Hiroshima Maidens

by Rodney Barker

  There were complications and delays. At that time, U.S. Immigration laws made it difficult for a single Japanese woman to travel to the States. Consequently, there was almost a two-year wait before Hiroko was able to depart for America — on the pretext of visiting Norman Cousins.

  When the plane landed in New York, she walked down the ramp with the rest of the passengers, not quite sure where she was to meet Harry. As she entered the large terminal, there seemed to be people everywhere. Then she saw his familiar round face looking nervously out of the crowd. When he saw her he waved, strode forward, and when they were at arm’s length, after a moment of indecision, he extended his hand. Her heart went cold. Coming from a land where arranged marriages were a custom had made it somewhat easier to conceive of agreeing to marry a man with whom matters of a personal nature were left undiscussed; but just how little she knew about this man was suddenly, stunningly, evident when she saw that both his forearms were branded with black tattoos.

  There was no way she could have known. When he had visited her in the hospital he had worn long-sleeved shirts. Unable to conceal her chagrin, tears began to flow.

  “What happened?” he asked, confused, looking back and forth from her to the crowd as though he thought someone had struck her.

  “Your mother never said anything to you?” she managed to say, glancing fearfully at an ink-drawn heart with an arrow shot through it and the word LOVE scratched underneath.

  “About what?”

  She was too upset to answer. Only later, after they had walked together through the crowds to the baggage wheel and waited stiffly for her small suitcases to appear, after he had loaded them into the car trunk and they were driving away from the airport, was she able to explain. In Japan, only criminals and gangsters had tattoos.

  From there, things only got worse. After a quiet wedding ceremony at a Methodist church in Baltimore the newlyweds moved into a low-rent high-rise, and Harry went back to work driving a cab. With nothing to do and nobody to talk to, Hiroko found herself sitting around the apartment counting the hours until he got off work. Once, just to get out, she decided to walk to the post office and mail a letter; she forgot the way back, however, and no one could understand her when she asked directions. Her difficulty with the English language not only kept her home-bound after that, it was also a block in her relationship with her husband. The pidgin English that had been mutually intelligible in letters did not hold up well in everyday conversation. Harry spoke too fast and his sentences ran on, so that much of what he said sounded like gibberish to her. In order to communicate on the most basic level, they resorted to sitting down at the kitchen table and writing each other letters again, which they were able to translate with the help of an English-to-Japanese dictionary.

  But the most troublesome aspect of their difficulties was too delicate even to broach: To her dismay, her mother-in-law turned out to be a domineering, insensitive woman. At the wedding she paced around, wringing her hands and letting the guests know she neither approved nor comprehended her son’s actions in this matter. Afterward, she expected them to visit her every day, and if they did not she would call on the phone and ask what was wrong. When she was alone with Hiroko, her behavior ranged from chilly to nasty. It was almost second nature for a Japanese woman to tolerate all kinds of discomfort; and by custom she was wedded into her husband’s family, not just to the husband himself, so Hiroko did everything possible to be a good daughter-in-law. But she knew it was going to be an onerous task when she offered to do the woman’s alterations and mending and the next time they got together she was handed three suitcases full of clothes, containing not only her mother-in-law’s garments, but a collection she had taken up from her friends.

  The year was 1965, and the contrast to her experience in America in 1955 could not have been more dramatic. The land of paradise had become a world of pitfalls. Only now did she realize how sheltered they had been by the Quakers. In her mind she likened her first trip to living in a greenhouse that let only sunlight in; now all it did was rain.

  Weather permitting, she would take walks to a park two blocks away where she would sit on a bench and try to study her English lessons book. But she was unable to concentrate, and spent most-of her time making friends with the squirrels and worrying about what she should do next. It gave her a sick feeling to think she had given up her career and come all the way back to the States just to learn she should have been content where she was. Sometimes she scolded herself for trading a life as an active businesswoman for that of a bored housewife, and sometimes she felt sorry for herself; but whenever she let herself imagine how the newspapers would play up her return (she did not even have to close her eyes to see the headline: AMERICAN SAILOR JILTS HIROSHIMA MAIDEN), her eyes would open wide as though to dispel a nightmare, and she knew that whatever the sacrifice, running back home was not an alternative.

  It helped to have a husband who understood the pressures weighing on her, and considered it his duty to shoulder them where he could. By turns tough and tender, a man who could be outwardly coarse but who turned out to have a noble spirit, Harry never forgot what she had given up to be at his side. When he saw how unhappy she was, he changed his job so his hours were regular and he could be home more, and then he went out and found them a nicer apartment with air-conditioning.

  She could not have asked for more from him, and when she realized the rest was up to her, she decided it was time for her to go to work. One morning she sat down with the Yellow Pages and diligently telephoned every tailor in the Baltimore area, asking them, “Do you need a seamstress or fitter?” The question became so polished with repetition that by the end of the day she could ask it without the trace of an accent. All said no except one, who told her the owner was out and suggested she call back later. When she phoned that evening, a woman whose voice sounded more foreign than her own invited her to come in for an interview.

