by Anna Sherman
Mother Burning
Kitasuna: The Firebombs of 1945
When I slid the paper-and-wood door open, the toilet seat levitated slowly upward.
The bathroom itself was as austere and pristine as a temple. Cypress wood covered its walls and ceiling; smoked bamboo concealed its panel joins. An antique woven basket hung from the wall; it held a single lily.
The polished concrete sink ran off a sensor, so – except for the door – it was possible to enter and leave the room without touching anything.
Back in the restaurant, I stepped onto a raised platform covered with straw tatami matting, and waited, kneeling, by my table. It had been carved from elm, and it looked as though it too belonged in a temple, rather than in a restaurant devoted to soba.
A waitress appeared. I asked for green tea.
‘There’s none!’
‘Barley tea, then?’
‘We have water,’ she said, so I asked for that, and then sipped it, thinking. After lunch I would find the Centre for Tokyo Raids and War Damage, a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of the Tokyo air raids at the end of the Pacific War. When the right-wing Tokyo Authority cancelled plans for the city’s Peace Museum, private citizens set up their own space, on privately donated land.
On the night of 9–10 March 1945 alone, a squadron of B-29s dropped more than 700,000 bombs over Tokyo. Between midnight and morning, more people died than in either Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The true number will never be known, but estimates stand between 80,000 and more than 100,000.
The Centre was in Kitasuna, ‘North Sand’, a residential district on the eastern side of the Sumida River. I wanted to eat before I went, so I stopped for soba in Asakusa. I would not be hungry, I thought, after the visit. I was afraid of what I might learn in Kitasuna. I was afraid of what I would see.
I knew many people who talked about visiting Nagasaki and Hiroshima the way they talked about visiting Mount Fuji, or eating raw fish in Tsukiji Market. They visited the atomic museums because those things exist only in Japan, although some went to the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, or the remaining wall of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral, as if they were on pilgrimages: to look at something unearthly, to acknowledge the horror that exists beside the world’s beauty.
I felt ambivalent. I wondered how I could visit Nagasaki or Hiroshima. My grandfather had been in Europe with the ambulance corps of George Patton’s Third Army, and had lost his leg below the knee after he walked out into a field seeded with Splitterminen. He was carrying a wounded soldier. My grandfather triggered one of those S-mines, which exploded, killing the soldier he had been trying to rescue. The blast ground black powder so deeply into my grandfather’s skin that it never came out. The grains tattooed his temple, his ear, his neck, a Milky Way of dark stars. As a child I loved to inspect his left earlobe and ask him what had happened, and where his missing shin and foot were. ‘In Germany, I guess,’ he would say, calm, letting me study the particles and even try to rub them out. I was convinced that I could.
My grandfather’s friends would also speak a little about what they had seen, in Sicily or Normandy. But the soldiers who had been in the Pacific kept silent. If they talked at all, it was just before they died, when they were old, old men; and then it was as if not even an afternoon had passed since the battles they had fought seventy years before. One distant cousin remembered a friend who had been killed beside him on Okinawa. They were crouching by a wall when he turned and saw that the top of his friend’s head was sheared away, like a soft-boiled egg. The old man told me that, almost with wonder.
Another man, who had served in the air-force bombing runs over Japan, and who retired in the city where I grew up, remembered the stench that rose from the burning cities. ‘It worked its way, like a living thing, through every part of our aircraft – the smell of burning flesh. As soon as we dropped our bombs, the anti-aircraft fire found us. We immediately climbed higher trying to get out of range; we changed course, then tried to dive into the darkness. If they couldn’t see us, they couldn’t hit us. All the time the smell of death followed us.’
Growing up, I was part of the old soldiers’ we. I had never thought about what we had done to them, and I never thought about who they were, not even when I was no longer a child.
