of paper to each pupil. He said, “Use a compass to describe a circle six inches in diameter in the center of the paper. Color it in with red crayon. Attach it with paste to a thin piece of bamboo. Bring it to school tomorrow without fail!” He was having each of us make a flag. When I asked what the flags were for, he said, “Tomorrow’s a glorious day: His Majesty the Emperor is coming to Hiroshima! Waving flags, we residents of Hiroshima will greet him warmly!”