Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  I am not by any means qualified. But then I like to style myself as something different from a nurse. I am a carer – and that is what I still do now, and that is what those two awful bombs have given to me: I care. I have cared, very deeply, about each and every one of the humans that entered our wards, and whether they were with us for a few days or a few years, I always strived to make their lives that little bit more bearable.

  I loved them all, the girls, the men and the pitiful old ladies, but the two that I loved the most were my son Toshiaki and Shinzo’s widow, Sakae.

  Even though it is now 60 years since I last saw my dear little boy, it still pains me to the think of him. After the end of the war, he clung to his life for another year. It would be nice to say that they were happy days, but I fear that he spent most of it in the most unspeakable torment.

  I can truly say that I would have given up my life for his – and, when Toshiaki died, I focused my grief on my patients. I would work 18, 20 hour a day on the wards and when my withered arm throbbed and ached, I only ever considered it to be a reminder of my own good fortune.

  By this strange alchemy of reasoning, Sakae’s fragile link with life came to have the most extraordinary hold over me. I had to save her. If I could save her, then I would be saving a little bit of Shinzo, of Toshiaki, of Sumie and Mako and all the others I had lost.

  And, after over two years in that hospital, and with the skin on her back as brittle as parchment, I like to think that I did save her.

  What I could never have guessed was that over those two years, as we chatted amicably and learned to make light of our pain, I would fall in love. And our love was based not on ephemeral beauty but on companionship, on mutual respect, and on a deep understanding of our pasts and our dreams.

  Of all the many gifts that were bestowed on me by the bomb, I would not have dared to dream that I might also find my soulmate. We married three days after she left the hospital. It would have been very fine, perhaps, if we had been able to have children. But I can only count my blessings; I have no time for regret.

  Sakae and I have, in a small way, become ambassadors for Fat Man and Little Boy. We have toured the world, telling people about the bombs in the hope that they may never be repeated. For a while, we even lived in America. How strange it was to be dwelling in the land of our one time enemies. Only a few years earlier, we had been trying to wipe each other off the face of the earth, and yet the matter of race is fast becoming an irrelevance. As I queued up to order a Big Mac and fries, my skin and my nationality were of as little consequence as the shoes on my feet.

  As for Japan after the war, the Motherland was not crushed into the dust and nor were our womenfolk raped and tortured. It took some years, but I believe that once again we have become a great nation – though a kinder, less arrogant nation. It is difficult enough to change the mindset of a grown man, let alone that of a country; but the bombs changed me and they most certainly changed Japan. From being a nation of rampant warmongers, we became the most fervent pacifists, with every victim of the bomb becoming a symbol, in their own right, of the unparalleled horror of war.

  And I am pleased to say that as part of my country’s rehabilitation into the world, our gentle Emperor also received his dues. At the start of the war, nations from around the world stripped him of every one of the medals and orders of gallantry that had been conferred upon him. Yet 30 years later, our Emperor was once again back in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and there amidst all the white-gowned choristers, he became one of the few men in history to be reinvested into that noble and ancient Order of the Garter.

  And with that little bow to the Emperor, I believe that I am nearly done.

  But is there anything yet left to tell? Is there anything that I have missed?

  Well perhaps there is the one last matter I should attend to:

  The Girl.

  I feel that now it is time to make a clean breast of things. You will have noticed how, throughout my little book, I have never once referred to the girl by name. She is always ‘The Girl’.

  The reason is because, at the start of this story, The Girl was nothing more than just ‘a girl’. To me, she was yet one more of Hiroshima’s numberless dispossessed. She had a name, but at that time I was not interested in people’s names – and nor was I much interested in people.

  It would be some time before I came to appreciate The Girl’s worth and to realise that there was considerably more to her than this yakking, chattering seven-year-old waif. So The Girl does have a name – and now I give it to you. Her name is Katsuko.

  For other, quite different reasons, you do not know my name either. Apart from my injured arm, you know next to nothing about my looks. But that is because I am a nobody. It is my story, but I am a mere cipher, just another of the selfish dogs that was allowed to prosper during Japan’s years at war. And that is the way that I would like to keep it.

  At the start of this book, I wrote about the dilemma that I am always asked when people learn that I am Mr Two-Bomb, the man who survived both Little Boy and Fat Man. Am I lucky? Have I been blessed – or cursed?

  I can unequivocally state that I am the luckiest man alive. Through the bombs, I have learned how to care; and I have learned how to love. But perhaps the greatest gift to be bestowed on me by the bombs was that they brought The Girl into my life.

  And she has never left it.

  She is standing over my shoulder now, watching me as I scratch away at these last few paragraphs, still correcting me on the composition of my sentences. She is even more nagging, more talkative and more bossy than she was 60 years ago – and I would not have it any other way. Every day, I give thanks for this woman, this wonderful woman.

  Now in this story, I have called her everything from ‘That chit of a girl’ all the way through to her given name, Katsuko.

  But it would be several years before we hit upon a name with which we both felt comfortable.

  It was a name that I felt I had earned – and I can only hope that she is as proud of her name as I am to use it. For the name that suits her best, and the name which reflects how much she means to me is this: I call her my daughter.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to the foreign correspondents who used to inhabit News Corp's New York bureau in 1998. They included Geoff Stead, Cameron Stewart, Tunku Varadarajan and Oliver August – and not forgetting my stalwart photographer, Shannon Sweeney.

  Also in this diverse cluster of reporters was Andrew Butcher – and it was Andrew who first told me of an extraordinary interview that he'd once had with the original Mr Two-Bomb. I thank you!