by Masuji Ibuse
I learned from this beautiful but stinking companion that Ōnoura lay about eight miles from the center of the Hiroshima explosion. When the bomb fell on August 6, she had been weeding in the paddy fields with her elder sister, and they did not realize what had happened. There had been a bang, and the leaves of the rice plants had stirred noticeably. They had thought it was an earthquake. On their way home after another couple of hours’ weeding, they had noticed that there were tiles off the wall of the toilet belonging to the local dry goods store. A particularly large number had been stripped off on the east side at the top. In the sky to the east, they could see a spreading black cloud.
“I wonder what that is—a smoke screen for some maneuvers, do you think?” her sister had said. “If it’s not, then it’s something really big.”
In the afternoon, a truck turned off the main road and went in the direction of the National Elementary School. Even so, another two or three hours passed without their realizing anything.
About four o’clock, a member of the women’s association came around with an announcement: “To members of the Ōnoura Women’s Association: You are all requested to come to the National Elementary School. Please come to help nurse the injured. Come to the National Elementary School as soon as possible.”
Getting ready and setting out in great haste, they were overtaken on the road to the school by several trucks carrying the injured. They caught glimpses of blackened skin, of ashen-colored skin, of raw flesh, of people lolled against the side and rear frames as though dead, of people with paper or towels plastered over their faces with holes cut out for the nose and mouth and eyes, of soldiers in the seats by the drivers. Their legs went weak, and for some while they had stood quite still, rooted to the spot.
Mrs. Ōshima took me to the school and said: “Well, I’ll introduce you to that army doctor over there. He’s very helpful, and interested in his work.” She took me to meet a Lieutenant Katō, who was standing at the entrance to the teachers’ room. The impression I got from his amiable expression was that he would not be a man to fuss unduly over trifles. I judged him easy to deal with. However, he stopped me before I could tell him my business.
“For the moment,” he said, “this reception center is not a national elementary school but a branch of an army hospital. Things being as they are, we are accommodating both army and civilian patients at the moment, but I’d be grateful if the locals wouldn’t interfere where the movement of patients is concerned. This story that documents have been sent from this reception center to the center at Nagao-chō is probably—not that I’m doubting you personally—a fabrication of the locals. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is, so let’s forget all about it. I’d like to impress on you again that the reception center is under the jurisdiction of the army.”
I couldn’t help feeling that he was playing with words, but gave in without arguing and started to ask if I could at least see the patients from the Kōjin Unit. But again he interrupted me. It was dangerous to go near the seriously injured, he warned me, as they gave off heat with some kind of poisonous element in it. The hospital was constantly having cases in which a healthy person who’d come to look after the sick was affected by the poison and carried off before the original patients. The more active a person was, and the more he rushed around doing things, the sooner he was affected by the poison. They had even had a case in which somebody who had come to take a slightly injured civilian home had himself been taken sick and had to seek help on the way back. (I later heard that Lieutenant Katō himself died after going back to his home in Tottori Prefecture following the end of the war. The trouble, it was said, was the same—he had been in close contact with too many of the victims of the bomb.)
The lieutenant must have been in a particularly bad mood. Or perhaps he was unwilling for any ordinary civilian to know just how chaotic conditions could be in a military hospital.
Accepting that nothing I said would have any effect, I went back to Hiroshima and reported on what had happened at the temporary reception headquarters for the Kōjin Unit at Nagao-chō. It was a classic case of having taken a lot of trouble for nothing, but I was too pleased that the pain in my toes had disappeared to care.
On returning home, I applied moxa to my knee again. It was pure luck that the pain in my toes had got better when I went to Ōnoura, but at the reception center Rikuo and Masaru told me that they, too, had been using moxibustion since the previous day as a charm to ward off the bomb disease. Tamotsu, as the sanitation NCO, was rather doubtful over the idea of a squad member using moxibustion so indiscriminately. As he saw it, it would have been better if somebody had got an expert to teach them the proper way, so that the rest could imitate his example.
(I have learned since that the number of persons suffering from radiation sickness admitted to the Ōnoura National Elementary School between 5 p.m. on August 6, and September 2, a period of 47 days, was 1,246. They were accommodated in sixteen classrooms averaging 720 square feet each, a total of nearly 14,000 square feet, and their treatment was undertaken by four civilian and seven army doctors, with a daily average of 25 nurses and 70 voluntary workers in four shifts. The number of bodies cremated was approximately 250. Ashes unclaimed were sent to Hiroshima City. These figures come from the records of the Ōnoura local office. At that time, victims of the bomb were being accommodated at national elementary schools throughout the Hiroshima area, but whether every town and village office still preserves similar records or not, I do not know. I have heard, though, that several thousand were sent to the national elementary school at Hesaka, that they could not all be accommodated, and that the school yard and even the gardens of farmhouses in the village were used as emergency reception centers.)
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What follows is another addition that I am making now to this diary. I want to make it in order to correct erroneous reports previously included as fact, and for one further reason that I shall explain later. The relief squad consisted of two groups, fire brigade members (sixteen men) called out by a police directive, and workers from the health office (twelve nurses) called out by the prefectural office. I learned this only recently.
