Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  In Hiroshima, official concern was mounting because there were numerous military installations and strategic industries within the city limits, because some 50,000 servicemen had swelled the local population to over 400,000, and because a high percentage of the houses that sprawled eave-to-eave across the delta were made of wood. Anticipating an eventual incendiary attack, civil defense planners began the evacuation of schoolchildren in the grammar grades, and decided to crisscross the city with firebreaks that would allow them to contain a conflagration. Making use of the six tributaries of the River Ota that divided the city from north to south, they planned to raze houses and widen streets into fire lanes that would bisect the city from east to west. As everyone was called upon to do his and her part, all junior and senior high school students were required to alternate their educational activities with national service; which in the summer of 1945 consisted primarily of assisting demolition crews on the house-clearing program.

  Although there was a sense of foreboding in the air, domestic news broadcasts never once reported a defeat or retreat, and most Japanese people were steadfast in their belief that continued efforts and sacrifices would lead ultimately to victory. When American planes dropped leaflets urging them to give up the fight, the warnings were dismissed as agitprop by the enemy. Even when it appeared that American forces would soon invade the islands of Japan proper, civilians, responding to the exhortation that this was an all-out war of survival involving the life of the nation, allowed themselves to be mobilized into a home guard that was armed with bamboo spears because there were not enough guns to go around.

  It is true that such against-all-odds patriotism drew heavily on a history of loyalty to one’s lord and country that dated back centuries, but there were circumstances peculiar to Hiroshima which made the acceptance of seemingly hopeless conditions almost second nature. Some three hundred years earlier a shrewd feudal ruler had encouraged the expansion of a conservative Buddhist sect whose doctrine held that one’s fate was entirely bound by karma and that security in this life and salvation in the next were attainable only by frequent and repeated prayer. To peasants who had little time or energy to practice an exacting and complicated religion, this quick and simple solution to life’s problems had a tremendous appeal. Likewise, it was useful to a feudal lord concerned with keeping his vassals content with their miserable lot in life; they would tolerate hardships, accept bad rulers, and endure calamities with a bow and a smile.

  Hiroshima kept its affiliation with this Buddhist sect, and in due course the creed that one should leave everything to Buddha and never force things because mortals did not have the power to change or arrange fate to suit their desires found its epitome in that community. Eventually a local religious order evolved whose influence was so pervasive it created a regional temperament. The people of Hiroshima tended to be provincial, docile, and mystically fatalistic.

  The introduction of this philosophy to Hiroshima was one of those historical machinations that shape the development of a whole population. And, during the late stages of the war, the kind of brave front expected by the military authorities (referred to officially as Supreme Understanding) was, in many ways, just a euphemism for an attitude that had been handed down from Hiroshima’s past. No one actually believed B-29s could be stopped with bamboo spears. But with spears raised in battle readiness, the people of Hiroshima were willing to stand up to the enemy. It was with resignation rather than a fighting spirit that they assumed their positions, however; for in the belief that everything that happens is directed from the outside, they were putting themselves in the hands of a higher power. They were waiting for something beyond their personal comprehension to happen when, in the first light of August 6, 1945, it did.

  *

  The sky was blue that Monday morning, but as Hiroko Tasaka dashed out the door of her grandparents’ home in the suburban outskirts of Hiroshima, she could feel the humidity like a fever. She rode the streetcar partway into the city, getting off where the line continued into the commercial center and walking along a river road toward the bay. It was early, but already the streets were teeming with soldiers, laborers, students. Although the rainy season was over, the umbrellas which sprouted with the daily downpours were still in bloom as women took shelter from the summer heat by carrying the shade over their shoulders.

  This was the first day the students from the all-girls Hiroshima Commercial High School had been summoned to assist demolition crews with the house-clearing program. Until this time their national service activities had consisted of helping farmers harvest rice and packing cigarettes into cartons, but today they were to clear the debris of dismantled houses, moving stones to one spot along the street, boards to another, where they would be picked up later and carted to a dump site somewhere outside the city. Donning a white hiking cap to shade her face and white gloves to protect her hands, Hiroko began the day’s work.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes passed and she was struggling with a rock from the house foundation when a classmate beside her called out, “Hiroko, look. B-chan.” In those days that was how they referred to B-29s, as though they were little pets.

  Hiroko stopped working and looked up. She thought it made a lovely sight, gleaming in the sunlight and chalking a white contrail across the blue sky. Just thirteen, she was too young to imagine a bomb bay opening or realize that tragedy could seek her out.

  “Where?” another girl asked. “I can’t see it.”

  Hiroko raised her arm and pointed, and at that very instant the air seemed to catch fire. There was a searing white dazzle that pricked hotly and she had time only to think she had been shot before she blacked out.

