The Roads To Sata

by Alan Booth

  The last hour of my trudge that day was along a highway where headlights blazed like tracer bullets, and I reached a ryokan long after dark, too dazzled to notice the cigarette burns in the sheets and too tired to complain about the wails of the cat that sat on my window ledge keening through the night.

  On a battlefield scarred with the tracks of tanks and pitted with the craters of mortar shells crows were battening on Japanese corpses, ripping eyes out of sockets and tearing the flesh down to the skull. A stone's throw away, in a makeshift stockade, two young Japanese soldiers were tied with barbed wire to wooden stakes and a grinning American Marine sergeant, who had just emerged from a barracks where he had been lashing the behinds of two screaming Japanese women with a studded leather belt, was mustering a firing squad. The young Japanese soldiers cried out as they died. One cried, "I am a Japanese!" The other, "Long live the emperor!" The bullets tore fist-sized holes in their chests, and within minutes of their deaths the crows were alighting; the eyes went first, then the tongues.

  I put the comic book back on the pile and spent the rest of breakfast staring at my maps. The large drive-in was almost empty, and when he saw that I was no longer occupied by cultural pursuits, the owner came and sat with me and we had a chat. He was a youngish-looking middle-aged man with gold teeth and a long chefs apron, and we discussed the Japanese economy.

  He told me that America, Britain, and West Germany could no longer be taken seriously since they were all more than halfway down the tube. Japan, by contrast, was the only country in the world where identical consumer goods, sealed and date-stamped for extra freshness, were as available in the smallest rural hamlets as they were in the metropolis. There were drawbacks to this convenience, he suggested. Fifteen years ago the Japanese had had something to work hard for. Now it was all there for them on a plate, and the young people no longer understood the value of dedicated labor. Fifteen years ago, too, the future had seemed a straight line; now there was a jittery awareness of the future's limitations. And then the litany began: tiny country, no natural resources, misunderstood by everyone....

  He was an amiable chap, disarmingly honest about the things that impressed him personally:

  "Sometimes foreigners—Americans mostly—come in here on their way from Iwakuni to go skiing on Mount Daisen. If they order 'morning service' (coffee with a free egg and a slice of toast) they always wait quietly till it's ready, no matter how busy I am or how long it takes. Japanese customers who order the same thing will be howling for it within five minutes. They're very patient, foreigners. It must come from having to do without conveniences...."

  The television was on full blast in the drive-in, and our conversation fizzled out when a newsreader reported that nine Japanese terrorists had just hijacked a JAL flight to Dacca and were demanding six million dollars in cash. The owner disappeared with an embarrassed cough into his kitchen, and I swung on down the narrow road that followed the local railway track in its plunge through commuterland toward the city of Hiroshima.

  Commuterland or not, these valleys and low rolling hills were among the greenest and most eye-pleasing I passed through on my journey. Hiroshima seemed a neat, well-manicured prefecture, and despite the drive-in owner's all-too-tiresome urging of the work ethic, the people struck me as a gentle, unhurried crowd who felt it important to spare time for chats like ours. Among the conveniences available to them in their shops was a wall clock set into a large photo-graphic panel showing Oh Sadaharu cracking the home run that flushed American baseball down its own tube: from camera to clock factory to rural Hiroshima in twenty-six days—there's industry for you!

  As I approached Mukaihara, toward the end of a long, overcast day, three little girls ran after me to ask me where I'd come from. Hokkaido, I told them. They shrieked and ran away. And in the shabby streets of the little township I was serenaded on my search for a ryokan by four boys of about the same age—alerted, perhaps, by the little girls—who trailed after me, shouting 'I-me-my, you-your-yours" for something like five minutes till I snapped at them to shut up and, incredibly, they did. There were no ryokans in Mukaihara, and no policemen by the look of things, either. The station was little more than a shed, but the old man I found dozing there told me that there was a ryokan near the next station down the line, at a place called Ibaraichi. How far was that, I asked.

  "Fifty kilometers."

  It was half a minute of agony before I realized that the old man had a less than perfect grasp of the metric system.

