Because I was wearing high clogs I couldn’t keep my balance on the rippling ground, so I took them off and carried one in each hand. Like someone on a boat in heavy seas, I lurched and ran to where my friend stood with his arms wrapped around a telephone pole for dear life. I did likewise. The pole was waving around crazily, too. In fact, it was snapping its wires into thousands of little pieces.
Then, before our eyes, the two storehouses belonging to the pawnshop started shedding their skins. They shuddered and shook off their roof tiles and then let go of their thick walls. In an instant they were skeletons of wooden frame. It wasn’t just the storehouses that were doing this either. The roof tiles of all the houses, as if they were being put through a sieve, suddenly danced and shook and slipped off. In the thick dust the roof beams lay revealed.
Isn’t it remarkable how well Japanese houses are built? In this situation the roof becomes light and the house doesn’t collapse. I remember thinking these thoughts as I stood clinging to the violently shuddering telephone pole. But this doesn’t mean that I was calm and collected. Human beings are funny creatures—if they are too severely startled, one part of the brain is often left out entirely and remains strangely composed, thinking about something completely unrelated. But my poor brain, which in this moment contemplated Japanese domestic architecture and its capacity to withstand earthquakes, in the next moment became feverish with concern over my family. I set out at a breakneck run for my house.
The front gate had lost half of its roof, but it stood solidly without even a list to one side. But the stone walk from the gate to the front entrance of my house was blocked by a mountain of roof tiles that had fallen from the buildings on either side. I could hardly see the front door. My family must all be dead.
Strangely enough, the feeling that came over me at that moment was not one of grief, but rather a deep resignation. The next thing that occurred to me was that I was all alone in the world. Looking around me and wondering what to do, I saw the friend I had left holding on to the telephone pole come bursting out of his house with all the members of his family. They stood in a group in the middle of the street. Thinking there was not much else I could do under the circumstances, I decided to stay with my friend, and I started walking toward them.
As I approached, my friend’s father started to say something to me, but then stopped suddenly. He walked past me and stared at the front of my house. Following his gaze, I turned around and looked back. There were all the members of my family coming out of the front gate. I ran like one possessed. Those I had thought dead were not only safe, but appeared to have been worried about me. As I ran to them, they welcomed me with relief visible on their faces.
You would think I would have burst into tears as I ran to them. But I didn’t cry. In fact, I couldn’t cry. It was impossible for me to cry because my brother began to scold me with a vengeance. “Akira! What’s the meaning of this spectacle? Walking around barefoot—what slovenliness!” Looking at them, I saw that my father, mother, sister and brother all had their clogs on. I hastened to put my high clogs back on, and I felt terribly ashamed. Of all the members of my family, I was the only one who had conducted himself in a disorderly fashion. To my eyes it looked as if my father, mother and sister were not in the least perturbed. As for my brother, he was not only calm in the face of the Great Kantō Earthquake, but appeared to be having a wonderful time.
Darkness and Humanity
THE GREAT KANTŌ EARTHQUAKE was a terrifying experience for me, and also an extremely important one. Through it I learned not only of the extraordinary powers of nature, but extraordinary things that lie in human hearts. To begin with, the earthquake overwhelmed me by suddenly transforming my surroundings.
The street where the streetcar ran on the other side of the Edogawa River was badly damaged, heaving with fissures. The river itself had raised its bottom and showed new islands of mud. I didn’t see any fallen houses in the immediate area, but there were leaning ones here and there. The whole Edogawa River district was veiled in a dancing, swirling dust whose grayness gave the sun a pallor like that during an eclipse. The people who stood to the left and right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell, and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect. I stood holding on to one of the young cherry trees planted along the banks of the river, and I was still shaking as I gazed out over the scene, thinking, “This must be the end of the world.”
From that point on, I don’t remember very much about that day. But I do recall that the ground kept on shaking and shaking without respite. And I remember that eventually a billowing mushroom cloud appeared in the eastern sky, gradually towering and spreading to fill half the heavens with the smoke from the fire engulfing central Tokyo.
That night the Yama-no-te hill area, where we were and which escaped the fires, was of course without electricity like the rest of Tokyo. No lamps were lit, but the light from the fire raging in the low-lying downtown section cast an unexpected glow on the hills. That night every household still had candles, so no one was threatened by the darkness. What terrified everyone was the sound of the armory.
The armory grounds, as I have already mentioned, were bounded by a long red brick wall within which the factories stood in rows of huge red brick buildings. This plant served as an unforeseen barrier to the fires advancing from downtown and saved the entire Yama-no-te district. However, the arsenal itself, because it was a storage area for explosives, seems to have been touched off by the heat of the flames licking their way from Kanda to Suidōbashi. From time to time, perhaps ignited by some kind of shell, a column of fire spewed forth from the armory accompanied by a terrifying roar. It was that sound that unnerved people.