  When her senses returned, she was lying on her back in the middle of an unfamiliar darkness. Not a single star shone and no light could be seen. She rose shakily to her feet. Nothing she could remember explained where she was, and it was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction, but she sensed some danger threatened her there and with one hand held out in front, she groped forward through the nocturnal haze. A gust of smoke stung her eyes and she spun around. When she started to walk again she was unable to tell if she was heading left, right, or in a circle, and she was close to panic when the strangest thing happened. There was a sudden change of wind and before her eyes the swirling vapors spiraled into a human shape. Like the dancing devil of a sandstorm, a saintly old man appeared, his long beard and loose robes flowing, and his crooked finger urgently pointed the direction she should go. In a moment of fear her mind pressed the vision aside as a trick her eyes were playing on her, and before she knew it the figure vanished, dissolved, became the smoke itself. But alone again and absolutely lost, she had no idea which way to go so she started to run the way she had been shown. In just a few steps she thought she could see more clearly, and a short distance further she broke out into the daylight. In front of her the Kyobashi River shimmered, and without hesitating she slid down the embankment and plunged into the cool current.

  It was ebb tide, so the water in the channel was low and flowing swiftly toward the sea. Keeping to the shallow parts, Hiroko looked around and saw that scores of other people had sought shelter in the river. The tattered remains of their uniforms identified practically all of them as schoolmates, but it was impossible to distinguish individuals because every face was swollen to a piteous likeness. That led her to examine herself and she was startled to discover that her half-sleeved blouse was scorched and, even though she felt no pain, the skin on her bare arms had split open, exposing the pink tissue underneath.

  No one knew what had happened. After an excited exchange, however, it was decided a bomb must have exploded directly on the work site. Just then a woman whose hair was singed, wearing rags that smoked as if they were about to burst into flames, rushed up to the riverbank crying, ‘The city is no longer safe. We must try to get back to school.’ With a choking sensation, Hiroko realized the command came from the teacher who had taken the morning roll call.

>   As a group they scrambled out of the water, trotted across Hijiyama Bridge, and proceeded down the road that wound around the base of Hijiyama, the only rising land formation to break Hiroshima’s uniformly flat terrain. On both sides the houses that were not ablaze were leaning at an angle away from the city center, making it difficult to believe only one bomb could have caused so much damage and causing her to wonder how many had been dropped. When the path ahead was obstructed by flames and further progress was impossible, the group abandoned the pavement and charged the slopes of Hijiyama that rose into a low cloud of ash like an island surrounded by fog. There was no path to follow and the scrub oak bushes dotting the hillside were igniting with a whoosh, so everyone went in different directions. In her quest for the safety of higher ground, Hiroko took a route that went straight up, though more than once the loose rock underfoot gave way, carrying her backward on a clattering landslide.

  It took her almost an hour before she reached a clearing near the summit where she paused to catch her breath and look back. Though the view was obscured by dense clouds of smoke, she was able to make out a few scattered concrete buildings standing like tombstones in a vast fireswept cemetery. It was an appalling sight, but she was too weak to feel anything but her own exhaustion. In a daze she sat down on a rock and watched others come up from below. As she saw that every single face was puffy and blood-smeared, her hand went automatically to her own face and she wondered if hers might be the same. It was getting hard for her to keep her eyes open. In front of her a woman was working her way up an outcropping, and when she made it over the top Hiroko called to her, “Excuse me, but would you tell me what my face looks like?”

  With hardly a glance the woman responded, “We all look the same,” and passed on.

  As she picked her way carefully down the far side, tears streamed down Hiroko’s fattening cheeks. Until now she had thought everyone was more badly hurt than she.

  A military medic was daubing oil on wounded civilians in a first-aid tent at the corner of her schoolgrounds, so she took her place in line; but before she could be treated the roar of enemy aircraft overhead sent everyone rushing frantically for the nearest air-raid shelter. Limping on blistered bare feet, Hiroko was unable to keep up and chose to take her chances under a small umbrella-shaped tree where she hoped she would not be seen. Apparently it was a reconnaissance and not a bombing mission because, after making several passes, the planes flew off; but it was some minutes before people ventured tentatively back onto the street.

  Hiroko would have been content to stay where she was in the shade if she had not heard an authoritative voice call all who could still walk to proceed to the station where a rescue train was due. She was rapidly losing her vision and knew soon she would be blinded by the swelling. As it was, she found the depot by clutching the clothes of those walking in front of her.

  As the hours passed, direct exposure to the sun turned up the heat of her burns, and just when Hiroko was beginning to give up hope that the trains were still running, someone shouted, “Here it comes.” As no one wanted to be left behind, people swarmed over the engine and climbed through the windows before the wheels rolled to a stop. Hiroko tried to stand up, but to her mortification her legs gave out each time and she was unable to crawl the last part of the way across the platform before the train pulled slowly away.

  Through swollen slits she watched the afternoon sun sink into a plume of purple smoke rising over Hiroshima, passing through the different discolorations of a deep bruise. As the darkness fell over her, she resigned herself to the fact that her fate was out of her hands; she had done everything she could to stay alive.

