The inner grounds of Yasukuni Shrine were bathed in the translucent glow of pale pink cherry blossoms so revered by the young kamikaze pilots as symbols of the evanescence of life. Under the boughs, a number of older men wearing white armbands hosted an outdoor exhibit, mainly crude paintings of kamikaze pilots about to depart on their last, glorious missions. About six thousand Japanese, ages eighteen to thirty, died in suicide attacks in the war, many during its final weeks, some even after the surrender.
Yasukuni Jinja (which translates as “Shrine of the Peaceful Country”) was established in 1869 by order of the imperial government, and dedicated to “the celebration and consolation of the spirits of all those who died to defend the emperor and the empire.” It was intended at its inception to honor loyalists who died in the Meiji Restoration, but as time went on, it included imperial subjects who died in later wars. Some 2,450,000 Japanese war dead are enshrined as “guardian gods,” or kami, at Yasukuni Shrine.
Here at Yasukuni, Yoshio Shimizu would be considered a deity.
In 1946, the occupation government demoted Yasukuni from a state shrine to a private religious shrine. But there are many among the powerful right-wing factions in the government who would like to see its former status reinstated.
Yasukuni is still controversial in Japan today, a focal point for nationalist patriotic sentiment. Every August the country waits to see whether the prime minister will make the traditional visit to Yasukuni. In 1994, though Prime Minister Murayama declined to make the visit, a renegade group of his Cabinet ministers defied a high court ruling by openly worshiping here.
In the Yashukan, the war museum adjacent to Yasukuni, I appeared to be the only non-Japanese person in the exhibit hall. Yasukuni and Yashukan are meant for Japanese visitors, not Americans. Most of the explanatory text was in Japanese, and I considered asking someone to translate for me. But the other visitors appeared to be deeply immersed in their own private experience, and I decided not to intrude.
One eerie aspect of Yasukuni is that the World War II exhibits are not shown in the context of a disastrous militarism that brought death and misery to millions of Japanese and others. To the contrary, even photographs of Prime Minister Tojo and General Yamashita, both executed as war criminals, are accorded honor here. At Yasukuni, you almost feel as if Japan won the war.
There is a War-Dead Memorial Peace Prayer Hall proposed for a site adjacent to Yasukuni by the Japan War-Bereaved Association, which publicly contends that Japan did not engage in “aggressive war.” The continuing debate over the meaning of the project illustrates the gulf that splits Japanese society on the issue of war responsibility. Its contents are as contentiously debated in Japan as was the Smithsonian exhibit in the United States on the dropping of the atomic bomb. As the Irish peace scholar Terence Duffy has pointed out, “Arguments concerning the assumed ‘title’ of the facility are central to the controversy, since it is not clear whether the project is conceived as a ‘war’ or as a ‘peace’ museum.”
Yashukan covers several eras of Japanese militarism, including the feudal Tokugawa period, when Japan was divided into warring shogunates. I walked into a hall displaying samurai armor. Mournful shakuhachi flute music wafted from a boom box in a corner. Helmets, lacquered red inside, some improbably tall, were augmented with gilded metal horns or horsehair plumes, or fanciful crests representing snowstorms, catfish tails, lightning bolts. Metal face masks grimaced from their pedestals. Whole suits of armor wired together—ridged and riveted breast protectors, leggings, hinged forearm plates—formed rigid, glowering homunculi. The fearsome personae of the warriors who once wore this empty armor were still palpable. The peach-faced kamikaze pilots, whose memorabilia filled the adjacent rooms, must have looked back to this military tradition with great pride.
The English-language brochure states that the aim of the museum is to pray for the repose of soldiers’ souls “and for eternal world peace,” but the darker, unmentioned stories that are also integral to the events commemorated at Yushukan came to mind. When I looked at the certificate recognizing “the brave actions of the 13th Flight Squadron in Nanjing (formerly Nanking), China in December 1937,” my thoughts turned to the Nanking Massacre—a six-week orgy of terror in which the Imperial Army ran amok, bayoneting babies, gang-raping women by the tens of thousands, summarily executing military prisoners. When I stood in front of the shiny black steam locomotive in the courtyard, which, the sign proclaimed, “holds the distinction of being the first to pass the junction at the opening of the Thai-Burma Railway,” I thought about the starved and tortured British and Canadian prisoners of war who laid the tracks.