In my neighborhood there was actually a man who explained, as if he really believed it, that this sound was volcanoes erupting on the Izu Peninsula a hundred miles south of Tokyo. They were setting off a chain of eruptions, he said, which was heading north toward us. “So if it comes to the worst,” this man continued, “I’m going to pack up what I need and get out of here with this thing.” And he proudly displayed a milk wagon he had found abandoned somewhere.
This little story has its charm and doesn’t really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior. By the time the fires downtown had subsided, everyone had used up all the household candles and the world was plunged into the real darkness of night. People who felt threatened by this darkness became the prey of the most horrifying demagogues and engaged in the most incredibly reckless, lawless acts. It’s impossible even to imagine the magnitude of the terror brought by total darkness to people who have never experienced it before—it is a terror that destroys all reason. When a person can’t see anything to the left or the right, he becomes thoroughly demoralized and confused. And, as the old saying goes, “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters.”
The massacre of Korean residents of Tokyo that took place on the heels of the Great Kanto Earthquake was brought on by demagogues who deftly exploited people’s fear of the darkness. With my own eyes I saw a mob of adults with contorted faces rushing like an avalanche in confusion, yelling, “This way!” “No, that way!” They were chasing a bearded man, thinking someone with so much facial hair could not be Japanese.
We ourselves went to look for relatives who had been burned out in the fires around the Ueno district. Simply because my father had a full beard, he was surrounded by a mob carrying clubs. My heart pounded as I looked at my brother, who was with him. My brother was smiling sarcastically. At that moment my father thundered angrily, “Idiots!” They meekly dispersed.
In our neighborhood each household had to have one person stand guard at night. My brother, however, thumbed his nose at the whole idea and made no attempt to take his turn. Seeing no other solution, I took up my wooden sword and was led to a drainage pipe that was barely wide enough for a cat to crawl through. They posted me here and said, “Koreans might be able
to sneak in through here.”
But there was an even more ridiculous incident. They told us not to drink the water from one of our neighborhood wells. The reason was that the wall surrounding the well had some kind of strange notation written on it in white chalk. This was supposedly a Korean code indication that the well water had been poisoned. I was flabbergasted. The truth was that the strange notation was a scribble I myself had written. Seeing adults behaving like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.
A Horrifying Excursion
WHEN THE HOLOCAUST had died down, my brother said to me in a tone betraying his impatience to do so, “Akira, let’s go look at the ruins.” I set out to accompany my brother with the kind of cheerfulness you feel on a school excursion. By the time I realized how horrifying this excursion would be and tried to shrink back from it, it was already too late. My brother ignored my hesitation and dragged me along. For an entire day he led me around the vast area the fire had destroyed, and while I shivered in fear he showed me a countless array of corpses.
At first we saw only an occasional burned body, but as we drew closer to the downtown area, the numbers increased. But my brother took me by the hand and walked on with determination. The burned landscape for as far as the eye could see had a brownish red color. In the conflagration everything made of wood had been turned to ashes, which now occasionally drifted upward in the breeze. It looked like a red desert.
Amid this expanse of nauseating redness lay every kind of corpse imaginable. I saw corpses charred black, half-burned corpses, corpses in gutters, corpses floating in rivers, corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at an intersection, and every manner of death possible to human beings displayed by corpses. When I involuntarily looked away, my brother scolded me, “Akira, look carefully now.”
I failed to understand my brother’s intentions and could only resent his forcing me to look at these awful sights. The worst was when we stood on the bank of the red-dyed Sumidagawa River and gazed at the throngs of corpses pressed against its shores. I felt my knees give way as I started to faint, but my brother grabbed me by the collar and propped me up again. He repeated, “Look carefully, Akira.”
I resigned myself to gritting my teeth and looking. Even if I tried to close my eyes, that scene had imprinted itself permanently on the backs of my eyelids. In this way, convincing myself it was inescapable, I felt a little bit calmer. But there is no way for me to describe adequately the horror I saw. I remember thinking that the lake of blood they say exists in Buddhist hell couldn’t possibly be as bad as this.
I wrote that the Sumidagawa was dyed red, but it wasn’t a blood red. It was the same kind of light brownish red as the rest of the landscape, a red muddied with white like the eye of a rotten fish. The corpses floating in the river were all swollen to the bursting point, and all had their anuses open like big fish mouths. Even babies still tied on their mothers’ backs looked like this. And all of them moved softly in unison on the waves of the river.
As far as the eye could see there was not a living soul. The only living things in this landscape were my brother and I. To me we seemed as small as two beans in all this vastness. Or else we too were dead and were standing at the gates of hell.
My brother then led me to the broad market grounds of the garment district. This was where the most people lost their lives in the Great Kanto Earthquake. No corner of the landscape was free of corpses. In some places the piles of corpses formed little mountains. On top of one of these mountains sat a blackened body in the lotus position of Zen meditation. This corpse looked exactly like a Buddhist statue. My brother and I stared at it for a long time, standing stock still. Then my brother, as if talking to himself, softly said, “Magnificent, isn’t it?” I felt the same way.