  She took along several dresses of her own design and making, and a picture of her Hiroshima shop; and she was hired by a jolly German lady whose employment policy favored immigrants like herself. Her pay was only a dollar an hour, however, so she continued to look for a better position, and when she heard about an opening in a French tailor shop she made a move. Six months was all she could take: the money was good, but the bosses could not get along, her co-workers were constantly arguing, and everyone thought she was dumb because she could not understand what all the yelling was about. Back she went to the German lady’s shop, but not for long. Feeling the frustration of a talented woman operating in an environment that did not use her full capacities, she would scan the Help Wanted ads in the daily newspaper, and one day she noticed that the Hecht Company, a nationwide department store chain, was looking for a qualified woman with management potential in the alteration department of Ladies Apparel. “I’m very experienced, and I promise my work will give satisfaction,” she told the interviewer. Apparently she was believed, for she got the job; within two years she was promoted to supervisor.

  Hiroko and Harry settled into the comfortable routines of a typical working-class couple. He worked the night shift, she held a day job, so they saw each other for breakfast and dinner, relaxed on the weekends, and saved for vacations. They had a pet myna bird named Norman and taught it to speak both Japanese and English. Although appearances suggested Hiroko’s adjustment to American life-styles had become complete, in fact she remained resolutely Japanese, returning regularly to visit her mother in Japan. Proudly she took along her husband, who basked in the attention traditionally accorded the master of a house. Surrounded by nieces and waited upon by his doting mother-in-law, he was in serious danger of becoming spoiled, and would talk as if he never wanted to return to the States.

  As a couple they were especially popular with the Japanese press, who found the built-in irony of their relationship a source of unending fascination and delighted in varying the marriage-made-in-Heaven theme with a love-born-by-the-A-bomb twist. But often the journalist
ic gush got things wrong and caused bad feelings. When a Japanese newspaper quoted Harry as saying his feelings for Hiroko were an effort to compensate for the crime of the atomic bomb, the letters she scribbled to friends denying those were his words were smudged from the tears that fell on the ink as she wrote.

  From time to time, people she worked with would comment that she seemed to be healing. It was not so, she knew; they were just getting used to her appearance. Even she had grown accustomed to her face; after all, it had been with her longer than not. Sometimes her disfigurement was so far from her mind that she would be standing in front of the mirror putting on make-up and suddenly be struck by the extent of the damage. But it was not in a self-pitying way, rather as if she had noticed something outside herself that was broken and it was a shame. When she thought about her scars it was usually because someone else reminded her. She noticed, for example, that when she first met people they had difficulty remembering her name or understanding what she said, and she had to repeat herself. The problem was not her English; it was just that they were looking, not listening. Sometimes people came right out and asked her what had happened, and usually she was comfortable telling them.

  Only once was the curiosity unacceptable. While waiting to meet a friend at the airport, she and Harry had gone into the cafeteria for a snack. As they approached the register, the cashier’s eyes widened when she saw Hiroko, and she ducked into the kitchen to tell the cooks and waitresses to come and look. Hiroko saw it all and, turning her back on the help gawking from the kitchen, she busied herself opening a bag of potato chips. When, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the cashier slowly approach her, watching and waiting for her to turn around, she decided to walk away. Halfway to the door, she realized the girl was following her out in hopes of a last look, and for the first time in her life she lost her temper over public reaction to her scars. Wheeling around, she said, “Do you want to see my face? Is that what you want?” The girl was too flustered to come up with anything better than a stammered, “What? No. I was, uh, looking for, uh, the clock.” Hiroko glared. “You work here and you don’t know where the clock is? You’re not looking for a clock. You came to see me. Well here I am. Why don’t you ask me what’s wrong with my face?” The girl began backing away, passing Harry, who was so dumbfounded he fled through the cafeteria doors. “Well, I’ll tell you anyway. It was ruined by the atomic bomb.” On the verge of tears, the girl said she did not understand, so Hiroko spelled it out for her: “A-T-O-M-I-C B-O-M-B.”

  It was an uncharacteristic outburst for this slim, small, normally reserved lady, but sometimes the rudeness of people made her so angry she forgot herself. She understood the interest in her life experiences and she was not unwilling to talk about them because she had always considered it her obligation to remind others of “the hell of that day.” And she was convinced that the power that had prevented the further use of atomic weapons came out of a knowledge of the immediate and continuing effects of the atomic bomb on the lives of the Hiroshima survivors. But there were times when she found herself wondering why she should continue to put up with insensitivity and distortions when the personal returns of sharing her past were so minimal and her own peace of mind so much more immediately relevant to her well-being, and she would say to herself, Let them learn the way I did.