At about ten o’clock on the evening of the sixth, the day the bomb had fallen, the entire fire brigade of Kobatake village assembled at the village office in response to a circular from the village headman. The headman addressed them in more or less the following terms:
“I am sorry to call you out without warning at night, but a police order has made this meeting necessary. The fact is that at about eight a.m. today Hiroshima was bombed, and suffered enormous damage. No details are known yet, but you are to proceed to Hiroshima together with members of the fire brigades of every town and village in the country. You will be doing war work, this means, in accordance with instructions from the authorities. At the same time, however, I look to you all to take proper care to avoid accidents in any demolition work you may do, and also to make particular efforts to help anyone from our village working with Unit No. 32060, Central Honshu—the Kōjin Unit. I wish you all good luck on the field!”
Properly speaking, an address by the head of the fire brigade should have followed. However, his home was a long way from the village office, and blackout regulations ruled out lanterns to light the way there, so he had not been contacted. A man called Kaneshige, treasurer and assistant chief of the brigade, took his place. “It seems,” he said, “that the chief job for the brigade in its forthcoming expedition, quite apart from pulling down houses, will be to give some help to the people of the Kōjin Unit. So I hope you’ll rescue just as many as possible, men from here in Kobatake in particular, and bring them back safe and sound so that we shall all be ready for the defense of the village when the day comes—for come it will, you can be sure. Seeing as no details are available, I hope you’ll all set to with a will in whatever way seems fit when you get to Hiroshima.”
The brigade was dressed in fire-fighting uniforms with rubber-soled, split-toed socks, and carried saws,
ropes, axes, air raid hoods, and overcoats to sleep in at night. Their transport was a so-called “charcoal-driven” truck, and they had to hurry and chop wood into small pieces for use as fuel. What with helping them and seeing them off, the whole village was in a turmoil. The truck’s headlights were covered so as to throw light for a distance of only three or four yards, and the people being seen off and those seeing them off could not even distinguish each other’s faces in the gloom. Husband and wife knew each other only by their voices as hands were stretched down from the truck, hands stretched up to clasp them from below….
The truck stopped first at the Takafuta village office. Here they were piled with flour, rolled sushi, sugar, and the like by local well-wishers, and the head of the local veterans’ association spoke a few encouraging words. Then, together with the Takafuta fire brigade, they turned back again to pick up the firemen of Toyomatsu, Yuki, Fukunaga, and four other villages and towns, arriving in Shōge around dawn. They left there by the first train in the morning. They arrived in Yaga-machi, outside the city proper, around ten, then entered the town on foot and set about the task of rescuing survivors and burning the dead.
Since the whole place had been razed to the ground, the ropes and saws they had brought for pulling down houses were quite useless. They gathered together any kettles and empty bottles they came across in the debris, filled them with water, and went around rationing it out to the victims, who were suffering from raging thirst. Whenever they came across a badly burned person staggering along the road or sitting on the ground, they made him open his mouth and poured the water in, carefully, so as not to spill it. Such tasks and the cremating of the dead kept them more than occupied.
The rescuing of survivors, on the other hand, did not go so smoothly. They discovered a number of the twenty-one members of the Kōjin Unit from Kobatake, but altogether nineteen of them, including those killed outright and those who died later of radiation sickness, never got home alive.
In the meantime, the Kobatake health center had had a telegram on the night of the sixth, addressed to its head and saying: “Heavy losses. Come at once.” The head of the center, a Dr. Satake, set out at once (he was in Hiroshima for only two or three days, then went home, but died after the end of the war), and immediately sent an order to Mr. Kano, head of the center’s medical section, to come to Hiroshima right away to help in the relief of survivors. He was to bring with him the welfare nurses from Jinseki county. Kano set out on foot with twelve county nurses on August 10, but floods made it impossible to get a train from Shōge Station, so they walked to Miyoshi and spent the night there. The next morning they went by train to Yaga-machi, then proceeded to the relief headquarters.
The relief headquarters, they found, had moved to part of a brick warehouse in the grounds of the army’s branch clothing depot. The nurses’ main responsibility was to look after the injured. The chief at the headquarters, who was called Kitajima and was head of the Prefectural Office Sanitation Department, had a triangular bandage wrapped round his face where the bomb had caught him.
Kano was told to take charge of the clerical work. Patients came pouring in, but neither the chief nor the other doctors knew how to treat the disease, with its symptoms of high fever and diarrhea. The one thing they could do—on the assumption that dietary supplements at least could do no harm—was to get the nurses Kano had brought with him to use the vitamins and glucose for injections which they had packed in their rucksacks when they left. Between the tenth and the fifteenth days, when it had all gone, they had orders from above to make way for nurses who had come with medicine from another county. Kano, too, was dismissed and went back to the village.
