Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  Not a flicker of emotion disturbed Toyoko’s face as she folded the letter back into the envelope. The authority of the command was diminished by the seven thousand miles that lay between them; for years she had been doing her best to forge a new life for herself, and she refused to turn back now.

  *

  No national polls were taken, so it would be next to impossible to say precisely how the Hiroshima Maidens Project affected American attitudes of the day — but for Norman Cousins it had been a far-reaching force for good. He thought it had demonstrated dramatically that it was not always war with its urgent necessities that could pull people together and turn a vision into a practical project. At a time when there were conflicting claims about the nature of atomic age warfare, he felt that the realization that it had taken a year and a half of painstaking, expensive operations just to effect an improvement, not a restoration, on twenty-five individuals gave people a more realistic sense of what to expect in the event of a nuclear attack on an American city. And an anonymous letter with an accompanying donation to the project let him know it had provided an outlet for other Americans who were looking for a way to do something concrete and symbolic for “peace.” It read:

  Ordinarily, a request for contributions to another worthy cause would bounce off my charity-hardened conscience — the contribution might be forthcoming, but without a deep feeling of concern for the implications of my act. In this case it is different. This program seems to be a fine example of what Americans as individuals rather than as faceless citizens of a powerful nation, can and should do to further the cause of world peace and international understanding. With the Russian satellites in the sky, with America’s deep anxiety about her position in the world, with citizens like myself wondering what we or anyone can do to prevent a catastrophic war and feeling helplessly at the mercy of the governing Powers That Be in the United States and Russia, a program such as that undertaken by the Hiroshima Peace Center Associates provides at least a glimmer of hope that man can, if he will try, heal himself rather than destroy himself.

  If the implications of the project were one kind of success story, the transformation of the Hiroshima Maidens was something close to a Cinderella tale. In many ways, Cousins felt they were no longer the same women who had left Hiroshima. Underscoring the improvement in their facial appearances and the full use of their arms and hands, a life had come back to their eyes. “When you looked at them they no longer seemed to blink back from a half-lit world,” Cousins wrote in one of his final reports.

  To his way of thinking, personal resurrections had taken place and the Maidens were evidence of the power of life over the power of destruction. Their outlooks had been profoundly enlarged now that they knew they belonged to a wider world. He knew that they would be forced to confront the occasional defeat and constant challenge of unpredictable human response, but he was confident in the belief that they were prepared for the drama of life that awaited them. Indeed, he felt their experiences had given them an increased awareness of their capacity to conquer great difficulties.

  Of course, no one knew for sure if the Maidens would be able to sustain their courage among old surroundings and situations, and as optimistic as he was, Norman Cousins attached considerable importance to the maintenance of a working relationship with the girls for a year or two after their return. He thought some form of job placement service could be set up for those qualified to embark on careers, or in the case of girls needing additional study, that some arrangement should be made to pay for the required tuition. His concern about a follow-through accounted, in part, for the very special offer he had extended personally to Shigeko Niimoto.

  For most of those who met her, Shigeko was a delight. Her affectionate nature enabled her to make links on personal, even intimate levels. She was always forthcoming with an honest and heartfelt response, and quite capable of flashing out a startlingly intuitive truth. Norman Cousins found the simplicity of her outlook so charming, her pluckiness so endearing, that he singled her out in one of his articles: “If this group had an official cheerleader, [Shigeko] would be instantly elected to the job. She has the bounce and joyous alertness of a character out of Dickens.” Her lack of inhibitions and desire to please explain how, in articles about the Maidens, Shigeko’s melted doll’s face came to stare from the pages of the Saturday Review, and a profile of her showed up in Time magazine.

  But for the project supervisors, Shigeko was a problem. Though she seemed to make friends easily, there was another side to her high-spiritedness. She craved to be the center of attention, and she tended to be uncooperative and lagged behind in any group activity unless there was an observing outsider. Westerners found her cute when she sidled up to them or showed off, but by Japanese standards her behavior was frivolous and obnoxious, and among the girls she earned a reputation as childish and immature.

  Shigeko was oblivious to the tensions she created. As a person who took things as they came and reacted instantly on her feelings, she was unmindful of the impression she made or effect she had on people around her. When her assigned roommate no longer wanted to live with her, she was not inclined to analyze the reasons for their incompatibility; it meant she would have the next home to herself.

  Because of her affinity with young people, she was placed in families with children; and even though they were often much younger than she, there was genuine interest and affection expressed between them. Her visits averaged three to four weeks, which did not allow enough time to become deeply attached, but she kept a book with everyone’s names, addresses, and telephone numbers, their birthdays, and a snapshot of each.

  Shigeko was one of the most stubborn surgical cases. Six months into the project a communication from Norman Cousins reporting on the progress of the surgery expressed concern about her. “So far, only one operation out of almost fifty has not been successful: little Shigeko Niimoto, to my mind the sweetest girl of the group. Apparently all of the prime donor area has been used up in previous operations, and the doctors had to do the best they could with less adaptable skin. The result was that while the general configuration of the lower part of her face has been improved, the color and consistency of the skin tissue are poor.”

