by Kyoko Mori
“Your uncle is right,” she says when I catch up. “This is very depressing, isn’t it? But I always come with guests. I think it’s my duty to see these things, somehow.”
Underneath one of the burned blouses in a display case the identifying tag explains that the young girl who had worn it died from her burns and radiation poisoning. There is a small photograph of her back. Next to the blouse is a church organ, its wood charred, its cords snapped. Walking away from it into the third room—more burned clothing, photographs, stopped watches, fragments of walls—I think of Keiko again.
When Keiko came to live in Kobe, several years after the war, she worked at an office downtown and took piano lessons on weekends. Because she had no money for her own piano, she painted the keys on a piece of cardboard, exactly the right size and proportion. She practiced on this silent paper piano every night after work. Eventually, she married her piano teacher, who said she was the best student he’d ever had. But a few years after their marriage, her husband quit giving lessons and went to work at his father’s fruit shop. He and Keiko were too busy to play the piano. When the shop went bankrupt a few years after my mother’s death, Keiko’s husband got a clerical job and both of them joined the hirameki shrine, pledging their small income.
Standing among the preserved rubble of Hiroshima, I know that Keiko’s disappointments, my mother’s death, and my personal sorrow are nothing by comparison. Still, I cannot stop thinking of Keiko pounding on her paper instrument night after night. I imagine her, years later, longing for that silent music as green bananas ripened in the cellar of her husband’s failing store. Even now, Keiko hasn’t given up on discipline and persistence. She prays morning and night for the dead of our family; she carries bundles of tracts in her purse to distribute on the street. Shiro is right about our family curse. None of us can give up on our hopeless causes. Why do we want to pray for the dead and remember their pain when our persistence does little except to keep us in pain?
Michiyo turns back toward me and puts her hand on my shoulder. I look away, afraid of bursting into tears. On the wall, there are notices the American planes dropped in Hiroshima a few days before the bombing. They warn of further air raids; they urge the people of Hiroshima to surrender.
“We don’t have to see any of this,” Michiyo says.
“It’s all right. I want to see it.”
In the next room, a group of schoolchildren are clustered around two large dioramas placed side by side. One shows the city as it was before the bomb; the other shows it right after—nothing but a jumble of gray ashes and charred sticks. The teacher, a middle-aged man, is standing behind the dioramas and talking. The children are growing restless; their heads in identical yellow caps begin to move up and down, sideways. They look very young, no more than second or third grade. As Michiyo and I enter the room, two boys, standing near the diorama of the city before the bomb, begin to point at various buildings.
“Look, here’s the castle.”
“The Sumitomo Bank Building downtown. I’ve been there.”
They are too young to understand that the buildings shown here were destroyed and then reconstructed.
The first boy waves his hand over the general area between two of the rivers. “This is our neighborhood,” he says. “Look.”
“Let’s go,” the teacher calls. “There is more to see.”
The children file out in orderly double rows. Michiyo and I follow them into yet another room, this one much darker than the others. Lit by one fluorescent light from overhead, two mannequins stand in a gray landscape behind glass. They are a mother and her young daughter, their kimonos burned and coming off in black strips, their hair and faces singed and bloodied. Their feet are covered by rubble: shattered roof slates, charred cloth, burned wood. The painted background is an eerie orange. The schoolchildren walk on in hushed obedience. The teacher does not stop to comment.
I want to hurry past the rows of yellow caps and catch up with the teacher to tell him something is going wrong with their well-intended visit. If these children are getting anything out of the displays, it’s that war is bad because bad things happen to us and to our families. But that isn’t why war is bad.
When my mother told me about the Second World War, she didn’t just talk about the deaths of her friends, her own hunger, the destruction of her city by firebombs. The worst thing about the war, she told me, was the way she had been taught to support it. “I believed we were fighting to bring civilization to the rest of Asia,” she said. “I thought we were going to China and Korea and Burma and all those places to chase away the Americans, the British, and the French who oppressed the people there. We were bringing them a better government.” She had no idea, during the war, about the Japanese soldiers’ cruelty toward the native populations of Asia, toward prisoners of war. She never heard, until much later, about the massacres of civilians all over Asia. She was angry that the textbooks in my brother’s and my history classes still did not mention such things. Rather, they emphasized how Japan was “forced into conflict” by unfair trade practices, how the Russians broke a treaty to attack us in the last year of the war to win the northern islands, how Japan, nobly, vowed never to fight again. “This is all wrong,” my mother said.
She was an exception. My teachers at school seemed unimpressed by the objections I raised because of what she had told me. It was clear that other kids didn’t hear the same stories from their mothers. Later, my stepmother, Michiko, would say that I could not invite people of Korean ancestry to our house because they were inferior and unhygienic. Asked about the war years she had spent in Shanghai, Michiko talked only about the French movies she used to sneak into. She complained that her family had been forced to return to Japan after the war, without time to sell their property at a fair price. As soon as Japan had lost the war, she said, Chinese people broke into her house and stole things. To her, the war was like some natural disaster that inconvenienced her family; it had no other implications.
