Hiroshima Read online

  That contrast still survives today. American textbook treatments of Hiroshima since World War II, the fiasco at the Smithsonian in 1995, when political pressure prevented even the most careful questioning of the Hiroshima decision, the decision of the Obama administration in spring 2010 against adopting a “no first use” policy: these are all different facets of the same phenomenon—denial. Even sixty-five years after Hiroshima, we refuse to face the reality of nuclear war. Just this spring we learned of an American serviceman who claimed, falsely, to have been in the B-29 that photographed the bombing of Hiroshima.[11] Why make such a claim except to bask in the glory of a “successful” mission? Yet Nakazawa and many other bomb victims who really were there concealed their past, hoping to avoid the supposed shame. Why not admit to having been in Hiroshima on August 6 unless there is a social price to be paid?[12] A man on the sidelines fakes involvement in order to share supposed glory; many directly involved pretend not to be involved in order to avoid supposed shame. We have all lived in nuclear denial.[13]

  In his note to the 2004 English translation of the manga, Nakazawa writes: “Human beings are foolish. Thanks to bigotry, religious fanaticism, and the greed of those who traffic in war, the Earth is never at peace, and the specter of nuclear war is never far away. I hope that Gen’s story conveys to its readers the preciousness of peace and the courage we need to live strongly, yet peacefully. In Barefoot Gen, wheat appears as a symbol of that strength and courage. Wheat pushes its shoots up through the winter frost, only to be trampled again and again. But the trampled wheat sends strong roots into the earth and grows straight and tall. And one day, that wheat bears fruit.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Nakazawa Keiji for permission to translate this book into English and for permission to reproduce illustrations from the book and from Barefoot Gen. Asai Motofumi, director of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, served as contact person with Nakazawa. I thank him for his very important help. I am most grateful to Colin Turner of Last Gasp for permission to reproduce excerpts from Last Gasp’s fine Barefoot Gen, 10 volumes (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2004–2009).

  Kyoko Iriye Selden, herself a translator of Hiroshima literature, helped me enormously by comparing the translation very carefully with the original and suggesting many corrections and improvements; I am greatly in her debt. Mark Selden read the manuscript with care. This is the fourth time Susan McEachern of Rowman & Littlefield has acquired a manuscript of mine, and each time it has been a pleasure to work with her. Janice Braunstein served ably as production editor. Don Sluter drew the maps and provided last-minute emergency assistance. Tyran Grillo scanned and reversed the illustrations.

  You all know the graphic work, Barefoot Gen, don’t you? It’s in libraries and on school bookshelves. You may even have a copy at home.

  Barefoot Gen is read not only by Japanese, but also by people around the world. It’s been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Tagalog, and Esperanto, and there are plans for translations into Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. So Barefoot Gen is literally the Gen who raced around the world.

  I haven’t told you yet, but I’m the author of Barefoot Gen.

  Barefoot Gen depicts a boy (Gen), who on August 6, 1945 witnesses a this-worldly hell when the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, overcomes the ravages of war, and goes on living life at full speed.

  I get letters from lots of people. And when I give speeches—for example, in schools—I’m often asked, “Is Gen’s story true?” “Who served as the model for Gen?” Well, who do you think?

  Hiroshima’s atomic bomb dome stands at right about the center of Hiroshima. Just less than a mile from that dome, there’s a place called Funairi Hommachi.[14] That’s where I was born and brought up. Ours was a family of seven. A baby due in August (August 1945!) was in my mother’s womb, so perhaps you can say we were a family of eight.

  August 6, 1945. I was a first grader. That morning I was at the wall that enclosed the school, talking with the mother of a classmate who had stopped me when the atomic bomb fell. She died instantly. I was pinned beneath the wall and survived miraculously.

  Of my family, Dad, older sister Eiko, and younger brother Susumu died that day. Of my other two brothers, the oldest—Ko¯ji—had gone to Kure as a student-soldier, and the next brother—Akira—had been evacuated with his class to the countryside and was unharmed.

  Mom, too, survived, but from then on, her health was fragile from the aftereffects of the bomb. The baby was born into that horror right after the bombing and died soon after birth of malnutrition.

  I lost Dad, Eiko, Susumu, and the baby in the atomic bombing and went to live with relatives, where I was treated as an “outsider.”

  It’s true. It’s the same life as in Barefoot Gen. I’m the model for Gen. Barefoot Gen is based on fact. That’s why I’ve given this book the title, The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen.

  [1]Gen is pronounced with a hard g and a short e, as in again, where the second syllable is pronounced to rhyme with then. Hadashi means barefoot. Hence, “Gen of the Bare Feet.” In the final chapter of this autobiography, Nakazawa explains the origin of the name: “I called the protagonist ‘Gen’ in the sense of the basic composition of humanity so that he’d be someone who wouldn’t let war and atomic bomb happen again.” (Gen is the first half of the compound Genso, meaning chemical element.)

  [2]The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, ed. John W. Dower and John Junkerman (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985).

  [3]“Hiroshima” no ku¯haku—Nakazawa-ke shimatsuki (Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta¯, 1987); ‘Hadashi Gen’ no jiden (Tokyo: Misuzu, 1995).