On returning home, some of the nurses had diarrhea and slight loss of hair in the same way as the victims of radiation sickness. But there was no known treatment and no medicine. There was a great deal of panic-stricken consultation among them, as a result of which each did what she thought best. Some soothed their nerves by resorting to moxibustion; some avoided going out into the sun, so as to keep up their white corpuscle count; others stuffed themselves with tomatoes. Some even ate the leaves of potted aloes. I, for one, can well understand this need to clutch at any straw.
The members of the relief squad who had walked about the ruins fared much worse than the nurses. Of twenty-one from Takafuta, one died on the spot, and eleven died of radiation sickness after their return. That was the result of simply walking in the ruins. In the village of Kitami, fifteen out of sixteen died, leaving only one alive today. In Senyō, all died.
Having no need to keep silent any longer, I have described these things, right down to the nurses’ superstitious resort to moxibustion, just as they occurred. In the same way, I have set down the exact statistics of deaths among those who wandered about the bombed city.
My reason is that the talks on my niece Yasuko’s marriage, which were rapidly approaching an agreement, have quite suddenly been broken off by the Aonos—the young man’s family. Yasuko has begun to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Everything has fallen through. By now, it is neither possible nor necessary to go on pretending. Yasuko, it seems, has sent the young man a despairing letter saying she has started having symptoms. I wonder whether it was love for him that made her decide on this honest course? Or did she do it in despair, on the impulse of a moment?
Her sight has deteriorated rapidly, and she complains of a constant ringing in her ears. When she first told me about it, in the living room, there was a moment when the living-room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
CHAPTER 16
The last entry in the “Journal of the Bombing” was dated August 15, the day the war ended. Only three more days’ entries remained to be copied, but Shigematsu was too worried over Yasuko’s illness to concern himself with such detailed paper-work. It had also become urgently necessary for him to help Shōkichi and Asajirō see to the pond where they were trying to rear their carp; for some time to come, his days would be occupied with visits to the pond below the bank on which Shōkichi’s house stood.
Yasuko’s illness grew rapidly worse. The blame lay partly with Shigematsu and his wife for not having kept a more careful eye on her behavior, and partly on her own excessive reluctance to confide in them. The trouble had started before the young man’s family rejected the marriage, just as the match seemed on the verge of being settled. She had clearly ascribed her symptoms to some disturbance of the feminine organism caused by a mixture of acute happiness and bashfulness, and she had been too shy, even, to have a woman-to-woman talk about it with her aunt. Nor did she privately consult a doctor. All this they found out later. By the time Shigeko took Yasuko to the general hospital in Kobatake for her first medical examination, the disease was already far advanced.
Over and over again, they lamented the fact that Yasuko had been so shy about talking to them. Even allowing for the fact that she was about to become engaged, she had carried modesty too far.
“It was so silly,” said Shigeko to Shigematsu, who was out in the garden when they got back from the hospital. “Her keeping everything to herself like that.”
“I’m sorry, uncle,” said Yasuko. She went past with her head bowed, her eyes on the ground.
This was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Afterwards, Shigematsu fetched a torch and the packed meal that had been prepared for him, and set off for the carp-rearing pond to help Shōkichi and Asajirō in regulating the temperature of the spawning pool.
It was already July, and the ponds in this district would reach a temperature of between 64° and 68°, ideal for the carp to spawn, around the Eighty-Eighth Night. However, it was not good for the water to be too warm at the start. Nor was it good to keep the males and females together from the beginning. They must be kept apart by means of a wooden partition, and the temperature kept down to 48°–50° until they had settled down. Then, and only then, the males and females were released together in a pool co
ntaining fresh water at just the right temperature for spawning. This immediately stimulated them into action, and the time from eleven or half-past at night until dawn saw them setting about preparations for spawning.
This was the method of getting the fish to spawn that Shōkichi and Asajirō had learned at the Tsunekanemaru hatchery. It was the first time that they were applying it in practice, and where everything relating to this particular subject was concerned they were as enthusiastic as schoolboys. Asajirō declared that he was going to keep watch over the carp until dawn in case there was a raid by weasels, and Shōkichi echoed him. It was arranged that Shigematsu should come early the next morning, and around eleven o’clock, when the carp were just beginning to splash about in the water, he went home.
There was a thick mist, and the upper branches of the kemponashi tree in the garden seemed to be melting into the night sky. The shutters at the entrance and along the veranda of the main part of the house were all closed. He cleared his throat loudly two or three times, whereupon one of the shutters on the veranda opened slowly and portentously. Flashing his torch, he saw Shigeko standing there in a night kimono much too short for her.
“Just a moment,” she murmured.
He promptly put out the light. She closed the shutter behind her and, crouching down on the edge of the veranda that projected into the garden, whispered in Shigematsu’s ear.
“Yasuko may not be asleep yet for all we know. Let’s have a quiet talk somewhere outside.”
“All right, let’s,” murmured Shigematsu. “Has anything happened to Yasuko, though? Tell me, quick.”
Shigeko stepped down onto the stone step below, slipped on a pair of sandals and, walking stealthily so as to make no noise, led Shigematsu beneath the kemponashi tree.