by Masuji Ibuse
August 9.
At dinner time last night we reached the end of our emergency rations. From today, that meant, we should have to get food from the company canteen. Shigeko went to get our breakfast and Yasuko our lunch, but at lunchtime both of them started complaining; I imagine they had set each other off.
If the food involved were only raw vegetables and rice, they said, it would not be so bad, but to go and fetch cooked food that other people had prepared, and to eat it without so much as lifting a finger themselves made them feel terribly guilty. Yesterday they had had some work to do, helping with the refugees, but from today on they would have nothing at all to occupy them, and they felt too ashamed to go and get the food. The manager had told Yasuko today that she could have a holiday from the office until further notice.
Intensely irritated, I immediately found them something to do.
“Tomorrow you can go to where the house was at Senda-machi,” I said. “And you can find out exactly what’s happened to the people in the neighborhood association. Then, while you’re about it, you might as well get out of the air raid shelter any changes of clothing we’re likely to need in the near future, as well as the bottles filled with rice. The rice was for an emergency, so I don’t know when we’re supposed to eat it, if not at a time like this.”
This seemed to put their minds at rest, and they declared that tonight they would go to the canteen together to get the evening meal.
The air raid shelter at the house in Senda-machi contained a radio, blankets, dishes and bowls, kitchen equipment, and various foodstuffs other than rice. In a clear space in the garden, we had buried four half-gallon bottles of rice, a four-and-a-half-gallon can of soybeans, and another can containing underwear and cotton kimonos. I had checked that they were not destroyed by the fire as we were on our way out of the burning city.
Shigeko and Yasuko, who had only the clothes they stood up in, were discussing something in undertones. It seemed they wanted to wash their underwear, but were wondering what to do until it dried. I told them they should go down to the river, take all their things off and wash them, and stay in the water swimming until they dried. So they took their towels and set off.
The tension of my mind must have relaxed, for I suddenly began to feel the heat badly, and sleepiness seemed to steal over me irresistibly where I sat. Yet as soon as I lay down and shut my eyes, the recollection of the countless columns of smoke rising from the river bed and the hills drove sleep away.
Whether I stayed up or lay down, the sweat poured from me steadily, but though I wanted to wipe my face, this was only possible with the right half. The left half, with its bandage, reminded me of the feeling when a hot towel is pressed on one’s face at the barber’s, only far worse, and there was a suggestion of thick sweat or pus accumulating beneath the cloth. The only thing I could do was to dab at the cloth to help it soak up the sweat or pus. I kept dabbing at it, and the cloth began to feel soggy. I should have changed it, but I had no fresh bandage, so I got a triangular bandage from a first-aid kit, cut it to fit my face, poured boiling water on it, and put it in the sun to dry.
I was leaning against a pillar on the veranda, feeling drowsy, when a man called Tanaka from the general affairs section came to tell me that he had handed over some provisions to a group of soldiers who had come to take them away.
“That’s a fine thing you’ve gone and done!” I said. “When did you give the stuff to them?”
“A while ago—about an hour, I should say.”
“What soldiers were they, and where did they take it?”
“They were infantrymen, so I thought they were from the Second West Japan Corps, and gave them what they wanted.”
We had been storing the food for the Signal Corps and the Second West Japan Corps. Late at night about two weeks before, Captain Nozu, who lived opposite our house in Senda-machi, had arrived at our place all out of breath, and had asked me to look after some food for him. I asked him why. He said there had been a call from divisional staff saying that things had reached a point where Hiroshima might be bombed any day, and that they were to get army reserve supplies out of the way immediately. Captain Nozu, who was a conscript and knew nothing about army affairs outside his own barracks, entreated me to help him. I called Mr. Fujita at the works before taking charge of the food, then had it taken to the works warehouse that same night.