* * *
Robert Guillain, a French journalist who spent the war in Tokyo, described the inadequate equipment of Tokyo’s fire-fighters, and the lack of public bomb shelters, the subway system that was too shallow to provide proper protection. ‘Nor were any private shelters built, except for hurriedly dug holes in a few gardens. People did not dare to take precautions for fear of losing face.’ Tokyo knew, he wrote, ‘that it was an overgrown village of planks. In the streets at night one was, in a sense, enveloped in wood. All those dry beams, all this wood ready to burn, waiting for a spark. Behind those planks, millions of people slept on straw mats.’ Then, in September 1944:
The ground in Tokyo suddenly gaped with millions of holes, like bomb craters before the bombings and in anticipation of the bombings. Holes everywhere – in empty lots, in gardens, even in the streets, in all the sidewalks, holes every dozen yards. Hole is the only name these shelters deserve, for these pitiful trenches so feverishly dug on orders from on high one fine September day, everywhere at once, all over the city – these trenches were all the government had planned to shelter seven million people from the coming bombs. Each was a maximum of ten feet long and some two and a half feet deep. No roofs … housewives in pants squatted down in them, with their knees against their collarbones, and beamed satisfied smiles skyward; now the bombers could come.
Outside the soba restaurant, I hailed a taxi on Kototoi Bridge. I gave the driver the address and he set off east. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said.
We were travelling through Kōtō-ku, which has the strangest shape of all Tokyo’s wards: photographed from a satellite, the district looks like a cartoon monster with huge jaws made up of reclaimed land, geometric oblongs that pierce Tokyo Bay. Kōtō-ku is Tokyo in miniature: golf courses, heliports, baseball grounds. Incineration plants and canals, wharves and power substations. A theme park in Odaiba recreates an Edo era hot spring resort on the sea, complete with fish that eat the dead skin off your feet as they soak.
The taxi skirted the vast base of the Skytree tower, and then cut across the Kameido Tenjin district, whose red drum bridge and wisteria arbors have been made famous by ten thousand woodblocks. Hiroshige’s prints made the shrine intimate, dazzling after a snowfall, while his more famous, late work, Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin, distorts perspective so that a single violet cluster eclipses the radiant arc of Kameido’s bridge, its water, an ancient pine, and even the sky itself. The shrine’s human revelers are the same size as the wisteria petals. Ten years after Hiroshige sketched that drum bridge and the flowers clustering around it, the Tokugawa shogunate would fall; but Hiroshige’s world is outside time. His vine does not wither, even though Kameido Tenjin itself went up in the flames of 1945. The new temple is made of iron and concrete. It was built to the scale of its predecessor, but looks dirty and small.
‘Never heard of this place,’ the driver said again, glancing at the address. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’
‘No.’ I paused. ‘Just drop me off. I’ll find it.’
I got out by a boarded-up Chinese restaurant and once the taxi drove away, listened to the silence of the street. I looked at my map and then began walking away from the museum. Anything to put off going inside. I passed one or two old-fashioned houses, with clay kawara roofs and maple trees, bamboo stands and gnarled pines, but most were concrete or tiled apartment blocks. I stopped in front of one old garden, and watched sparrows settle on a persimmon tree and peck at the orange fruits, which were bigger than the sparrows themselves.
The street was empty, but I could hear someone in another lot, maybe in a neighboring alley: hammering on corrugated metal. It was a flat sound. Somewhere a door slid shut, or open. I looked at the garden
, past its sparrows, at the last gold fans on a gingko tree. Behind me someone pushed a baby stroller; I listened to the grit between wheels and the tarmac. The child inside must have been sleeping. More distant, there was the muted music of keys in a pocket, and then the neighborhood was quiet again. I turned, and the street was empty. I walked back the way I had come.
The Tokyo Air Raid Museum does not look like what it is. It is one unremarkable tiled concrete building among a sea of other tiled concrete buildings. It could have been anything – a doctor’s surgery, a small company’s office.
Inside the museum was empty, except for two guides – both old women – who were talking to each other on the ground floor. I bought an entry ticket, and then asked if someone could answer questions. Nihei Haruyo, a woman with feathery black hair, said she would show me around.
Mrs. Nihei reminded me of a small bird: she barely came up to my shoulder. She didn’t look almost eighty, though she was. She was born in May 1937.
The other woman handed me a copy of Mrs. Nihei’s testimonial, about the night Tokyo became a sea of fire.
I was eight years old. My family lived in Kameido: Daddy, Mummy, Brother, Little Sister, & me. March ninth was a night like any other night. We ate a good meal behind our blackout curtains. We listened to the wireless. Then we went to bed.