  Shigeko could tell that the American doctors were making little headway in her case. Nothing was said, but she could see for herself the improvements in others, while her own gain was minimal. She was not disappointed, however. Just as she did not resent the Japanese doctors who had been unsuccessful because their failures had created the opportunity for her to come to the United States, she did not resent the American doctors because the whole American experience had been good medicine for her. She was accumulating a greater knowledge about the world she lived in, and she loved the sensation of feeling united with many different people.

  Nevertheless, if further surgery was not going to make a dramatic difference, then she did not see the point in continuing. One afternoon she went to Norman Cousins’s office and made her feelings on the matter known. First, she expressed her gratitude for all he and the doctors had done, and then she implored him to let her forego any additional surgery. She said she felt her time in America could be better spent preparing for a career when she returned to Japan. Ever since she had seen what had happened when there was a shortage of qualified medical personnel she had wanted to become a nurse, she explained, and her experience in an American hospital had reaffirmed that desire. Was there any way, she asked, that she could be enrolled in nursing school for the duration of her stay?

  That afternoon Cousins assured Shigeko that he would look into her request, and at the next steering committee meeting he raised it for discussion. Surgery would continue, about that there was no doubt. Even though her face could no longer be helped, there were still improvements to be made that would give her back the use of her hands. But in regard to her desire to study nursing in America, there were reasons for caution. The English language was well beyond her command and she lacked the necessary high sc
hool education to qualify for a nursing program. Moreover, there was a question about how well she understood her own limitations. As one of her hostesses who was consulted testified, “Shigeko has a shrewd native intelligence, but not much intellectual interest. She may not be up to advanced study.”

  The point for Cousins was that Shigeko wanted to better herself and he believed she should have an opportunity to learn for herself what her limitations were. It was his opinion that she should be enrolled in public school as a special student to indicate to her some of the long-term problems involved in her wish, neither crushing her hopes nor giving them unqualified endorsement. And to give her the best possible chance of succeeding, he offered to take her into his own home, and to speak personally with the Superintendent of Schools in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he lived.

  She was given the Cousinses’ guest room, a spacious, upstairs chamber with flowered wallpaper, dormer windows, and a separate bath. With the help of a local high school principal and a teacher who had lived in Japan and understood the language, a program was mapped out that was flexible enough to be fitted into intervals between operations, visits to the clinic, and a weekly Red Cross class she was also attending. As it happened, going back to school was not as easy as Shigeko thought it would be. She found she had trouble focusing her mind on any one subject long enough to understand and remember without other thoughts entering her head. When she tried to talk to Norman Cousins about it, he suggested she had just been away from school too long and gotten out of the habit of studying. But she thought it more likely it was a peculiarity of her brain; she always got more from listening than reading.

  And, too, the domestic life at the Cousinses’ proved diverting. His four daughters took to Shigeko, and she to them, like sisters. On a given evening they would put on a fast record and give her a Charleston lesson, and in return she would form them in a line and lead them through a Japanese folk dance about coal miners. It seemed there was always something more interesting or fun to do than study.

  Shigeko spent a cozy winter in New Canaan, and unabashedly fixed on Norman Cousins the way orphans attach themselves to people who give them special attention. She felt that he was able to see inside her and appreciate her inner worth, and there were moments of epiphany between them when she experienced something like absolute understanding. When he came home from the office she would greet him with a long, warm hug in the American way of greeting. A petite girl, not five feet tall, she would press her ear to his chest until she could hear his heartbeat. If she had had recent surgery or been to the clinic to have a dressing removed, he would check the progress under the light of a living room lamp. There was no reticence on her part, no self-consciousness when he examined her puffy misshapen hands, only an eagerness to please. Sometimes, after he had been away for several days on a trip, when he came home he would stay up late playing the piano. She liked to sit quietly on the stool beside him, watching his hands and listening to the music. The first thing she did when she was able to move her fingers again was figure out a little tune on the piano to surprise him.

  The day that Tomoko Nakabayashi died, Shigeko was in the hospital recovering from an operation of her own. The following afternoon Norman Cousins came to take her home and she noticed the tenseness about his face, as if he were fighting against extreme pain. As they were driving through Central Park she guessed (correctly) that he had been up all night and had not been able to eat anything since the tragedy of Tomoko’s passing. To get him to stop she told him she was hungry, so he pulled up in front of a cafeteria and they went inside. But he refused to take a tray for himself and, after they had taken a seat at a table, he turned down her offer to share a sandwich, with a sorrowful smile and shake of his head.

  Feeling she had to say something, she reminded him, “After winter comes spring. Flowers will bloom in time.”