It’s not that I expected to see in a Japanese military museum a memorial to the Korean comfort women, the Chinese victims of Unit 731, or the American GIs who died on the Bataan Death March, but those outrages were, to my mind, ever present.
For a New York Times article, correspondent Nicholas Kristof asked a Shinto priest at Yasukuni what the requirements were for becoming a god. What about soldiers who had committed atrocities—raped Chinese women or tortured POWs? “I did not get a clear answer,” he reported, “but as far as I could tell, any military person, no matter how brutal, became a kami upon death in combat.”
Where I found poignancy in Yasukuni was not, however, where it was intended—in those spectacular displays like the gorgeous color panorama of the Divine Thunderbolt Corps in “final attack mode” at Okinawa. Instead, I gravitated to the glass cases that contained the humble personal effects of the war dead. Here was the human face of war: notebooks, binoculars, a small rocking horse, a harmonica, reading glasses, a torn photo of a child, a protractor and compass, a cloth doll. Kamikaze soldiers, elegant in their long white scarves, smiled from sepia photographs. I looked at a glove, a belt buckle, a toothbrush, a spoon.
In one case there was a flag like the one I would soon return to the sister of Yoshio Shimizu—the same blood or rust spots, and holes in the silk. I examined one of the museum’s most famous displays, a poem written in human blood on a rice paper scroll, which was exhibited in front of a gleaming seppuku dagger: last words, not translated into English, from a soldier who committed ritual suicide. I looked up from the glass case in revulsion. I glanced out a window that opened out toward an ordinary apartment building. On the landing, someone’s laundry was drying, their umbrellas and bicycles stashed away. I felt restored by these everyday objects, by the fact that this room of the dead looked out on the living.
Tired by hours in the museum, I decided to take the train back to the hotel. As I waited on the platform, I recalled my father’s letter about a crowded train in Nagoya during the occupation:
1 November 1945
Since we are the conquerors, we just walked on the station platform without buying tickets and boarded the trains first. Soon the Nip populace began filing in—and although I am a conqueror—I couldn’t stand to see Nip women with infants slung on their backs papoose-style standing while I sat. So I got up to give them my seat and they kept bowing and smiling and thanking me over and over again. Wonder if the Nips ever did that in places that they occupied?
Individual acts of kindness came naturally to my father, though every incident that happened to him in Japan was filtered through the lens of his anger and bitterness toward the Japanese military, his sorrow over lost friends.
22 October 1945, USS Natrona
Just happened to think of a charming letter my friend received from his sister-in-law. She thanked him for all the boys that did the fighting and helped bring Peace to the world, and she mentioned some of his friends who were wounded and she thanked him for safeguarding the security of the world so that her son won’t have to participate in a war in his generation. Well, I hope that is true.
But we over here—the combat veterans—feel that the only real heroes are those that gave their lives in the supreme sacrifice and those unfortunate ones who were maimed for life physically or mentally.
The train was very crowd
ed, and according to the map, I needed to make a change after two stations. I somehow managed to get lost. “Sumimasen. Excuse me. Do you speak English?” I asked a young student wearing a severe black military-style school uniform with a high collar and brass buttons. His hair was cropped short, the slight beginning of a mustache showed above his lips, which parted into a shy smile. “Chicago? You know Chicago?” he inquired with enthusiasm. “I was on homestay in Illinois.” He insisted on escorting me all the way to Akasaka Station, near the hotel.
If, fifty years ago, this young man had received a red envelope summoning him to war, would he have gone? Undoubtedly yes. The Japanese writer KenzaburM Le writes about how, every day in his school during his childhood in a remote corner of Japan, the teacher would ask the students one by one, “What would you do if the Emperor called upon you to die?” “I would take a knife and rip open my belly,” the child was obliged to reply.