The radio was playing ‘Little Cedars of the Mountains’. I remember that.
I put my clothes beside my pillow; then I lined up my rucksack and air-raid hat. Next were my shoes. If you laid things out in order, you could dress even when it was pitch black.
I didn’t know what time it was, but my father said, ‘It’s different this time! GET UP! WAKE UP!’
Outside it was freezing & the sky was still dark. There was no fire where we were. But the winds were incredibly strong. Toward the south, I could see a red stain spreading on the horizon & a whirlwind of fire.
My brother was volunteering away from home and my father was on look-out duty. Mummy, Sister & I got into a public bomb shelter, which had space for two families. I was shaking. Above us, we heard noises – people moving past, people shouting & screaming, children crying. There were explosions. Then I heard Daddy’s voice: ‘If you stay in there, you’ll be steamed to death! Out! Out! Fast!’
Mummy & Sister climbed out and I was following them, but my neighbour held onto me: ‘Stay inside! You’re going to burn to death!’ She tried to drag me back, but I slapped her hand away & got out. I ran up, up the embankment and onto the railway tracks. From that high place, I watched my house burning down.
The sky was on fire & the earth was on fire and there was a noise: GOOOOOO GOOOOO. Like the voice of a monster. The winds blew all the fireballs sideways.
The tornado of fire raging gulped houses down one by one with a roaring sound. People were in flames & running. Children were burning on their mothers’ backs, but the mothers didn’t stop running. Children on fire held their mothers’ hands but kept running. The ones who fell turned into fireballs on the ground.
The fire engines came & fought the fires but the fires didn’t fall back, not at all. Water ran out. In the end, the firemen got caught up in the inferno. One man was standing with a hose & no water was coming out & he was burned where he stood. I saw a horse standing next to me, pulling a cart crammed with things. The bundles were on fire and the fire had jumped onto the horse, but the horse just stood still. The man holding the reins was on fire too.
Then the fire started climbing the embankment. The dried weeds began to blaze. Daddy, Mummy, Sister & I ran down toward the station, right into the sea of fire. My parents screamed, ‘Your hat – take it off!’ I let go of Daddy’s hand, to undo the knot. The winds flung me backward & I got separated from my family.
Fire was everywhere. Then suddenly: darkness.
There was a tall building, made of stone, & in the shadows around it a woman was standing and burning. The flame wasn’t red. It was green & wavering as if the woman were wearing a gorgeous long-sleeved kimono. She stared at me & put out her arms, & I thought, I have to put out the fire! I was stretching out my arms to her, but then I realized, I didn’t have anything to beat the fire down – no hat or rucksack or overcoat or shoes. So I was going to put the flames out with my bare hands. Then I heard a lady’s voice behind me: ‘Don’t go there! You’ll die!’ I felt like she had slapped me, & I turned away.
Then I bumped into something red-hot. A lamppost. I came back to awareness. That’s when I knew I was alone. No Mummy, no Daddy. I felt the heat for the first time. I called Daddy over and over again but never heard an answer. I ran and kept calling, ‘Is that you, Daddy?’
Finally I couldn’t move anymore. I sat down where I was. My body felt heavier and heavier. I felt sleepy, suffocated. In the distance I could hear the fire bells. Then sometimes human voices. Two men were shouting at each other.
‘We are Japanese! We can’t die like this! Stay alive! Stay alive! Yamato damashii!’
The fires were burning out. It was dawn and then sunrise. I was pulled out from underneath the bodies. I was at the very bottom. My father had found me. He kept talking to me all night, so I wouldn’t slip away. I couldn’t even say ‘Daddy’. I was wondering, Where am I? What happened? As far as I could see, there was Nothing. Just smoke the color of dirty water. It was rising like mist. No sound. Nothing moved. In some places, pale blue flames were dancing.
When I looked down, I saw that the people who’d been piled on me were dead, burned to black ashes. They had saved me.
I took the four pages of the testimony, and read the first line. ‘Night of the Blaze: Till Tomorrow!’ – ‘Let’s play tomorrow!’ But I read Japanese very slowly, and I needed a dictionary, so I thanked the woman who had given it to me, and slipped it in my bag, unread.