The following morning, Lieutenant Kokubu of the Second West Japan Corps arrived at our house and asked us to store in the works warehouse some army provisions that they wanted to get out of the way. The matter was urgent, but they couldn’t think of anywhere to take the stuff, so in the end they had called Captain Nozu and asked what the Signal Corps was doing, as a result of which he had come to me.
I checked with the company and agreed to take it again, but there was so much that it would not all go in, and I had to go and ask a local tatami-maker called Tauchi to take care of some of the rice, which was in woven straw bags. It was the rest of this rice, the stuff in the works warehouse, that the soldiers had taken away.
Their story was highly suspicious. They had said that Lieutenant Kokubu had been injured in the bombing, but anybody who came from the Second West Japan Corps to get food stores should have had an introduction from him, or papers of some kind at least. We must resign ourselves, in short, to the fact that we had been hoodwinked by scoundrels working under cover of the general chaos. It was too late to doing anything about it.
I gave Tanaka a stern warning. From now on, I said, he must on no account give anything to anybody other than Lieutenant Kokubu or a representative of his armed with the lieutenant’s own card. That was one of the conditions under which we had taken charge of the stores in the first place. What complicated matters was that clerical business pertaining to the storage of foodstuffs was out of our hands now, and the Signal Corps was using a small Japanese-style room on the second floor of our office buildings as its quartermaster’s office.
I went to the works warehouse and found precisely the number of bags missing that Tanaka had said. It seemed to me that the familiar world had started to come apart at the seams since the bomb had fallen on Hiroshima. In olden times, people used to say that in an area badly ravaged by war it took a century to repair the moral damage done to the inhabitants; and it began to seem as though they might have been right.
CHAPTER 11
I went to the company offices to report on the theft of provisions, taking Tanaka with me as the man in charge on the day in question. We were dealing with the army, so the matter was not one to be taken lightly. Tanaka had undoubtedly been remiss, but the real responsibility was my own, while the ripples of the affair would almost certainly extend to Captain Nozu as well.
The missing goods consisted of seven bales of polished rice and ten cases of canned beef, along with five crates of a white wine known as “Sadoya’s Special.” It was outrageous for soldiers on active service at such a time of emergency, when the food shortage was at its height, to come along as bold as brass in an army truck and cheat civilians out of army reserve stores that had been left in their charge. The soldiers had come in two trucks, and the lead truck had reportedly had a small, pale blue flag on it.
“When you eat this canned beef you have to cook it with eggplant,” a superior private who looked older than the rest had remarked gratuitously as they loaded the canned beef on to a truck. “It brings some people out in a rash if they eat it straight.” The beef was supposed to have been stored ready for use in scorched earth warfare following a possible enemy invasion, but one soldier at least was obviously already familiar with its delights.
“That means that a company officer came with them!” said the manager indignantly when Tanaka gave his account of the episode. “I’d no idea the army had deteriorated so badly.” His lips were twitching with suppressed emotion. Tanaka stood stiffly upright and almost motionless before the manager, his face white. A man of forty-eight, he came from Kabe, but was staying in the work
s dormitory while his wife worked in a foundry in their home town. Both their two sons had died in battle, and they had had a large tombstone erected—so people said—with the two names carved on it side by side.
Although he was standing at attention, Tanaka could only manage a feeble, spineless kind of voice. “Actually, sir,” he faltered, “there was one older man, a superior private, and the others had their jackets off. They were all wearing puttees and workshoes.”
“But I thought you said they had a pale blue flag on the truck? A pale blue flag should have meant it was carrying a company officer. A red flag would have meant a field officer, and a yellow one a general. You lost two sons in battle yourself, didn’t you? So don’t tell me you don’t know that much about the army.”
“But you see, the older private was in the infantry, so I simply thought they were soldiers from the Second West Japan Corps. I thought the blue flag meant they’d come at the orders of a company officer. But then, I was stupid….Yes—you must blame me, Mr. Fujita, it was all my fault….” He dropped his head and, without warning, started sobbing, his shoulders heaving with emotion.