  Cousins remained silent, looking steadily at her. Then he stood up and left the table. Shigeko gazed sadly at his retreating figure. He was gone a long time and when he returned his eyes were red as if he had been crying; but apparently it had done him good because he seemed more relaxed, and when she ordered him a bowl of soup he took his first meal in thirty-six hours.

  In the time she had lived as a full-fledged member of the Cousins family, Shigeko had become a precious part of Norman Cousins’s world. He felt that in some innocently instinctive way she put him in touch with the feelings that provoked his deepest responses. When he looked at her now, he was oblivious to her scars, and it was not because of the surgery, which had been of little help, but due to a suffusion of character and appearance that somehow made the scars invisible once the spirit was known. Sometimes when he came across a picture of Shigeko, he was actually startled by her disfigurement and did not recognize her at first. As he tried to explain it, “Shigeko doesn’t feel she is disfigured. If she did, you would see it. The fact that she doesn’t think of herself in these terms gets inside you and dominates your own attitude.” He thought she gave new meaning to the old saying that a person is responsible for his or her face.

  Naturally, as the project drew to a close, he took a personal interest in her plans for the future. One evening he sat her down and asked her what she thought she was going to do when she got home.

  Shigeko grew quiet. Even though she knew the dream she had been living would someday come to an end, she could think of no reasons for returning to Japan. She was flourishing here. The openness of American society set her free to be her natural self. Most of all, she was happy living under the Cousinses’ roof and had grown accustomed to thinking of herself as a daughter in his family. Even her own mother in Hiroshima had written her letters urging her to try to remain in America. She did not want to go back, there was nothing to go back to. And that was what she told him.

  Norman Cousins was smiling. He did not bother to explain the circumstances that made it necessary for her to return with the other girls first; that it was a delicate situation and he did not want it to appear that he was playing favorites; that it was known by some Japanese people that her operations had been the least successful, and if she remained it might set off a rumor that the Americans were hiding their failures. He said there would be many details to be worked out and they would take time. In the meantime, he said, when she got home she should talk it over with her parents to be sure it was agreeable to all concerned parties; and if it was, he too would like for her to come back to America and live as his daughter.

  Shigeko felt a quick bound of excitement. Along with her natural father and the Reverend Tanimoto, whom she considered her spiritual father, she had come to think of Norman Cousins as the third father in her life, and it was reassuring to hear his thoughts were the same. But what she ultimately derived from the invitation to come back was something much deeper, as from a faith. She had a renewed sense of her life as being determined by outside influences: One waited and watched for events and people to come along, and when they did, one rose to embrace them. She had no notion of where her personal destiny was heading, but now in one of her self-dramatizing moments she saw herself as the cinder-faced daughter on whose foot the glass slipper had fit.

  Chapter Seven

  When the day came in late October for the remaining Hiroshima Maidens to say farewell, the airport scene was very different from the way it had been that chilly day in May a year and a half earlier. They had been a sorry sight descending the ramp of the Air Force plane at Mitchell Field, some with faces bandaged to hide unsightly scars, looking as bewildered and frightened as refugees. This time they radiated well-being and a sense of inner ease; they were neatly and attractively dressed; in fact, they looked like a group of women who had just graduated from a finishing school.

  On hand to send them off were their Quaker “parents,” and there was much hugging and kissing and weeping, generally considered deplorable behavior for Japanese people. The newspaper journalists captioned a photograph of the scene, “Hiroshima Maidens in Tearful Farewell to ‘Americ
an Mommies.’” As well, there were private moments of silent exchange. On her host’s birthday, Michiko Sako had wanted to get him a present but since she had lost her father early in life she did not know what a man would like. Finally, she settled on a necktie because she had noticed he had a rack of them in his closet, and it pleased her no end to see that he was wearing the one she gave him.

  The plane bearing the Hiroshima Maidens away rose skyward, as though swept into the air by the profusion of waving hands and blown kisses. They were headed home, but they were taking the scenic route. Several weeks earlier, when their forthcoming return was on everyone’s mind, Helen Yokoyama had asked if rather than flying directly to the West Coast and then on to Japan, they might arrange a sightseeing tour across a portion of the American countryside. She did not want them to go home thinking of America as just the East Coast, but wanted to add to their collective impression scenes of the West, and the faces of the people who lived there. There was not time to go cross-country by bus, but the committee had agreed to fly them to Los Angeles via Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  After two days in New Mexico, two days in Los Angeles, and a week in San Francisco, where they were warmly received by the Japanese-American community, it was time to go home. On November 4, 1956, the Hiroshima Maidens and an entourage that included Norman Cousins, Drs. Barsky, Simon, and Hitzig, and Ida Day, began the last lap of their trip. Because free air passage for this escort committee had not been part of the original agreement with the Air Force, and officials had refused to authorize any additional passengers, Cousins had worked out a deal with Pan American World Airways. In exchange for promotional considerations (he agreed to mention their name and the fact that this was a “courtesy flight” in all his written accounts of the trip), they had provided one of their Clippers to fly the Maidens and their retinue to Tokyo.