  More than once she swore off the whole business of giving evidence in the case against nuclear war. But when the Baltimore Sun wanted to run her account of August 6, 1945, side by side with the recollections of a native Baltimorean who had been the radar officer on the Enola Gay, she agreed to do so because it had always bothered her that in the American version the bomb was dropped, the war was over, and that was it, while for her and so many others that was just the beginning. And when an independent film company sought her cooperation in the making of a documentary about how a typical American family faced the nuclear war issue, she had dinner with the family and answered their questions on camera because it seemed to simulate in many ways her first experience in America. When she was asked to testify at Congressional hearings held by Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark Hatfield prior to their “nuclear freeze” resolution, out of respect for their goals she told them what she had seen and experienced thirty-seven years before when she was a thirteen-year-old junior high school student.

  Although America was no longer a foreign setting for Hiroko, her family was still in Japan and she had it in her mind that when Harry, who was ten years her senior, turned sixty and retired, they would move back. She thought of it as his turn to cross the ocean and bridge a culture for her, which suited him fine. What more could an old sailor ask for than to live out his retirement years on an island, tending orange groves and tutoring his nieces? And so it came about that in 1983, eighteen years after she had returned to America to become a bride, Hiroko went home again.

  With her free time she thought she might write a memoir telling her story in her own words, for looking back she saw that an odyssey that had begun in personal devastation appeared to be drawing to a deeply satisfying conclusion. Most of the so-called A-bomb literature consisted of depressing accounts of survivors who had been unable to live naturally; there were few reports of people who had endured hard times but recovered their health and now lived like everyone else. Hers would be an account in which the positive aspects of her life would predominate, however, for life in many ways had made up to her. She had done everything she wanted to do, and along the way had accumulated experiences and friendships that had allowed her to develop an affirmative attitude toward her circumstances. While stopping far short of appreciation, she nevertheless realized that if it were not for the bomb, much that was memorable in her life would have been otherwise, and who was to say her whether life would have been better, or worse. At the very least she felt she had a strength and resilience, a sense of integrity and of her own worth now that would enable her to handle any adversity that came her way.

  But most of all, she prized what she had learned about the healing possibilities of the human heart: One day before they left for Japan, Harry, with no warning, checked into a hospital to have his tattoos surgically removed.

  Afterword

  In the spring of 1984, I returned to Hiroshima. As this book had been five years in the writing, the purpose of my trip was to update my information; but by then I felt less like a journalist making sure his facts were current than like the keeper of the archives. Since my previous visit, no fewer than a dozen people on both sides of the Pacific had died, and age was eroding the memories of the surviving principals. More and more, I found I had to set the stage and supply the names before a scene could be recalled with relative clarity. Even then, the passage of time seemed to throw a halo around the Hiroshima Maidens Project so events were remembered in the soft focus of the heart rather than the sharp relief of the mind.

  The first time we met, I’d found the Maidens almost blithe in their willingness to assume a cooperative role in this undertaking. Of course, it was easier for them to say yes as part of a group than to reveal themselves individually to an interpreter, tape recorder, and a smiling gaijin. While my personal connection to the project may have been a ticket in the door, it certainly was not a pass to automatic trust. As I came to learn, on several occasions in the past one of the girls had been disappointed to find their confidence abused by publication. A girl who had poured out her heart in letters to a hostess after her return felt utterly betrayed when the letters turned up in an anthology of essays about and correspondences from the hibakusha of Hiroshima.

  It took time and repeated visits to establish the kind of rapport that allowed me to address in detail a past that had been shattered by a disaster so dreadful others have found it “unthinkable.” Sometimes I felt like a provocateur of pain, for the Maidens did not simply recite their A-bomb story for me, they relived August 6, 1945, and went through ten long years of struggle and sacrifice again. I was told that most survivors of Hiroshima deliver their testimony in this manne
r because the atomic bomb remains a terrible mysterious dynamic in their lives, and because they know no better way to let others know just how awful it was than to take them through it step by step. Make of it what you will, it was apparent that an account of an atomic attack is transmitted on a far more complex frequency than a conventional war story.

  If the atomic bomb was evil in remembrance, their American experience took on aspects of a hiatus in heaven. The pictures in their scrapbooks, the messages and signatures in the autograph books, were dream artefacts that seemed to possess a magical ability to transport them back to another land in an earlier time. Those memories are still dear to them, and they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to reminisce.

  Although they initially agreed to be interviewed out of a lingering debt to American friends, a few resisted when it became apparent that my desire was to understand all the forces that had shaped them up to this point. For some of the Maidens, an in-depth discussion meant probing areas they would not discuss even with someone they knew well. Others had closed the book on certain chapters of their lives for good; and there were those who saw themselves as ordinary women leading ordinary lives, who genuinely did not believe that anything they had done merited examination or documentation, and who preferred to keep it that way.

  But to an extent that sometimes surprised me, the overwhelming majority rose to the occasion in a spirit of participation. And to my gratification, many of those who took time out to think about their lives, and made an effort to muse over the meanings of their experiences, found themselves rewarded with insights and resolutions in the end. That, at least, is what certain Maidens told me before my first visit to Hiroshima came to a close.