I RETURNED TO OUR ROOM just as Lloyd woke up from fevered sleep. I stretched out beside him on the bed that filled most of our tiny room, alternately feeding him and slurping ramen noodles from a cardboard cup that I had bought from a 7-Eleven around the corner.
After looking at bullet-pierced, blood-stained military uniforms at Yasukuni, I was ready for some escape. I turned on the TV. The English language channel featured Gone with the Wind. As I dozed off, Scarlett and Rhett fled General Sherman’s army against a flamered sky.
CHAPTER TEN
Shadows
PEOPLE SAID THAT nothing would grow in Hiroshima for at least seventy-five years after the bomb. This turned out to be untrue. Hiroshima today is shaded by leafy mature trees—willow, cherry, pine. Azaleas bloom along its busy boulevards. Because the center of the city has been preserved as open space and rebuilt as the Peace Park, Hiroshima is, ironically, one of the greenest cities in all of Japan.
In the arrival hall of the Hiroshima train station, I spotted my old friend Shoji right away—though it had been ten years since I’d last seen him. Bearded, black ponytail hanging to his waist, wearing a wrinkled gray Issey Miyake ensemble that looked like a pair of pajamas, he stood out in the crowd. He grinned, grabbing my backpack. “Where’s Lloyd?” he asked, puzzled. I explained that he was lying low in a hotel in Tokyo, immobilized by a nasty flu, that I’d only be here in Hiroshima for forty-eight hours.
I met Shoji Kurokami, a Hiroshima native, when he was an art student in Seattle in the early 1980s. In our Seattle days, I’d always admired Shoji’s ability to improvise solutions to intractable problems, and his refreshing readiness to embark on spontaneous adventures. Suddenly inspired to attend a Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco? Shoji would jump into his red pickup and, Kerouac-like, drive a thousand miles through the night to get you there.
After finishing art school, Shoji returned to Hiroshima. He married, divorced, and remarried. He and his second wife, Miyuke, have two sons. Divorce is uncommon in Japan, so already Shoji and Miyuke defy the norm. They’ve built a home in Mukhara-cho, a rural suburb twenty miles north, where Shoji maintains a painting studio and is actively involved in the community.
Currently, Shoji informed me, he was president (“bossman” he called it) of the local PTA. He told me, deadpan, that when another parent complained about a problem at the school, and asked him for his opinion, he advised, “Get rid of education.”
What Shoji meant by “education” is the rote authoritarian approach that marked his own elementary and high school experience in Japan. “I believe in curiosity, in encouraging kids to ask questions,” he explained. “That’s different from ‘education,’ where they say to student, ‘You know nothing. The teacher is only one who knows.’ ” As a schoolboy in Hiroshima, Shoji refused to cut his hair, wear a school uniform, or join his class in singing Kimigayo, the national anthem (a hymn of praise to the emperor).
For Shoji, who is thirty-six, the atom bomb is a fact of life. As a child, he used to wait for the school bus beside a set of concrete steps on the landing of a large downtown bank building. A vague pattern of a human form was etched into the surface. “I always knew there was a human shape there. Citizens can see it every day. So I was pretty shocked when my mother told me it was a ‘shadow’ and I didn’t know what ‘shadow’ meant.”
The intensity of the blast vaporized the human being who sat or stood on those steps on August 6, 1945. The person’s body acted as a stencil—briefly masking that spot from the heat and light of the explosion. All that was left of the person was the shadow on the bleached surface. “When I was sixteen,” Shoji told me, “they cut the concrete out from the street, lifted it out, and brought it here.”
We were standing in front of that same shadow inside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Shoji had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to accompany me. “I come here only once every twenty years,” he joked, then looked serious. “My city doesn’t have a past,” he told me. “Atom bomb wiped that all away.”
I described to Shoji the controversy in the States over the Smithsonian exhibit on the dropping of the atom bomb. I told him how, in the words of one Smithsonian official, “the veterans wanted the exhibit to stop when the doors to the bomb bay opened. And that’s where the Japanese wanted it to begin.”
Shoji considered this, then said thoughtfully, “Who is at fault, who has the guilt, that is not really important issue for me. Peace should be the main issue. The important thing is that as many people see and remember Hiroshima.”
