Before we left the museum, I stopped to write in the guest book, waiting first while a woman and her young son made their entries. After they stepped away from the book, I read what the boy, a resident of Hong Kong, had written in a childish scrawl: “I mean, everything here is sad and all, but who started it first? Who attacked other countries first? Who killed first?”
It was not apparent in the museum that, up until the moment the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had been waging a war of aggression.
In a blazing flash, its sins in Korea, Nanking, Burma, and Bataan were dissolved in the greater sins of humankind. In that one instant on August 6, 1945, Japan the aggressor was transformed into Japan the victim. What had gotten lost in that horrific and instantaneous transformation?
WE STROLLED THE grounds of Peace Park as a light rain fell. Shoji lit a cigarette as we stood in front of the Peace Cenotaph that contains a box holding the list of the known victims of the bombing. It continues to grow as people die, even now, from radiation sickness. Nearby was a mound of grass under which seventy thousand unidentified bodies lay buried in a mass grave.
“In the years right after 1945, people in Hiroshima really tried to forget about the bombing,” Shoji began. “My ex-wife’s grandparents—both survivors—didn’t tell me anything about the bomb. They just told me a lot about how they recovered. How they planted corn right after the burning.” Surprisingly, streetcars were up and running within three days of the blast. The sight of the functioning streetcars gave hope to the survivors.
“I was raised—almost forced—to believe that America wanted to test a bomb in Japan,” Shoji volunteered. Did he believe that? “I do believe that the Americans wanted to use it. They wanted to use it in actual situation. This war was the last chance. The crazy people got a new toy.” Did he think the emperor was ready to surrender before the bomb was dropped? Shoji paused, “No, I think the emperor really made the decision to surrender because he saw photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Can both of these beliefs be true?
During my visit to Japan, I met Japanese who (unlike Shoji) had lived through the war years. They shocked me when they offered their opinion that the atomic bomb had been necessary to end the war, that the military government would have urged them to mass suicide if the conflagration of Hiroshima hadn’t happened.
My veteran friend Baldwin Eckel was one of the first American soldiers to be on Japanese soil after the surrender. He had the opportunity to speak to many high-ranking people associated with the Japanese military industrial complex—officers, government officials, businessmen. To all of them he posed the same question: “What made you willing to surrender?” Every person answered, “Atomic bomb.” Baldwin explained to me, “Japan’s spiritual fabric was destroyed. It wasn’t the Americans who did it. It was the atomic bomb, something supernatural. They could emotionally live with that explanation.”
Paul Fussell wrote, “To observe from the viewpoint of the war’s victims-to-be that the bomb seemed precisely the right thing to drop is to purchase no immunity from horror.” The phrase offers a helpful way to live with two opposing ideas: that the bombing was necessary to bring peace and that the bombing was inexcusable under any circumstances.
Maybe in order to begin to understand Hiroshima, if that is even possible, you have to be willing to live with paradox and contradiction. In Shoji’s Zen koan, “Bomb is bomb.”
DURING THE WAR, the Japanese military trained the Special Attack Forces at Etajima, the island across the bay from Hiroshima’s Ujina Port. The Imperial Navy Academy was established on Etajima in 1888, and was closed at the end of World War II. It reopened in 1956, as the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force School. I was curious to visit the military museum on Etajima and Shoji agreed to take me there.
The ride on the nearly empty ferry took fifty minutes. The busy harbor, cradled by rolling hills forested with pines, reminded both Shoji and me of Seattle’s Puget Sound.
Our tour guide was a genial fellow in a black suit and tie. We were a group of nine, all similarly attired middle-age men except for me and Shoji. From the playing fields in the distance echoed the “hut hut hut!” of the cadets. Clusters of them, all crew cut and lean, jogged past our walking tour.
The guide was in a good mood. One of his remarks provoked laughter from the group. Shoji nudged me with a translation: “He says that American military planned to move into these beautiful buildings at Etajima, that’s why they only dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.”