  [4]Nakazawa refers to his mother throughout as Mother/Mom, but on August 6 his father cries out to “Kimiyo.” The manga gives her name as Kimie. In the manga, she calls her husband “Daikichi.”

  [5]Charles Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (New York: Henry Holt, 2010). A New York Times account of the brouhaha that has greeted Pellegrino’s book quoted Jeffrey Porter of the University of Iowa, “There’s a hazy line between ‘truth’ and invention in creative non-fiction, but good writers don’t have to make things up.” Motoko Rich, “Pondering Good Faith in Publishing,” New York Times, March 9, 2010, p. C6. For an extended discussion of the issues involved in this hoax, see my “Misunderstanding Hiroshima,” Japanfocus.org.

  [6]“Barefoot Gen, Japan, and I: The Hiroshima Legacy: An Interview with Nakazawa Keiji,” tr. Richard H. Minear, International Journal of Comic Art 10, no. 2 (fall 2008): 311–12. An excerpt from this interview is an appendix to this book.

  [7]Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima, 325. Without footnotes, without a list of interviewees and the dates of the interviews, Pellegrino’s assertions are impossible to evaluate and hence virtually worthless. At best, those survivor accounts are sixty-year-old memories of the event, and intervening events and experiences have played a major, if undocumented, role.

  [8]There are two other changes to note. In the plate showing the principal accusing Gen’s sister of stealing from her classmate, the large characters on the wall read (right to left) “patriotism.” These are the third and fourth characters of a wartime slogan, “Loyalty and patriotism.” But now, of necessity, the third and fourth characters have become the first and second. In the plate showing water tanks in the ruins of Hiroshima, the tank now on the left edge originally had the third and fourth characters of the four-character phrase: “water for fighting fires.” Now those characters have been replaced with the first and second characters, copied from the tank now on the right.

  [9]“The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War,” Liberation 12 (September–October 1967); reprinted in Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 168–69.

  [10]Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Black Eggs (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of M
ichigan, 1994); When We Say “Hiroshima”: Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999); O¯ishi Matashichi, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon #5, and I (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming).

  [11]In Last Train Pellegrino quotes Joseph Fuoco at length. Fuoco claimed to have been a last-minute replacement. Pellegrino himself claimed to have had a Ph.D. in zoology (Victoria University, New Zealand, 1981), but the university has now refuted that claim. So Pellegrino’s trust in Fuoco may be an instance of the scammer scammed. Even so, the scammer may well laugh last. James Cameron, director of Titanic, for which he won an Oscar, and Avatar, for which Pellegrino was a scriptwriter, has already optioned Last Train for a film. Indeed, Cameron wrote a lead blurb for Last Train, and that blurb is true in a way Cameron never suspected: Last Train “combines intense forensic detail—some of it new to history—with unfathomable heartbreak.”

  [12]Victims of the bomb faced discrimination from nonvictims who feared the effects of radiation on future offspring.

  [13]Cf. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995).

  [14]See map 3.

  Map 1. Western Japan

  Map 2. Hiroshima

  Map 3. Map 1 inset, Funairi

  Map 4. Map 2 inset, Central Hiroshima

  Author’s Introduction

  The Dropping of the Atomic Bomb, “Gen,” and I

  Nakazawa Keiji

  1

  Prelude to Tragedy

  Dad and Mom

  The Nakazawa clan had been low-ranking samurai serving the house of Asano, lords of Hiroshima Castle. With the order of 1871 to abolish the daimyo domains and establish instead today’s prefectures, the Nakazawa family switched to the business of painting, mainly lacquer, and made its living lacquering the wooden clogs, frames of sliding interior partitions, wooden utensils, and the like, for which Hiroshima was noted.[1]

  My father, Harumi, was the oldest child in a family of three sons and a daughter. Dad didn’t enter the family lacquer business. Instead, wanting to set up shop as a printer in the Japanese style, he went to Kyoto and trained in painting and fine lacquering. The Japanese-style painting was in the school of Maruyama O¯kyo.[2]

  My mother, Kimiyo, was the oldest daughter of the Miyake family; she had three brothers and two sisters. The Miyakes lived in Koami-cho¯; they were bicycle wholesalers. A friend of hers told me that Mom was a fashionable “high collar” girl in the style of the 1920s. At that time if a woman rode a bike, she was derided as a tomboy. But Mom went about town on a bike, stately in split skirt, and went to movies and frequented coffee shops—that is, she was a young woman in free and broad-minded times.

  Remembering her arranged marriage with Dad, Mom often laughed.[3] In marriage back then, unlike today, parents made the decisions, and she couldn’t declare her preferences. Before she knew what was happening, the date for her marriage interview had been set. When, uneasy about not knowing what sort of man she was to marry, she peeked from behind the sliding screen, she was astonished to see someone completely bald, with a shiny pate. She was in tears—“I’ll die before I’ll marry him!” There was a big to-do. Her parents reasoned with her, “You can’t call it off at this late date,” and the whole family was in turmoil. Then a young man with a full head of hair entered the room and said, “Sorry I’m late.” He was the real candidate. Mom said with a smile that when she realized her mistake, she was so embarrassed her face turned flaming red. The bald guy was the go-between.