He’d heard about the tasteless (and since scrapped) plan for the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp showing the mushroom cloud, with the caption, “Hiroshima bomb hastens war’s end.” Even this didn’t faze him. “I can look at stamp in neutral way,” he said. “Maybe it helps people to think about Hiroshima. Some people may think bomb was good—and maybe that’s OK. But to me, bomb is bomb.”
We walked past glass cases containing the devastating relics of the conflagration: a wooden sandal with the imprint of someone’s left foot; a carbonized child’s lunchbox; the distorted frame of a tricycle that belonged to three-year-old Shimichi Tetsutani, who died in the blast. The legend on the display reads: “Shimichi’s father thought his son would be too lonely in the family tomb, so he buried him in the backyard with his best friend, his tricycle.” Later, his father dug up the tricycle and donated it to the Peace Museum. I knew Shoji and I were both thinking about Sage, his fearless four-year-old son. That could be Sage’s tricycle.
We walked past the life-size diorama of a procession of sufferers against a background of red sky. Skin hung in strips from their flayed arms, which they held out in front of them to ease the pain. We silently observed a photograph of a woman’s shoulder, the cross-striped pattern from her kimono permanently imprinted on her skin by the intense heat. Horrifying photos of keloid scars, malformed toenails, women with faces transformed into something resembling bean curd. A piano, a radio, a ten-yen bill. There were sake cups, ivory seals, pipes, teapots, vases—all melted into unrecognizable lumps. A blackened and almost obliterated statue of Daikokutsin had been recovered from a ruined Buddhist temple. Daikokutsin, the caption said, was “the god of good fortune.”
This weapon was so insidious, so democratically destructive. The victims’ suffering was so grotesque and for many, final.
An uncomfortable thought kept insinuating itself in my mind: part of the story was missing here. I tried to push it away but it bore down with some insistence. There was little introspection here on the larger context of why Hiroshima was incinerated, of what else was happening in the world on August 6, 1945. The wording on the Pearl Harbor display was a troubling example: “On December 7, 1941, a bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor and Japan was hurled into the war.” Was dropped. Was hurled. In this “victims’ history,” as one scholar called it, “the war appears as a natural catastrophe which ‘happened’ to Japan, as if without the intervention of human agency.”
True, there were some displays downstairs, added as recently as 1994, which showed that Hiroshima was a h
ub of military activity. But the possible reasons listed in large block type for why the United States dropped the bomb—(1) limiting U.S. casualties, (2) to force Japan to surrender before the Soviet Union could enter the war, and (3) to measure the effectiveness of the bomb—do not mention the responsibility of Japan’s own military government’s refusal to surrender as a cause.
I had accumulated a collection of books on the subject of Hiroshima and though the debate rages on, what I read had ultimately convinced me that the Japanese military would not surrender. Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, on August 9, half the Supreme War Leadership Council was still determined to fight on. War Minister Anami declared to the Cabinet, “I am quite sure that we could inflict great losses on the enemy, and even if we fail in the attempt, our one hundred million people are ready to die with honor.” Finally, on August 10, the emperor spoke out and the peace faction on the Cabinet overruled the military zealots. The peace faction considered the atomic bomb to be “a gift from heaven” that allowed them to prevail.
In Luzon, on August 6, 1945, when the war-weary soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Division heard the news of the surrender, they did not know what lay under that mushroom cloud, what lay ahead for the human race and the entire planet as a consequence. At that moment, the bomb meant the end of the war, it meant that they did not have to participate in another bloody campaign. They were going to live, after all.
Paul Fussell, in his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” suggests that “the degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War.” Was this some sort of demented mathematical equation—ten times more knowledge, twenty times less shame? Yet I had to admit that my discomfort about what was missing here was directly related to what I’d learned over the last years about the ghastliness of the Pacific War, and the brutality of Japan’s military regime. As I’d talked to Pacific War vets, whenever we came to the subject of the bomb, they would not budge from their implacable belief that its use was absolutely necessary to end the war. The historian Ian Buruma suggests that the attack on Hiroshima might be viewed as “a war crime that actually might have helped to bring the war to a quicker end.”
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