  "How many ri?"

  "One and a bit."

  "Then it's five kilometers, not fifty."

  "Yes," he agreed, "it could be, too. Things are never the same for very long nowadays."

  Dusk fell, and again it was night by the time I reached a place I could stay. The ryokan was in darkness, but the little bar next door had lights on, and so I opened the back door, hoping that the bar and the ryokan were parts of the same establishment. They were, and I was welcomed to both by two gushing hostesses and a jubilant mama-san who also ran the ryokan and who sat with me as I ate my dinner, addressing me all the time as O-niisan (the polite, affectionate term that means brother).

  "Ibaraichi is a very old town, O-niisan. It's only five or six years since they made it a suburb of Hiroshima city. It has a long history of its own to be proud of. This ryokan itself is seventy years old, and in the temple across the road one of the great Mori lords is buried. Each year in spring an old man in his eighties with long white hair and a flowing beard comes from the city of Hagi, a hundred and twenty kilometers away, to spend the night here in this ryokan, and in the morning he climbs the hill behind the temple to pray at the grave of the lord, his ancestor."

  The woman knew her history. Hagi, she said, was the city to which the Mori lords had retired after losing Hiroshima due to one of them's siding with the wrong faction against the shogun in 1600. He had attempted to make amends by cutting off his own son's head, but the shogun preferred stability to murdered children and Hiroshima passed into more reliable hands. Recent history, too, was a preoccupation of the mama-san's, and it crept up on our dinner conversation without awkwardness or fanfare.

  "Do you know what an omiai is, O-niisan?"

  "Yes, it's the meeting between a potential couple and their families as the first step toward an arranged marriage."

  "That's right. You know a lot, O-niisan. Before the war, if the man was satisfied at an omiai the marriage would go ahead with no thought at all for the woman's preferences or affections. That was how it was with me, though I saw little enough of my husband to know whether I could love him or not. We'd been married a year and a half and I already had one child. My husband was a soldier in Hiroshima city...."

  I waited without saying anything, turning my sake cup round and round in my fingers.

  "... I remember it was especially fine weather that day. We lived about two ri from the center, and my husband was stationed near the naval yards. It was a quarter past eight in the morning and suddenly all the paper doors and screens blew down and everyone shut their eyes because it seemed the day had grown brighter. I'd just watched two planes fly over and when I looked up again they were still there. One of them had turned and was climbing away but the other one was circling a great cloud that seemed to be rising like a tornado out of the earth. We couldn't make out what the planes were doing. It was two days after they told me my husband was dead...."

  "I remember going out and walking the streets. Some of the people were burned on every part of their bodies except where they had tied the sashes round their summer kimonos. All the rest of their clothes had disappeared. Others you couldn't see any marks on; their skin looked perfectly normal, but there was something itching underneath it. When you took them to the doctor's, they said it was a vitamin C deficiency and gave them an injection. Ten days later their hair began to fall out and they bled from all their orifices, and then they died. I remember a fourteen-year-old boy pulling great chunks of his hair out and asking his mot
her why. The next day he complained of a stomachache and his mother took him to the doctor, who sent him to hospital with suspected appendicitis. The next day he bled from his ears and nose; the day after that they cremated him.

  "Later on they told us that no plants or trees would grow in Hiroshima for ten to fifteen years. Around the point where the bomb dropped they were selling land for a yen and a half a tsubo (about the size of two tatami mats). But the next year the grass grew just the same and the trees bore leaves again...."

  An old woman with perfectly white hair tottered round the doorpost of the room we were sitting in, clutching the paper screen for support, and peered at me, still seated at the dinner table with the same sake cup between my finger and thumb.

  "Where's auntie?" she asked me.

  "Here," the mama-san said, standing up with a puff of breath.

  "What about my dinner?" the old woman moaned. "I've been waiting and waiting and waiting...."

  I slept on a hard rice-husk pillow, and the second-to-last night of September had a chill in it.

  Next morning the mama-san made me a packed lunch and, still clucking with pleasure and calling me O-niisan, told me which road would bring me soonest into the city that had fueled all her life's conversations.