  How long she lay like that she does not remember. Twice she was moved. Once she felt herself swooped up off the platform and carried to another place. Later a soldier picked her up, walked with her in his arms, and delivered her to an elementary school that was being used as an emergency medical center. For the next three days she lay on a thin straw mat on the floor of a classroom in limbo between life and death. Mercifully, she was conscious only at intervals, and delirious much of the rest of the time. All around her the badly wounded moaned and ranted for water, water, water, and even though she tried to stay calm and bear her pain in stoic silence, soon her own thirst became unbearable and she joined the anthem of agony. The only relief came from the orderlies who made the rounds with a dipper of cool water, but because it was widely believed that fluids were dangerous to burn patients, they were sparing in their servings. Hiroko, in fact, drank even less because she was unable to part her lips, and most of the water ladled out dribbled over her chin. Evidently one of the water bearers felt a particular sympathy for her because he returned later with a steamed rice ball and stayed to wave the flies away while she ate. She thought maybe he had a daughter her age because the next time he came he sang to her the way her father used to when he wanted to raise her spirits.

  Late on the afternoon of the third day she dreamed she heard a voice call her name. It was so distinct it woke her up, but when she listened for it again all she heard was the relentless moaning. Over the previous days many people had come to the classroom and called out the names of the people they were looking for, so on the chance she had not been dreaming she uttered a feeble, “Yes.”

  Footsteps came from the other side of the room, stopping beside her. “Hiroko?” a young man’s voice said.

  Her lids fluttered but would not open. With great effort she pried them apart with her fingers and peered up into the boyish face of her cousin, a sailor home on leave from the navy. While, under the circumstances, her reaction might have been much different, at that moment she had only one thought: She craved a taste of fruit and the first words to leave her mouth were a request for a tin of mandarin oranges. She asked so casually, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about her circumstances, that her cousin laughed out loud. For a brief moment the moaning stopped. When it resumed, he lowered his voice and told her to hold on, he would be back soon with help.

  *

  Shigeko Niimoto was bent over trying to untie the air-raid hood she had left on after an earlier alarm when she heard her Middle School classmate say, “Look, Niimoto-san. Something’s dropped from that plane.” She stopped what she was doing and tilted her head back. Using her hands as a visor to shade the sun, she looked up just in time to witness an explosion of light, white and blinding. Screaming, she covered her face with both hands and dropped to her knees. The last thing she remembered was a violent blast of wind slamming her sideways.

  She returned to this world slowly. Her mind was fuzzy and everything around her blurred. As she got to her feet she peered into a thick, shifting mist through which she saw flickering fires and forms beginning to detach themselves. She was unable to make out anything distinctly until the floating mists parted to reveal a frightening procession of figures that looked to her like cadavers making an exodus from their graves. They moved slowly, almost dreamily, without making a sound. They held their hands out in front of their chests like sleepwalkers. At first she thought they were wrapped in wisps of smoke, but as her vision increased she saw it was their skin peeling from their bodies. She drew a deep breath, holding it in. Something terrible had gone wrong and she wanted no part of it.

  “Niimoto-san. Niimoto-san.”

  At the sound of her name being called, she turned. One of the nightmarish figures was moving toward her. Instinctively she recoiled. “Who are you?”

  “Araki. Sachiko Araki.”

  To Shigeko’s astonishment, it was her best friend. “Oh, Sachiko, what happened?”

  Having seen the way she was looked at, her friend asked, “Do I look that bad?”

  “No,” Shigeko lied, “it’s just slight.” Then, noticing how Araki-san’s eyes were fixed on her, she asked, “How about me?”

  “Just slight too.”

  Without any discussion of what might have happened, Shigeko found herself pulled by the arm to a street not far away where her friend
’s mother was trapped under the wreckage of their completely collapsed home. The roof had come down on top of the woman and only her head stuck out. Shigeko stood dumbfounded for a moment, wondering what she was supposed to do, before joining Araki-san, who was frantically pushing splintered timbers and shattered tiles aside.

  But there was a mound of debris to move and not much time. The house next door had erupted in fire and the heat grew more intense by the minute. Araki-san’s mother was the first to admit it was useless. “There’s nothing that can be done for mother, dear,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice. “Go and find father.”

  When Araki-san sobbed she could not bear to desert her mother, they would die together, she was ordered away. “Do as I say. Hurry. Right now.”

  As they backed away the house became a raging funeral pyre. “Good-bye,” her friend cried. “Good-bye, mother.” The last they saw of Araki-san’s mother her face floated in flames but she was still smiling.

  Shigeko wanted only to find her way home, but huge billows of smoke were rising in that direction so she ran after the eerily silent procession that streamed the other way. She was no longer afraid of them or concerned about where they were going now that she knew what they were escaping from; all she could think of was following the person walking in front of her. As for the people rolling on the roadside and voices calling for help from under crushed buildings, it wrenched her heart to pass by without offering any assistance, and when a woman ahead of her stumbled and fell she automatically stopped to help her up. From behind someone bumped into her, knocking her to the ground also, and to the great surge of people who kept coming she shouted, “Wait. Please wait,” as she realized they were both in danger of being trampled. It was all she could manage to get back on her feet, and as she plodded onward she resolved that from then on she would think only of her own safety.