In a way, the displays in the museum are no different, however noble their original intention. The atomic bomb is still portrayed as a cosmic disaster that befell innocent people, burning them and destroying their homes. Even the inscription outside, on the memorial stone, is too vague: “Please rest in peace. The mistake will not be repeated.” What mistake? Does the word refer only to the bomb, or the Second World War, or all war? And why does the inscription use the passive voice, “will not be repeated,” as though we had no control over the outcome? Exactly who or what is accountable for the “mistake” that ended up in the tragedy of Hiroshima?
I know that the people of Hiroshima were “innocent” in the way all civilians are innocent, but dying in a war, even for them, is not the same as being killed in a natural catastrophe like a typhoon or an earthquake. The worst thing about war, as my mother told me, is that we are encouraged to contribute in words and action to the machinery of destruction. The people who died here had been trained, just as my mother had, to support the war, to participate in the “civilian war effort” of building weapons and ammunition. They had played a part, however small, in the destruction that ended in their own deaths. If we don’t scrutinize that aspect of their tragedy, if we gloss over the complexity of their circumstances, then we have learned nothing.
Michiyo and I, behind the schoolchildren, enter the last room of the exhibit. It is more of the same: burned clothing, photographs, watercolor pictures of the disaster by the people who survived it. We have come through several rooms and not found one explanation of why this war took place, in what ways each side was responsible and guilty. If they had been paying attention, the children ahead of us would have learned only one thing: war is bad and scary. They would have learned this in the same simpleminded and emotional way that the children before the war had been taught that war is good or necessary.
Leaving the last room, I cannot get over my disappointment. It isn’t right to scare people into peace. The exhibit is incomplete without a detai
led discussion of how the Japanese and American governments both contributed to the escalation of war, to what led up to the dropping of the bomb. I know that most people would applaud the total lack of anti-American sentiment in the displays, the restraint from finger-pointing. Being a gracious loser is an essential part of Japanese culture. It is shameful, we are taught, to engage too much in the after-the-fact analysis of our defeat, to be eager to assign blame to ourselves or to our opponent. Maybe this exhibit shows a typically Japanese attempt to save face all around, a desire to be polite: by treating the bomb as a cosmic disaster, we eliminate human responsibility—it’s as if the bomb caused itself to be dropped. But that is not the truth, and the atomic destruction of a city is scarcely a fit occasion for politeness. The whole point of politeness is to shield people from unnecessary embarrassment or pain on various social occasions. That principle should not apply here. Commemorating the bomb is not a social occasion, and if the only honest way to advocate peace involves assigning blame all around and causing embarrassment, guilt, and pain, then such feelings are far from unnecessary. To stop short of a full investigation, in the end, is only an abuse of politeness, not true courtesy or consideration. It is false to represent the bomb as a disaster we can all mourn together.
As Michiyo and I descend the stairway toward the exit, I have a sudden mental picture of my father crying in front of my mother’s grave. Anyone can give way to dramatic seizures of remorse, to tears and sadness. Even my father could do that much. Then, five minutes later, he could decline my grandmother’s invitation to lunch and go on his way, as thoughtless as ever. If my mother’s spirit had continued on in any way, she would not have wanted his flowers, tears, or remorse; she would have wanted him to tend to her mother’s need to talk, to be sad together. My father, crying in front of Fuku, had only wonderful things to say about my mother: she was a gentle, sweet person. But maybe it would have been better if he had blamed her some and also blamed himself for their mutual unhappiness. After all, they were both responsible for the failure of their marriage; even my aunt Keiko has said that. If my father could have reflected on exactly how she had been responsible, how he had been responsible, then he could have come to some understanding. Then he could have truly honored her—by some act of honesty and consideration.
Michiyo pushes the door that leads outside. “We’ve seen enough, don’t you think?” she says. “Fresh air would be good for us now.” She opens up her blue umbrella and holds it over us.
Through the park, the yellow umbrellas of the children are moving under the wet trees ahead. Michiyo and I stop in front of the memorial for the middle school boys who died in the ammunition factories downtown where they had been mobilized to work.
“My father’s brother, Tsuyoshi, was one of them,” I tell her. The names of their schools are carved on the stone. “I don’t know which one of these schools he attended.” The boys’ names, the explanation reads, are written on a scroll stored in a vault inside the museum. “Whatever happened to him, I hope it was very quick.” I can’t stop thinking of the burned blouses, singed hair.
“Your father’s family lived in Hiroshima, right?”
“All except my father. When they moved to Hiroshima, he stayed behind in Kyoto to finish high school. His family lived in the suburbs, so no one except Tsuyoshi was hurt on the day of the bomb. But they went looking for him later and got exposed to radiation. Keiko said my grandmother died from liver cancer. Aunt Akiko has always had problems with her liver, too, and she just had surgery this summer. Maybe radiation poisoning has something to do with their problems.”