  I was born in March 1939 in Funairi Hommachi, less than a mile from the heart of Hiroshima (the building that is now the atomic bomb dome). There were seven in the family—Dad, Mom, oldest brother Ko¯ji, older sister Eiko, older brother Akira, younger brother Susumu—plus Blackie, the cat. As for my name Keiji, one of my grandfather’s brothers had that name. He was apparently a real entrepreneur. He invested his own capital in the development of Ujina Harbor, a project that faced rough going. He cooperated in that enterprise and received a letter of gratitude from the lord of Hiroshima Castle. Later he crossed over to Shikoku, built a home, and died there. Mom told me I was named for him.

  Hiroshima was a castle town blessed by nature and climate, with both mountains and ocean: the mountains of the Chu¯goku range to the north; the Inland Sea, a calm small-scale landscape, to the south; seven rivers running through town. On the other hand, Hiroshima flourished as a military city. During the Russo-Japanese War, General Headquarters was set up in Hiroshima Castle. Thereafter, too, Ujina Harbor served as the base from which to dispatch soldiers to the southern front, and that practice continued right up to Japan’s defeat in 1945. This is where I was raised.

  “Artist” is another word for poor, and we were extremely poor. Dad had absolutely no mind for business—even paintings he did on commission he’d hand over generously, as if they were hostess gifts, and he hated taking money. The art galleries took advantage of Dad, accepting his work in his spirit, then making money by selling it at a high price. Mom couldn’t accept that, so she’d slip out the back door, hurry to the art galleries and, saying nothing to Dad, collect the money from the gallery: “It doesn’t matter what you sell it for; just give us our share.”

  Engrossed in the paintings and lacquer he himself liked, Dad was a “crazy artist” oblivious to family finances. Mom earned money in the family clog-lacquering business, borrowed money from her own family, and worked day and night to make ends meet. When Mom complained about money, he scolded her: “Money’s dirty. Merchants are crafty. Their only thought is to turn a profit by enticing people to spend. I hate them. I’m not the sort that can make money, so get used to it!”

  You often hear stories of artists or left-wing zealots spouting idealistic talk. To my mind, it stands to reason that things one creates by one’s own sweat should sell for a good bit of money as return on the labor. It’s silly to make flimsy excuses, such as “Money’s dirty.”

  That’s the way Dad was. He couldn’t make a living, so he made Mom weep because of our poverty. But that obstinate Dad—Mom loved him. Our family’s fate depended on Mom’s slender arms, and the sight of Mom working herself to the bone is burned into my memory.

  Dad Disappears

  The Industrial Arts Exposition Hall (now the atomic bomb dome) was a venue for exhibitions and prefectural art shows. Dad’s ink paintings and lacquer were exhibited there, and we children went proudly to see them.

  The Dad we were so proud of once disappeared. Scenes from that time etched themselves into my young mind. Evening: two sharp-eyed men stand in our entryway, then pack Dad off with them. Mom’s face is ashen, her lips tremble, her hair is in disarray. Watching Dad intently, prayers in her eyes, she sees him off. He sets off with one man holding each arm. I can never forget the sight. Even though I was a child, I understood that a family tragedy had occurred, and I trembled with terror. That afterimage is etched onto my heart, painfully.

  From that day on, Dad was not there. I often asked Mom where he was. She replied, “Your father went for his military physical.” Thereafter my memory fades and goes blank. Was he was away six months? Twelve?—I don’t know. The significance of Dad’s disappearance became clear only after Japan’s defeat, when I met people who knew him.

  At the time Dad was devoted not only to ink painting and lacquer but also to the stage. He belonged to the left-wing New Theater Group; it rented halls to put on Shimazaki To¯son’s Before the Dawn, Gorky’s The Lower Depths, and other plays. Today, no matter what bookstore or library you go to, it’s easy to lay your hands on Before the Dawn or The Lower Depths and read them, but during the war, under the Peace Protection Law, the winds of ideological oppression blew fiercely, and the authorities were pitiless, throwing into jail those who took issue with the wartime regime. Before the Dawn and The Lower Depths were classified as “dangerous thought,” couldn’t be published, and of course couldn’t be performed. One after the other,
left-wing theater groups disbanded.

  Dad’s theater group, too, was the subject of police surveillance; it was watched from the rooftop, raided constantly, had its materials confiscated. As suspect individuals, Dad and his buddies were under surveillance. The last left-wing stage performance took place in Osaka, and having seen that, the members of Dad’s troupe decided to disband. At its dissolution, the entire group met and took a commemorative photograph. Among them, I understand, were “thought police” spies pretending to be troupe members. With that commemorative photograph as unshakable evidence, the members of Dad’s theater group were arrested as thought criminals, taken to the jail in the Hiroshima Prefectural Offices, and held as prisoners awaiting trial. The sight of Dad being taken from our house is still engraved on my heart, an afterimage of panic.