by Jay Rubin
That day, she turned her back on Matsuyama and vowed never to visit this part of the city again. She returned to the relief center and worked long hours doing the only thing she felt there was left for her to do in this world. The best way she could serve her surviving family would be to join those who had entered oblivion. Mineko must never know she had existed. Yoshiko would go on with her life in America, and Mitsuko could never be part of that. Her “family” were those sick, blinded souls who had been pulverized between the millstones of honor and justice.
Almost before anyone had noticed, she had become a permanent part of the medical team. When the tension of those first days had abated enough for people to begin thinking about themselves as individual human beings again, a doctor smoking a cigarette asked her name. She hesitated only a moment before answering, “Tomoko Wada.” Through her, the dead child would have life.
As Tomoko Wada, she stayed on in the New Kozen Elementary School when it was taken over as a branch of the University Hospital. The government, in its wisdom, had stopped supporting it as a relief center in October despite the hundreds of patients still desperate for its services. She continued to be Tomoko Wada when the Occupation freshly outfitted and donated to the city of Nagasaki the old Japanese Army Hospital in Tokiwa-machi a few blocks away, moving both staff and equipment there from the school in December. She found a room nearby and spent most of each day in the wards of the new Nagasaki Citizens’ Hospital.
It was not the life she would have chosen. She was not what anyone would call “happy.” But as she recalled the horrid images, she smiled to herself, glad at least that her anger was still there. It was this to which she had clung—this angry love for the individual men and women and children whose bodies had been broken by the bomb—some hurt so deeply inside that the damage was surfacing only now, eighteen years later.
Yet today those men stood before the television cameras, mouthing words of palliation, words that had nothing to do with the mortification of the flesh of real human beings. Only once had she seen words that came close to capturing the truth. Not surprisingly, the words had been written by a doctor, one who had cared for hundreds of the wounded, who had been one of the deeply wounded himself, and who had looked at the horror with unflinching eyes. The truth had frightened the American occupiers, and they had tried to suppress Dr. Nagai’s words, relenting finally in 1949.
“Yes,” Mitsuko had said to herself upon reading The Bells of Nagasaki, “this is what it was really like.” But when she came to the end, her rage boiled over, for after his heroic act of witnessing one of the worst evils ever perpetrated upon man by man, the doctor had betrayed his own anger. After all the blood, all the fire and suffering, he concluded that Nagasaki should be grateful to God for having chosen the city as a sacrificial lamb to end the war. With that inflated sense of self-importance granted only to the religious, he concluded that Nagasaki was the one holy place in all of Japan and that God himself—not the American pilots—had actually directed the bomb to fall on the Urakami Cathedral. None of the other destroyed cities in the world had been a great enough sacrifice for this bloodthirsty god. But when holy Nagasaki screamed with pain, God had gone straight to the emperor and inspired him to surrender. Nagasaki had been a noble and splendid burnt offering to God because of its cathedral. When eight thousand Catholic believers and their priests entered eternal life burning with pure smoke, that had been beautiful and sublime. These faithful had been the only ones in Japan free from sin and worthy to be offered to God.
Here was God at his finest. Only God could justify the incineration of the innocent. Only God could dazzle the mind of a man whose eyes had seen so clearly. Without God, how tortured, how conscience-stricken must be the great killers of mankind. Someday, she knew, the makers of war would turn to Dr. Nagai with gratitude in their hearts for having shown them the way.
No, a blind woman with her skin peeling off was a wounded human being, not a lamb of God. Turn her into anything higher, nobler, purer or holier, and she ceased to be human. She became an abstraction, a symbol without feelings or pain. The eight thousand Catholics burning with pure smoke in Dr. Nagai’s fevered imagination surely felt no pain; but to the eight thousand individual human beings—and the seventy thousand infidels who joined them in death—there was nothing beautiful, pure, or sublime in what happened to them. Of course, there was no way to ask them about that. They were dead now. And probably the partial human beings lying in the wards here wished they were dead, too. We, the living, the sinners, could do only one thing for the dead: to mourn them in anger. To love each other in anger. To resist the temptations of an evil God who would tear his children to pieces and command them to be grateful for it.
Mitsuko’s own temptation over the years had been her children, one of her body and one of her heart. On days when her love for the victims did not seem great enough to sustain her, she would think of the baby she had left behind in Chiba and wonder what the child looked like, how she was growing, what kind of a person she was becoming.
Only once over the years had Mitsuko weakened. Knowing that Mineko’s twelfth birthday was approaching, she traveled to Tokyo to present her the other mirror. Any younger, and Mineko would have been too much her parents’ little girl; any older, and too many explanations would have been necessary. Mineko’s beauty had been a thrill to her and brought her memories of Frank. Perhaps it had been with Frank that she had first tasted that love borne of anger which had carried her through the pain.
Sheer distance made Billy less of a threat to her peace of mind. Living across the ocean in the home of the Reverend Thomas Morton, he might, like other Americans, have learned to hate all Japs for the greater glory of God. By now, surely, there was nothing left of her inside him. Sometimes, though, she would imagine that Yoshiko had sought him out and given him the mirror, and that, perhaps, lingering reverberations of her bitter love for him had been transmitted from the carved wood through his hand to his heart.