By that time I had seen so many corpses that I could no longer distinguish between them and the burned bits of roof tiles and stones on the ground. It was a bizarre kind of apathy. My brother looked at me and said, “I guess we’d better go home.” We crossed over the Sumidagawa again and headed for the Ueno Hirokoji district.
As we approached Hirokoji Street, we came upon a large burned-out area where a great number of people had gathered. They were assiduously sifting through the ruins, looking for something. My brother smiled bitterly as he said, “It’s the remains of the bullion treasury. Akira, shall we look for a gold ring as a souvenir?”
But at that particular moment my eyes were fixed on the greenery atop the Ueno hills, and I couldn’t budge. How many years had it been since I’d seen a green tree? That’s how I felt, as if I had after a long time at last come to a place where there was air. I took a deep breath. There had not been a single trace of green in all the ruins of the fire. Until that instant it had never occurred to me how precious vegetation is.
The night we returned from the horrifying excursion I was fully prepared to be unable to sleep, or to have terrible nightmares if I did. But no sooner had I laid my head on the pillow than it was morning. I had slept like a log, and I couldn’t remember anything frightening from my dreams. This seemed so strange to me that I asked my brother how it could have come about. “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” Looking back on that excursion now, I realize that it must have been horrifying for my brother too. It had been an expedition to conquer fear.
Honor and Revere
THE KEIKA MIDDLE SCHOOL in Ochanomizu burned down in the fire. When I saw the rubble of my school, my first thought was, “Ah, summer vacation will be extended,” and I was delighted. I realize as I write this that I must appear insensitive, but to describe the feelings of a not very brilliant middle-school student honestly, this is what you get, so it can’t be helped.
I have always been honest to a fault. If I did something bad at school and the teacher asked who was responsible, I would always honestly raise my hand. And then the teacher would take out his grade book and give me a zero for conduct.
When we got a new teacher I continued my honesty. I raised my hand when he asked who did it. But this new teacher then said that everything was all right because I had not tried to dodge responsibility. He took out his grade book and gave me a hundred for conduct.
I don’t know which of these teachers was right, but I have to admit I liked the teacher who gave me the hundred better. He was the same teacher who had praised a composition of mine as “the best since the founding of Keika Middle School,” Mr. Ohara Yōichi.
In those days Keika Middle School graduates had an excellent rate of entrance into Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), and this was a great matter of school pride. Mr. Ohara always used to say, “Even a ghost could get into a private university.” These days it isn’t that easy, but a ghost with money can still get in.
I liked my grammar teacher, Mr. Ohara, very much, but I was also fond of my history teacher, Mr. Iwamatsu Goro. According to my class report, I was a great favorite of this teacher as well. He was a wonderful teacher. A really good teacher doesn’t seem like a teacher at all; that’s exactly how this man was. If someone looked out the window or started whispering to his neighbor during class, Mr. Iwamatsu would throw a piece of chalk at him. He would fly into a rage and throw one piece after another, so he was always running out of chalk. Then he would say he couldn’t give his lessons without chalk, so he’d smile and settle into an unstructured chat. His rambling talks were always far more instructive than any textbook.
But the heavenly perfection of Mr. Iwamatsu’s personality displayed itself in the most vivid fashion when the term-end examinations came. Each classroom where the exams were held was visited by a succession of teachers who administered the tests. Care was taken that the supervising teacher had nothing to do with the subject of the exam being given. But if it was Mr. Iwamatsu who walked in the door, a roaring cheer would fill the room. The reason was that Mr. Iwamats
u was unable to do something so formal as proctor an examination.
If a student showed distress over one of the exam questions, Mr. Iwamatsu would come and peer over his shoulder at the problem. Then the following events invariably transpired: Mr. Iwamatsu would say, “What’s the matter, can’t you do that? Listen, it goes like this,” becoming completely involved. Then he would say, “You still don’t understand? Blockhead!” At this he would go to the blackboard and write out the whole solution, saying, “Well, now you understand, don’t you?” Sure enough, after his careful explanation, even the worst idiot would have the answer. I am very poor at mathematics, but when Mr. Iwamatsu proctored the examination, I got a hundred percent.
At the end of one term I took a history examination with ten questions. There wasn’t much I could do to answer any of them. The proctor was of course not Mr. Iwamatsu, since he taught the subject, so I was ready to give up. But in the utmost desperation I decided to take a stab at one of then: “Give your impressions of the three sacred treasures of the Imperial Court.” I scribbled about three pages of nonsense, something along these lines: I’ve heard a great deal of talk about the Three Treasures, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes, so it isn’t really possible for me to write my impressions of them. Take for example the legendary yata-no-kagami sacred mirror—it is so holy that no one has ever been allowed to see it, so it may in reality be not round but square or triangular. I am only capable of talking about things I have looked at closely with my own eyes, and I believe only things for which there is proof.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 8