“How about your father? Did he come back to Hiroshima to look for his family?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He must have. People didn’t have telephones in their houses back then. Letters were slow, especially after the bomb. Most people who had family came back here when they heard the news. They didn’t know about radiation poisoning. They were anxious to find out what had happened to their family. I’m sure your father came back, too.”
“I doubt it.”
We begin to walk away, past the domed building at the old epicenter. There are scaffolds around the skeleton of the building that was standing after the flash.
“They’re trying to repair that,” Michiyo says.
“Repair it, how?”
“So the building doesn’t completely fall apart. They want it to look exactly the same as it did the moment after the bomb.”
We exit the park and follow the riverside street toward the tram stop. After a few blocks, we are at a busy street corner that looks like any downtown shopping area. Cars are everywhere; people walk in and out of department stores and office buildings.
“I’m sure your father came back here,” Michiyo says again. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have known for weeks if his family were alive or dead.”
A tram clatters its way down the street toward us, all its cars painted bright yellow. The writing on the front and sides is in French. The tram is followed by another, this one green, with German words.
“Those trams come from all over the world,” Michiyo explains. “The tram company here buys cars from discontinued services. They don’t repaint the cars because they look more interesting that way.” She shrugs. “A sort of tourist attraction, I guess.”
Watching the tram cars of the world converge, so close to the old epicenter, I imagine this same street forty-five years ago—crowded with people looking for their families. I don’t think my father was here then, though I am not sure. I know so little about him. He has never talked about his younger brother’s death. I don’t know what my father did during the war, how he felt about it then or later, if he went hungry like my mother and resigned himself to death and then was angry about the lies he was told. He never mentioned the years following the war when he was hospitalized with TB. I know almost nothing about my father’s past. He might as well be a complete stranger.
All I can say for certain about my father is that he surely wouldn’t have returned to Hiroshima to look for his family if he had known about the danger to himself from radiation. That is the one thing I can count on him to do: to act with an unswerving dedication to his self-interest, which doesn’t even include his family. My father’s concept of self stops only and wholly with himself. Other selfish people—even his father, Tatsuo—include their own family in the consideration of their self-interest. They talk about “my house and my family” as extensions of themselves, as part of their emotional territory. My father never loved me even in that selfish way. That is why he doesn’t seem like family to me. So long as I can live thousands of miles away, I can almost believe that I have written him off, forgotten him. Then I can go on with my life and think of him as someone who has no influence over me regardless of how much he has hurt me in the past. I wish, more than anything, that I hadn’t seen him at all during this visit.
Michiyo looks sideways into my face, no doubt trying to make sure that I am all right. She tilts the umbrella farther in my direction to shield my hair, which is blowing in the wind.
I am suddenly reminded of the purple hair of the doll she gave me on the morning she married my uncle, when I was three. I had been crying all morning, my mother told me later, because Shiro’s friends had stopped by to move some of his furniture from the house he and my family shared. Shiro was to live with Michiyo’s family for a month and then move to Tokyo for his graduate studies. That morning, before their wedding, Shiro and Michiyo stopped to see me because my mother had called them at Michiyo’s parents’ house and said that I was crying. I remember the hallway of the house where I was standing, and Michiyo handing me the doll with a soft cloth body and long purple hair.
Now Michiyo walks next to me in silence; she doesn’t want to ask me needless questions or intrude on my thoughts. Though she and I are not connected by blood, I have known her almost all my life. She is my family in the way my father never will be. I can count on her to remember what I like and dislike
, to notice when I am too upset or preoccupied to talk. When the time comes for me to speak, she will listen to me as carefully as she now matches her steps to mine. But if I say nothing, it will also be all right.
As we walk on, away from the memorial of pain, raindrops keep hitting the stretch of fabric over our heads. A thousand words are falling, every second, from the sky.
Smoke
The phone rings on Wednesday evening while I am straightening out my room at Sylvia’s. I pick up the receiver by the porch.
“Kyo-chan,” my cousin Kazumi says. “Your father just called. He wants to take us out to dinner.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night. That’s the only time he’s free, remember?”
My father must be alone. Michiko is supposed to return from Hokkaido early Friday morning to accompany him to the hospital. The surgery is scheduled for Saturday, the day Kazumi and I plan to visit her mother, Akiko, at her hospital. I’m not going to visit him at his. I’ll be flying out of Osaka the following morning.
“What do you think?” Kazumi asks. “Can you go?”
“Would you come with me?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll go then.”
When we hang up, I open my desk drawer, pull out my plane ticket, and look over the itinerary. Seattle. Minneapolis. I imagine myself sitting in an airport coffee shop with a newspaper, a cup of coffee, and a bagel. I wish I could skip forward to that moment, into the relief I will feel then, but I am stuck in this cluttered room. The desktop and the floor are covered with clothes, books, piles of letters. I bring the ticket, back in its blue envelope, to the phone stand and slide it underneath the receiver. The corner of the envelope sticks out, a sliver of blue I can see from any place in the room.