There had been one instance of temptation regarding Billy, too. In 1951, she had been asked to interpret for a party of American pacifists and do-gooders who were visiting the hospital. The staff knew that she had useful English skills and pressed her to guide the group around. They were visiting Nagasaki to build homes for victims of the bombing. She wanted to ask, who had sent them, the president of the United States to lessen America’s guilt? But she held her tongue and showed them around, making certain they saw the most grotesquely disfigured patients.
One especially tall, bony man in a white short-sleeved shirt was furiously taking notes on everything he heard. He had a camera slung over his shoulder and every now and then would ask permission to use it. Some members of the group tried to engage her in conversation, but she had all she could do to remain civil, and she barely looked at them. As the group was leaving, the tall, thin man thanked her for her kindness and asked her name. She looked him in the eye now for the first time and caught her breath. He was Reverend Emery Andrews of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle. She recognized him from the crowd of well-wishers seeing the busloads of people off to Puyallup. And he was the father of Brooks, the other little boy Frank had saved from drowning at the Minidoka swimming hole.
For a split second, she thought of giving him her real name. Perhaps he knew Tom and could tell her about Billy. Perhaps he could deliver Billy a message, bypassing Tom. In the end, though, she said only, “My name is Tomoko Wada.”
“Tomoko Wada,” he repeated, scribbling her name in his notebook. “And where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”
When she hesitated again, he looked straight at her. “Are you sure we’ve never met before?” he asked. “In Seattle? Or Camp Harmony? Or Minidoka? You look so familiar.”
How could she utter the word “Seattle”? How could she tell him that she had been the wife of a man who had betrayed her and betrayed the community he served so faithfully?
“Never mind,” she said. “My English is not good.”
“Thank you anyway, Tomoko Wada,” he said. “You have been very kind and very helpful.” Before he closed his notebook, she saw him write a large question mark after her name.
The commemorative ceremonies had ended several hours earlier when Mitsuko heard Tomoko Wada being paged over the intercom. She had visitors, the voice said, at the front admitting desk. That was impossible. No one knew “Tomoko Wada” outside this hospital. She practically lived here, and the destruction of records had enabled her to preserve her anonymity for the past eighteen years. Could it be the police? Had she broken a law by adopting the identity of a stillborn infant?
She took the elevator down and turned right into the long, gloomy corridor. As she moved toward the rectangular glare at the far end, three silhouettes moved away from the admitting desk and stood there, facing in her direction. The two outer shadows belonged to men, one very tall, the other less so, and the middle one was a woman about her own size. As she drew closer, and her eyes adjusted to the light, she recognized her daughter, Mineko, now a beautifully grown woman. She stopped short and strained to see the others. The man to the left was surely no Japanese. No, he was blond and resembled the young Thomas Morton. Could this be Billy, standing before her? And the Japanese man to the right? His left arm was missing, but in his intense gaze, she recognized Frank Sano. Before she could recover from the shock of seeing her past arrayed before her, the blond man started moving toward her, holding his arms out.
What could they say to each other, what could they be to each other after all these years?
But the moment he clasped her in his arms, all her doubts were swept away.
“Mother!” he said. “Oh, Mother!”
THE END
NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is a novel, its major characters and events entirely fictional, but the setting of the story is authentic. Characters often appear in situations which actually occurred, or they encounter people who were actually alive at the time. This factual information owes much to the contemporary press (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Star, Seattle Daily Times); to the relocation camp newspaper, The Minidoka Irrigator; to a 1943 publication called “Minidoka Interlude: September 1942 – October 1943,” published by Residents of Minidoka Relocation Center, Hunt, Idaho; and to such books as the following:
Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969).
Hiroshima-shi, Nagasaki-shi Gembaku Saigaishi Henshū Iinkai, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Kazuo Ito, Issei (Seattle: Executive Committee for the Publication of Issei, 1973).
Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).
Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).
Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, translated by William Johnston (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984).
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.P.O., 1982).
Katsumoto Saotome, Tokyo daikūshū (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1971).
Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1979).
Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1982).
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976).
In addition to the above sources used for this book, the reader may wish to consult some of the numerous publications, both factual and fictional, which have appeared in recent years. A particularly rich source of information is the web site www.densho.org, the mission of which is “to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished.” A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to Densho, to the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (Seattle), to the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington State, and to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.
Many friends, family members and colleagues have helped bring this book to fruition, among them Todd Shimoda, Bruce Rutledge, Rick Simonson, Hana Rubin, Davinder Bhowmik, Ted Woolsey, Sara Woolsey, Ted Mack, Scott Pack, Motoyuki Shibata, Brooks Andrews, Jim Peterson, Ted Goossen, and Tess Gallagher. By far, the single greatest contributor has been my wife, Rakuko, without whose intelligence, imagination, determination and love, there would have been no book. She has been my coauthor every step of the way.