“Well at any rate, we shall have to submit a report to the Second West Japan Corps,” said the manager, turning to me. “As quickly as possible. And all three of us—Tanaka, and you Shizuma, and myself—will have to sign it.”
“Very well,” I said. “The usual form for written explanations, I suppose?”
He agreed. Unfortunately, the Second West Japan Corps had vanished, barracks and all, in the raid, and there was nowhere to take the documents. The paymaster’s office of the Signal Corps had moved into the second floor of our offices, but I doubted whether it was any good presenting the paymaster’s office of the Signal Corps with documents addressed to the paymaster’s office of the Second West Japan Corps. We civilians did not know enough about the way things were organized inside the army.
All the same, I drew up the document in the form of a written explanation. The manager and I stamped it with our own personal seals, and I got Tanaka to put his thumbprint on it. Then I took it upstairs to the paymaster’s office of the Signal Corps. A chair and table stood on the tatami in the small, Japanese-style room, and a pair of boots that somebody had taken off stood on a piece of newspaper inside the sliding doors. Naturally, I took off my own shoes before going in. Captain Nozu was out on official business, I was told, but there were two army men who looked like noncommissioned officers; I could not tell their rank as they had their jackets off, but one of them who was apparently the senior of the two, with a small toothbrush mustache, took the envelope containing the document that I held out to him.
I said that I was an acquaintance of Captain Nozu, and he said, “Good of you to come, I’m sure.” Then he took out the document and started to read it. His expression changed. “Oh dear,” he said. “This won’t do at all.” He thrust the document back at me. “Surely this should be presented to Lieutenant Kokubu of the paymaster’s office of the Second West Japan Corps, shouldn’t it? This is the paymaster’s office of the Signal Corps.”
“Yes, but we’d like you to pass it on to Lieutenant Kokubu. You see, we’re not sure where the Second West Japan Corps is…”
This remark definitely seemed to displease him.
“No nonsense, now,” he said. “If this unit passed on that kind of document to Lieutenant Kokubu, it would be as good as putting him in the wrong before the whole corps. And that would affect the record of the whole paymaster’s office of the Second West Japan Corps. Anyway, it’s quite impossible for us to accept it.”
Helpless to do anything further, I retired downstairs and reported to the manager. Tanaka was no longer to be seen. The manager told me that Tanaka had sworn to make amends to the army for the stolen goods, even if it took him all his life to do it.
I went back to the small detached house that we were living in. I was terribly tired. Shigeko and Yasuko had not got back from the river yet, so I decided to have a rest until dusk, and putting up the mosquito net to keep off the flies, lay down.
I slept a while, and awoke with the cry of an owl ringing in my ears. Opening my eyes, I saw the afternoon sun shining on the white clay wall of the storehouse beyond the shrubs in the garden, and the young wife of the house owner walking towards the shrubs. To imagine owls crying was nonsense. In fact, I found, I had woken because my feet were cold. It worried me that I should get cold feet in August, at the height of summer, while the sun was still up. Feeling my toes, I found that the big toe on each foot was rather painful. Somewhat dismayed, I got up, lifted up the mosquito net, and went out onto the veranda. As I did so, something struck cold at my left cheek. I felt at it, and found that the bandage had gone. It was caught on the bottom edge of the mosquito net.
The mirror showed me that the infected place on the side of my nose was gaping open and had dried up crisp and hard. Life was one depressing thing after another. I went and soaked a small towel in water and gently wiped the affected area, replacing the bandage with a new piece which I fastened in place with sticking plaster.
I was folding up the mosquito net when Shigeko and Yasuko came home and fetched dinner for three from the works kitchen. The meal they set out on the borrowed table consisted of sweet potato leaves boiled down in soy, pickles, and boiled barley with bran mixed in it. As we ate, Shigeko and Yasuko talked to me of conditions in the city, as they had heard them from people they met by the river. They had washed their baggy cotton breeches, their shirts, and their underwear, then gone and sat in the river while their clothes dried on the pebbly, dried-up part of the bed. There were three other women doing the same thing, and they had talked of Hiroshima all the while they waited.