  It was a beautiful bright sunny day with the mountains crisp and clear, and white autumn cumulus piled up on their peaks like cushions. Despite the growing nearness of the city, the little villages along this railway line preserved a great deal of country charm. In the narrow main street of one, an old woman pushing an empty pram waved and flashed me a lovely smile, and in the course of the day perhaps a dozen drivers stopped to offer me lifts.

  From the crest of a hill in midafternoon I had my first view of the hazy city, with high hills to the east of it and, pale beyond, the islands of the Inland Sea. Cranes towered above the islands, and high over the cranes, at the edge of a wisp of cirrus cloud, a tiny rainbow hovered. I tramped down through the northeastern suburbs and was swiftly lost in a maze of streets and railway sidings, managing to take my bearings once or twice from the briefly glimpsed NHK radio tower. At last in the distance I saw the gleaming blue-and-white bullet train snaking slowly along its elevated track, and I knew I was approaching Hiroshima station and two packless, trampless days of ease.

  In the streets I met people who seemed eager to speak English to me. An old man sitting on a corner said "Hello." A vegetable seller in a straw hat said "How are you?" A young man in a sports shirt said "Where do you go?"

  "To find a ryokan."

  "I go play pinball."

  And an American with gray hair pointed at my pack and asked me what mountain I was planning to climb.

  "Can I help you? I know Hiroshima pretty well."

  "Perhaps you could recommend a ryokan."

  "A what?"

  "A ryokan. A Japanese-style inn."

  "Hell, no. I stay at real hotels."

  As I was crossing the last of the shunting yards on a long empty iron footbridge, four boys who had been throwing stones at the coal trucks threw them at the footbridge I was walking across instead. One of the stones ricocheted off a girder and caught my pack about six inches below the nape of my neck. I yelled at the boys and they scuttled away across the rubble and the rusted points of the railway track, and vanished behind a warehouse over which the sun was setting like a bloodied eye.

  8

  A Thousand Cranes, A Thousand Suns

  At the point where the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima there is a Peace Park, and in the Peace Park there is a museum. I visited the museum with no illusions that I would be able to write about what I saw and little real hope that I would comprehend it. The three hours that I spent there, forcing myself to look at every item, reading each caption in English and again in Japanese, brought me no closer to an understanding but they knocked a gaping hole in my spirit.

  It is not the vastness of the destruction that moves you so much as the relics of individual suffering. These speak with the most eloquence: a melted desktop Buddha, a burned watch, the scorched blazer of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, one of more than six thousand who had been led out to participate in an air-raid defense program and so were on the unprotected streets when the bomb fell. There are photographs of a little girl, her will snapped, refusing the cup of water that might have made her death easier; of a young soldier bleeding obscenely from the pores, who died two hours after his picture was taken; of keloid formation on the face and body of a teenage boy, bald as an egg; of a young housewife who had put on, in these last breathless days of the war, a bright cheerfully patterned summer kimono and the dye of the cloth had burned lines and squares into her back and arms and neck so that she looked, in her death agony, like a plaid doll.

  There is a display in which two or three department store mannequins have been dressed in rags and smeared with rubber latex to rep-resent the peeling off of their skin. They slouch through a yellow cardboard inferno, so gross, so like a comic strip that I could not bear to look at it. For the three hours I was in the museum my eyes kept drifting to the windows and, through them, into an impossibly remote world where fountains played in the sunlight of the park.

  I was staggered to see so many schoolchildren being shepherded round the exhibits by their teachers. They were very young and very quiet, shuffling along wide-eyed in their little yellow hats, some holding each other's hands, some pointing and asking their teachers questions that were answered in an almost inaudible drone. I did not see a single child smile, and the seriousness of their faces made them appear very much older and wiser than they were. Many stared as they passed me, and I could feel the bewilderment and tension in their little bodies. One boy turned round from an exhibit to find me standing close behind him and threw up an arm as though to protect his face from a slap. None of the children laughed at me or shouted greetings, but several whispered to each other, quietly and seriously, "Look, it's a foreigner. Look, it's a foreigner." Slowly I shuffled past the exhibits toward the exit with my sunglasses on my foreigner's face, breathing easier because I was almost out of the museum, and quite unprepared for what happened next.