Our last stop on the campus was the Educational Museum. We climbed the central marble staircase, which was cloaked in a cascading red carpet. The brochure in English said the museum was intended for students “who come to review the heroic actions of those who have preceded them.”
The Nine Heroes of Pearl Harbor were memorialized here, as were the 2,633 Special Attack Forces and kaiten “human torpedo” forces who “died a heroic death.” In case after case, as at Yasukuni, the photos and effects of the young pilots were reverentially displayed. Many of them were highly educated young men who were drafted when university deferments were terminated by the government in late 1943.
In 1992, Theodore and Haruko Cook, both historians, published the first oral histories of those few soldiers trained as Special Attack Forces who survived the war. Kozu Noiji was one such survivor:
There are men who returned as many as four times from missions, but in every case it was because their Kaiten was unable to launch from the host submarine, or no enemy was found. Nobody who was launched from a submarine ever returned, so we don’t know their feelings. At that final moment a cold sweat must have broken out. Or maybe they went mad. But there are no witnesses. Nothing could be crueler than that. Nothing.
The word kaiten means literally “return to heaven.” Theodore Cook describes a kaiten “not so much a ship as an insertion of a human being into a very large torpedo.” The “pilot” sat in a canvas chair practically on the deck of the kaiten, a crude periscope directly in front of him, the necessary controls close at hand in the cockpit. The nose assembly was packed with three thousand plus pounds of high explosive; the tail section contained the propulsion unit.
Kozu Noiji received a postcard from a comrade who’d departed on a mission ahead of him: “On it was ‘Say hello to Kudo.’ That was our code phrase for ‘Escape is impossible.’ Until that moment we had had no confirmation that the Kaiten was a self-exploding weapon which gave you no chance to escape death.”
Kozu had been unable to verify his fears with his fellow cadets, for fear he would disgrace his university. It was a privilege to be chosen for the Special Attack Forces, a sacrilege to question one’s possible fate.
AT DUSK, WE took the ferry back home. The steady hum lulled Shoji to sleep. I stared out the window at the busy tugboats out on the bay.
No American president has apologized for Hiroshima. No Japanese prime minister has directly apologized for Pearl Harbor, or Nanking. Words like regret and remorse are parsed out by national leaders, and victims understandably find them insufficient. Perhaps my own conflicted feelings inside the Peace Museum were a reflection of the larger ongoing and unresolved debate.
Here’s progress, I thought: Before I opened my father’s ammo box and found the letters and the flag, I didn’t know enough to be conflicted. I wished I could have talked to my father about Hiroshima, about how his feelings toward the bombing had changed since that ecstatic day in Luzon in August 1945, when he and his buddies learned the war was over. I felt confident we could have had a good discussion, even a rational discussion.
In An Ethic for Enemies, theologian Donald Shriver writes, “In the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, the Japanese mean to show that ‘an evil thing happened here. Americans did it.’ It may be a half-truth, but it is a truth.” Were an American head of state to apologize for Hiroshima, suggested Kenzaburō Ōe, “should he not do so to the children of his country, now and in the future, and the children of the world, and do this because our planet is
still haunted by nuclear annihilation?”
The saga of Hiroshima is part of the history (and mythology) of both the United States and Japan. As mutual antagonists in a war of relentless carnage, perhaps looking at the whole picture means we have to look at it together.
Shriver writes, “The most sober—and hopeful—form of international remembrance is forgiveness, that long, many-sided, seldom-completed process of rehabilitating broken human relationships.” Could the Japanese have ended the war sooner? Could the Americans have ended it in any other way? To create the empathy that builds toward forgiveness, shouldn’t we ask ourselves—and each other—those questions?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Amazing Grace
COMPARED TO REGIONS at similar latitude, roughly between that of Casablanca and Barcelona, the west coast of Japan is one of the snowiest places in the world. In winter, cold dry air known as the Siberian High builds up across continental Asia. Part of this air blows eastward from the interior, transforming into northwesterly monsoon winds that gust across the Japan Sea, picking up moisture then dropping it as snow in Japan’s central mountain range.