—
In the playground of the First Prefectural Middle School in the city—one of them said—there was a reservoir of water for firefighting purposes. Around it, hundreds of middle school students and voluntary war workers lay dead. They were piled up at the edge of the reservoir, half-naked since their shirts had been burned away. Seen from a distance, they looked like beds of tulips planted round the water. Seen closer, they were more like the layers of petals on a chrysanthemum.
In the road with streetcar tracks in front of the Shiratori Shrine, one of the women had seen a streetcar reduced to an iron skeleton, with the half-consumed body of the driver still standing grasping the handle. The half-burned bodies of four or five passengers lay on or near the platform.
On the morning of the sixth, another of the women said, a squad of cadet officers had been drilling on the West Parade Ground under the officer in charge. They had just finished, and were taking off their tunics for physical training, when the great flash came. One of them, at the very rear of the ranks, had been standing with his back against a leafy tree, and claimed to have seen the keep of Hiroshima Castle at the very instant it was blown away—the whole keep, its shape intact, flying off through the air to the southeast.
The next moment, he could no longer see anything. Yet he swore that he had seen the five-story keep of the castle, just as it had always been, up there in the sky forty or fifty yards away from its original position. Even if the story was true, he could hardly have consciously looked at it; the sight, rather, must have imprinted itself on his retina at the instant of the explosion.
People who were there later reported that the keep lay smashed to smithereens on the river embankment, reduced to a heap of clay and broken tiles. It seems that the blast of a bomb has the ability both to push and to lift. The keep of the castle must have weighed some thousands of tons, yet the force moving it was greater than gravity, and it was lifted into the air without being smashed.
Following the dropping of the bomb, the towns and villages around the city had all, sooner or later, sent their own relief parties into the ruins. One of them, from the town of Miyoshi, had set out with the aim of looking for pupils from the Miyoshi Girls’ High School and other inhabitants of the town and its environs who had been doing war work in the city. Some of
the girls in third grade and above had been mobilized to work as assistant nurses at the army hospital, while others had been assigned to the eleventh Air Force arsenal at Kure to help in the manufacture of planes. The relief party from Miyoshi, with about one hundred members, had entered the city early on the morning of the seventh, but had been trapped in the flames and most of its members had died. One of them, a man called Jitsuo Tabuchi, head of the party’s number one squad and a lecturer in the postgraduate course of the girls’ high school, had escaped and got as far as Gion, outside the city, before collapsing. The girls who had been in the city when the bomb fell had, of course, all been killed outright.
(I should add here that I myself happened to make Mr. Tabuchi’s acquaintance after the war. He told me that on the morning of the sixth, he had been reading the paper before going to work when something like a pale blue spark seemed to cross the sky. He had dismissed it as imagination, but around noon an army announcement over the radio had reported the bombing. By around three in the afternoon, the injured who had escaped from the city were beginning to arrive in Miyoshi by train. The Geibi Line was not running beyond Shimo-Fukagawa, so they had fled as far as Shimo-Fukagawa on foot and boarded the train there.
The local medical association and the Miyoshi fire brigade set up tents in front of Miyoshi Station, where they gave first aid to the injured. Around five in the afternoon the medical association, the staffs of the Miyoshi Middle School and the Miyoshi Girls’ High School, the members of the fire brigade, and other citizens from the town and neighboring villages conferred and decided to organize a relief party. Tabuchi was chosen as head of the first squad. Around five on the morning of the seventh, he boarded a train in charge of eighty people—teachers from the girls’ high school and volunteers from the town and neighboring villages—and went as far as Shimo-Fukagawa, whence they proceeded into Hiroshima on foot. The time was now about half-past ten in the morning. They were appalled at what they found, but they did not yet know, of course, what kind of bomb had fallen. The horror was so stupefying that they could do nothing but take helpless note of whatever they saw.