  I was looking at one of the last displays—a shelf of melted rooftiles and bottles that had fused together in the twelve-thousand-degree heat of the bomb—a heat sufficient to melt human bones. I felt a nudge at my elbow and looked round to find a man in his early thirties—too young, I think, to have remembered much about the bombing—standing beside me wearing workman's clothes and smelling (or perhaps I imagined this) of sake.

  He said: "Your country did this."

  My eyes must have altered behind my sunglasses. I slid away from him and stopped in front of a large photograph of a junior high school girl with half her face missing. I felt the same nudge and now the man was grinning.

  "Do you like this picture?" he asked. "Do you find it interesting at all? Does it amuse you? Do you find it amusing?"

  And suddenly the part of the museum where we were standing was very still because, suddenly, it contained no other people, only a young man with a camera—a student, I think—who came up and slipped quietly between us and said to the workman: "Stop it, please. Please, stop it. Please, leave him alone. He's not an American. Please, stop it."

  But the workman would not be stopped now, and his voice had begun to rise.

  "He was rude to me," he said. "He turned his back when I spoke to him. He mustn't do that to me. I'm Japanese!"

  I drifted on toward the exit, past another group of staring children whose teachers had stopped answering their questions and were looking vacantly at the windows or at the walls. I could hear the workman and the student still arguing and I managed to pause at the souvenir stand long enough to buy some books I wanted—one that contained poems by survivors of the bombing, one with the photograph of the school-girl who had no face. When these were wrapped and paid for, I turned round to find the workman waiting for me in the doorway.

  At first I pretended I hadn't seen him and
tried to walk past him, through the pool of space that other visitors had left around him, out into the impossible world where the fountains played. But it was a narrow doorway, and as I stepped through it, he prodded me and I took a deep breath and swung round and looked him in the face.

  "I'm very sorry," he said.

  "It's all right," I said. "I'm sorry I was rude."

  "I'm sorry I was rude," he said.

  "No," I said, babbling like an idiot, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is the Peace Park."

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "No, I'm sorry too," I said.

  I left him in the doorway and went and sat on a bench with my books still wrapped in their paper bag and watched the autumn sun light the leaves of Hiroshima trees.

  It was from a cloudless sky like this that the bomb dropped—"bright-er," say the people who saw it, than a thousand suns." Later on, in the north and east of the city, the sky turned dark and a "black rain" fell. As painful as the deaths and the lingering disease was surely the bewilderment of the stunned survivors: no such suns, no such rain had ever before intruded into mankind's history.

  From my seat under the trees in the Peace Park I watched an old man sweep colored garbage into a heap that lie arranged very carefully beside one of the park's stone monuments. When I passed it on my way to the gate I saw that it was not a heap of garbage but thousands upon thousands of tiny folded paper cranes.

  There is a story told about a little girl who fell desperately ill some two or three months after the bombing. For a long time the exact nature of "A-bomb sickness" was only dimly understood, and treatment was haphazard and ineffectual. This fact, combined with the soaring black-market prices of foreign medicines in postwar Japan, condemned most of those who contracted radiation-induced diseases to an agonizing death. But the girl's mother was stubborn and resourceful and hung onto her wits far longer than most mothers would have. Patiently she persuaded her little daughter that if she could fold one thousand paper cranes and string them together like a rosary she would recover. Millions of these tiny cranes—the work of well-wishers and pilgrims—hang today in colored festoons from the stone monuments in the park, and it was these that the old man was arranging in heaps. The little girl began to make her cranes, but daily her fingers lost their strength, and eventually the sheer effort of folding them was a torture both to her and to her mother. Still her mother—by now, and of necessity, a believer in the myth she had concocted—stubbornly urged her daughter to fold another crane and then another, and painfully the little girl folded her cranes and one by one the number grew. She died after making nine hundred and sixty-four.