Suibara, a little town of twenty thousand or so souls, is located west of that central mountain range, about thirteen miles inland from the bustling port city of Niigata, in what the Japanese call “the snow country.”
We were now, finally, heading toward Suibara. It only took two and a half hours by shinkansen, or bullet train, from Tokyo Station to reach Niigata, where we were to spend the night. About an hour into the journey, our sleek train ascended the foothills from the open plain, quilted with the irregular shapes of cultivated fields, and then slipped into a long dark tunnel. I glanced over at Lloyd, who was dozing. I was worried about him. He was still quite ill, his lungs congested, his voice a whisper.
As I looked into the darkness, I began to mull over my encounter the night before with Amy Morita, my only liaison so far with the Shimizu family. We’d met for a curry supper in a Tokyo restaurant. Though it was the first time we’d met in person, it was easy to talk to this frank and warm-hearted young woman. Over chapatis and beer she told me, “I received a call from an official in Suibara a week ago. He wanted to check with me about you, because a few years ago someone from London wanted to return a sword to someone in the town and it turned out they wanted a lot of money for it.” I was shocked. Amy continued, “I told them your purpose was strictly personal, and then he asked my advice about what they should do. The Shimizu family is a little panicked, you see. I told them you don’t expect anything elaborate. I suggested they think of you like a long-lost friend of their brother.”
Then she offered a warning: The Aum guru, Shoko Asahara, had specified April 15—the day Lloyd and I would be arriving in Suibara—as some kind of doomsday. “No one knows what he has planned. Be very careful,” she advised.
Nothing but a sick husband and pending doomsday to worry about, I thought. Suddenly we emerged from the tunnel. A brilliant light flooded our cabin as we headed toward a mountain valley glistening in spring snow.
WE SPENT A restless night in a business hotel in Niigata, a city struck off the atomic bomb target list by the American military a mere three days before they dropped Fat Boy on Hiroshima.
While Lloyd slept, I slipped out to the drab hotel lobby to meet Masako Hayakawa, a local translator who’d volunteered to assist us during our visit to Suibara. Masako was an attractive woman in her fifties, wearing a pleated wool skirt and sensible shoes. She’d studied at the University of Minnesota, majoring in library science, and now lived in nearby Nagaoka, where she worked for the city’s international division and taught at local universities. Consummately professional, she exhibited a corresponding kindness that put me at ease.
After briefing me on our itinerary for the next day, Masako used the pay phone in the lobby to call the Shimizu family and confirm we would be arriving the next day by bus. We said our goodnights and I attempted to get some sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, April 15, I woke up early. The sky had cleared and the day looked promising, no matter what Shoko Asahara had predicted. Lloyd, moving slowly but not complaining, got dressed and ready. At 8:30 a.m. Masako arrived, and we all set off for the bus station.
After hearing Lloyd’s hacking cough, Masako detoured our little party to a pharmacy, where she described flu symptoms to the young pharmacist. While she listened to his advice and then purchased some over-the-counter remedies, my eyes took in the familiar shelves of cough syrups, Band-Aids, aspirins. I always feel at home in pharmacies.
I thought about my father, filling prescriptions behind the counter of Edwards Rexall Pharmacy in Culver City. During all those years of listening to stories about other people’s pain—all those years of counting out the Valium, the Librium, the Ritalin—did memories of the jungle seep through from time to time?
The bus wound through beautiful countryside—rice paddies and vegetable gardens and old tile-roofed houses. In the distance gleamed the snow-covered Ide mountain range. The bus stopped frequently to pick up passengers—sturdy farmwomen in cotton pants, carrying plastic satchels laden with vegetables. The cherry trees alongside the irrigation canals were in first bloom, and Masako gasped with delight each time we passed a stand of them.
The bus was slow and as the sun warmed my skin, I nodded off. From my half-dream state, a perverse thought bubbled up: Why are you giving up the flag? It belongs to your family! Where had that come from, I wondered. Before I could answer, Masako cried out with excitement, “We’re here! This is our stop!” I was instantly awake. We grabbed our packs, threw our change in the box as Masako instructed, and hopped off the bus.