Mrs. Nihei led me upstairs, and walked me through the exhibits. We might have been in her own house. The first floor holds mostly art: oil paintings and watercolors and a cinema for screenings, and taped interviews with survivors of the firebombs.
An upright piano, and a smoke-darkened 1943 edition of Schubert’s Impromptus & Moments Musicaux. Beside the piano was a great calligraphic panel, painted on a rectangle cut like butcher’s paper. The wide page was spattered, streaked, smeared with ash-colored ink. The artist, Inoue Yuichi, was a young night watchman who survived the holocaust only by accident: he was off-duty on March Ninth. That midnight, people who tried to shelter at his school were trapped inside it:
The school buildings were full of fire. It was like Day. The refugees had nowhere to go. It was as if they were in a sealed kiln. Morning comes, and everything is burnt down. Silence. Emptiness. Only rubble. A thousand people had become a single lump of charcoal.
Inoue’s letters cluster together like people trying to shove past each other, jostling each other in panic. Around each is a halo of ink stains: droplets, black rain, grains. Neither solid nor liquid. The butcher’s page is crammed with markings, from the first word – Amerika, followed by a long, white blank – to the last: life.
The survivors, Inoue wrote, couldn’t feel anything or do anything. They just stood where they were. Voiceless and tearless.
I asked Mrs. Nihei if I could have a photograph of Inoue’s painting. ‘Yes, go ahead,’ she said. ‘The only thing that you can’t photograph are the pictures of the dead. Those ones are upstairs.’
We climbed to the second floor and again, Mrs. Nihei was as relaxed as if she’d been in her own house. She pointed to a glass case, containing two M-69 incendiary canisters balanced on their ends. The thick metal of one cylinder was torn, as if it were paper; heat from the phosphorus charge had sheared the steel away like a ribbon gathered into loops on an elaborately wrapped gift. The flaking metal looked dirty inside the crystalline display cases.
Mrs. Nihei nodded at the cluster bomb. ‘That night those were falling like rain,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t breathe, the smoke was so thick. Everything burned. Everything caught fire.’
Mrs. Nihei pointed
out the interior of a recreated World War Two era house, with starbursts of tape pasted to the glass windows, the blackout curtain, and dark cloth draped around a lightbulb.
I looked at the neat little interior, and tried to imagine her inside a room like that, as a child, listening out for the air-raid sirens and planes flying overhead. ‘… Did you have any idea of what was coming?’
‘We had no idea,’ she said. ‘We thought we would be safe.’
Mrs. Nihei moved to another glass case, which held a temple record listing the numbers killed in the bombings, the houses and buildings razed. Namu Amida Butsu, the monk had written. I venerate Amida Buddha. What remained of a life, of a family, of a street of families, a district, a city: single marks on a scroll.
More objects salvaged after the air raids: a perfect brass nozzle attached to the carbonized remnants of its hosepipe, which looked oddly graceful, like the bones of a hand, or a Giacometti figure. A fireman’s widow had donated it to the museum. A child’s tiny kimono, its blossom pattern blackened. A baby’s hand-knitted vest of red yarn.
Above the displays were framed photographs: people dragging carts through an ocean of ashes. A wall of blackened bodies. And the most famous, most hideous photograph: of a mother and her baby; their bodies bare, but without contours, every part blackened, except for a white shadow on the mother’s back; the place where the baby had nestled against her as they both burned.
I looked at the tiny kimono again, turning my face away from Mrs. Nihei.
‘And how can you … how can you keep reliving that night? How can you work here? How can you look at these photographs again and again…?’
‘Of course looking at the photographs affects me … My entire body shakes, when I show them.’
Later, in Mrs. Nihei’s statement, I read: I saw a mother cradling her baby. Those bodies were like charred matchsticks, and they were everywhere. I didn’t want to stand on any, so I kept weaving between them and stepping over them. I had to tiptoe. After my father found me, we passed a tiny, tiny baby, who was flailing her hands and her legs. She was on the road, crying like a little cricket. I stopped when I saw her, but my father said, ‘No. No. Not now.’ And he pulled me away. I was looking back, looking back, but I had to go. I could have saved that baby, but I didn’t. I witnessed her life, but I killed her because I did nothing. That guilt stays with me forever. It will never go.