I was surprised to see two men standing by the side of the road to greet us. They carried signs in Japanese that said, “Welcome to Suibara.” The first gentleman was Mr. Asama, from the local Department of Welfare; the other man was Yasue Shimizu, a cousin of Yoshio Shimizu. We filed behind the two men and walked a short distance to the city hall, where the stout and friendly mayor, Mr. Ikarashi, stood waiting next to a shiny black limousine.
More bows. We were introduced to Suezo Shimizu, a courtly man in his sixties with the unruly white hair of an absent-minded professor. He was the husband of Yoshio Shimizu’s sister Hiroshi. (He had followed the old custom of taking his wife’s surname because her family had lost sons.) Suezo’s eyes teared up immediately and so did mine. We bowed deeply. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” I said, “Good morning,” in handbook Japanese. “O-genki desuka?” (“How are you?”) Suezo smiled, speaking rapidly in Japanese, then bowed to Lloyd who extended his hand.
Mr. Mihara, the mayor’s eager assistant, opened the door for us. We clambered into the elegant limo with our backpacks. As we drove through the quiet town, we passed people standing on both sides of the street, waving small Japanese and American flags. “Is today some kind of a holiday?” Lloyd asked. Masako translated. The mayor chuckled. “You are the occasion,” he said. “We are all very touched that you have come from so far away to return the flag.”
The mayor informed us that Suibara was so small, it didn’t yet have a sister city. The biggest event in tiny Suibara was the yearly arrival of the Siberian swans. The town, I gathered, was like an extended family, so this was really a public, not private, occasion. I was returning the flag to the Shimizu family, but really I was returning the flag to the people of Suibara.
THE FIRST THING I noticed as I stepped into the Shimizu house, past the crowd of townspeople, was a simple altar with a framed black-and-white photograph of a young soldier, his face plump and unlined. There he was. Yoshio Shimizu. That’s what he looked like.
Lloyd, Masako, and I were ushered to places of honor at the long low table in the center of the room; cups of green tea and sweets shaped like pink lotus awaited us.
Fifty or so people from the neighborhood were crowded into the room. They sat cross-legged on the floor and faced us expectantly, somberly. The mayor sat at the head of the table and he began by introducing the Shimizu
family: the three sisters of Yoshio Shimizu—Hiroshi, Hanayo, and Chiyono; Suezo Shimizu; Yasue Shimizu, a first cousin; and the son of Yoshio Shimizu’s older brother, Yoshinobu Shimizu, in whose house we were all gathered. Yoshinobu was a robust young man with glossy black hair that stood straight up from his head. His two-year-old daughter sat comfortably in her daddy’s lap, observing the event with great solemnity.
Out of the corner of my eye, I gratefully noted that Lloyd, despite his flu haze, had stepped into his role as official photographer. He moved around the room with fluid grace, snapping shots from various positions.
There was an air of electric emotion in the room. When I raised my cup of tea to take a sip, I noticed that my hand was shaking. Masako nodded at me; it was the moment to hand over the flag.
On the bus ride to Suibara, I was gripped by an irrational fear that the box in my backpack was empty, that somehow I had forgotten to take the flag or had left it in the hotel in Tokyo, or on the train to Niigata. I was suddenly terrified that I’d unzip the backpack and there would be nothing inside. I couldn’t bring myself to check at the time.
Now I reached into the backpack, felt the contours of the box, and pulled it out. I placed it on the table in front of Hiroshi, whose birth order in the family placed her closest to Yoshio among the surviving siblings.
Hiroshi opened the box with her gnarled hands and drew out the flag. A collective gasp. Then crying. Then applause. “Show it to everyone!” exclaimed the mayor. Hiroshi spread the square of silk on the table. There it was—an incontrovertible fact. “I realize seeing this flag again may make you feel sad,” I said softly, “but I hope it will help you honor the memory of your brother.” Hanayo dabbed her wet eyes with a handkerchief.
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