by Alan Booth
I have found it extremely difficult and depressing to write even this much about Hiroshima, but others have taken greater pains. Among the pieces of writing that move me is a short childlike poem by Toge Sankichi—a man of twenty-eight when the bomb fell, who died of radiation disease eight years later. The poem is reproduced in stone on a Peace Park monument.
Give back my father, give back my mother.
Give back the old.
Give back the children.
Give me back myself, give back all
people who are part of me.
For as long as this world is a human world,
Give me peace.
Give me peace that will last.
The sun was still bright when I walked out of the Peace Park, past the fountains and the monuments and the paper cranes. It was hard on this cloudless autumn day—95 days since the start of my journey, 11,890 days since the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb—to realize how quickly time had passed and, in passing, how completely it had stolen away memory. Some 200,000 people are thought to have died as a result of the world's first atomic holocaust, and their names are contained in a stone chest that is one of the park's simplest and most eloquent memorials. But looking at the words carved on the chest, I couldn't help wondering whether the passing of time had not trans-formed their ringing promise into a strangled, wholly incredible-prayer:
Sleep in peace.
The mistake will not be repeated.
I left the Peace Park and walked along the broad, tree-lined avenues of Hiroshima and through the jangling shopping arcades with their mirrors and coffee houses and their pounding sense of well-being. I watched the young people of Hiroshima crowd round the counters of a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop and a young female member of the staff wash down the statue of Colonel Saunders outside, soaping his back as a daughter might soap her father's as he sat on the tiled floor of a bathroom.
I had my boots reheeled by a man squatting on the sunny pavement outside the arcade. He had his sleeves rolled down and buttoned at his wrists, but when he saw my face he rolled them up to reveal the livid purple burns that snaked up both his arms. I watched three Americans ask directions of a middle-aged Japanese woman at a bus stop, thanking her with waves and exaggerated smiles, bowing absurdly low. In a bookshop I found a display of books in English, books by foreigners— The Kimono Mind, How the Japanese Think. I left them alone. I bought a book of essays by Richard Hoggart for his Englishness. I wanted no kimono minds; I was tired of how the Japanese think. I bought new jeans in a shop where a poster read, "For Those Who Assent to the Spirit of America..."
I walked back with the jeans and the book to my ryokan and lay down on my mattress in the middle of the afternoon. I spent three hours reading Richard Hoggart, and in the evening I went out to get stone drunk in places where Hiroshima workmen drink.
Next day, too, I wandered aimlessly about the arcades, passing groups of workmen taking their lunch breaks on the sun-spattered pavement. There was a small film theater on the museum's upper floor, and I had planned to go to a showing there. Three times I got as far as the gate of the Peace Park, and three times I turned and walked back into the arcades. By early afternoon I was lying on my mattress in the ryokan again. I read more Hoggart and his cool Yorkshire sense washed through me like an opiate. At dinner I sat with a middle-aged American couple, just back from a sponsored goodwill trip to China, who explained to me patiently and emphatically why the Japanese should abandon their writing system, just as (they assured me) the Chinese were abandoning theirs. The couple understood not a word of Japanese, but this did not prevent them from enjoying their brushes with exotic languages.
"You speak good British," the man assured me. "Wash yer faysin the baysin." And they chuckled happily.
After dinner, to my surprise, an old friend from Tokyo turned up at the ryokan. Seiichiro had found out from my wife that I was likely to be in Hiroshima on the same dates as he was. He had then tracked me down through the ryokan information office at the station, where I had gone to inquire about lodgings, and he stood now in the foyer mopping his brow and looking as lost and out of place as he had on every occasion since the first time I met him.
We went out to stroll together through the narrow, neon, bar-lined streets, past topless cabarets and cinema hoardings advertising Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, a film that featured blond women being tortured in ingenious ways. Hostesses in velvet dresses clip-clopped up and down the alleys, calling out to passers-by or grabbing them by the arm and hauling them toward the doorways of their clubs and bars. But at a bar whose prices were displayed on a winking sign outside, Seiichiro and I were politely turned away.
"Oh, don't come in here, O-niisan. You won't enjoy yourselves in a place like this. Those prices are not the real prices, you know." And as a suited businessman stumbled past: "Hello, Mr. President! Come on in! What a wise choice! You'll love it!"
"There's tax, you see," explained Seiichiro, mopping his forehead, "and service charge and a cover charge...."
We had a quiet drink in a workmen's haunt, devoid of workmen. Seiichiro had a book to give me—a hard-covered novel that I glanced at and handed back.
"Have you read it, then? It's Black Rain. All about the bombing of Hiroshima. I've finished with it now. You re welcome to take it."
"No," I said, "it's too heavy for my pack."
"There's a paperback edition. Maybe one of the shops here has it." "No, it's all right, I said. "I'll read it when I get back to Tokyo." We sauntered back to the ryokan, where Seiichiro, too, had taken a room, and in the night a hard rain began to hammer down onto the streets. While I sat having breakfast in the dining room next morning, the manager of the ryokan stood over a guest at the next table and spoke in clipped sentences to the red back of his neck while the guest stared down at his rice bowl:
"Just go back and look at what you've done to that room! Go on, go back and look at it! How can I let that room to other guests? What excuse have you got for doing a thing like that?"
Seiichiro came in, dripping from the downpour, carrying a three-hundred-yen plastic raincoat and a transparent plastic hat that he'd gone out to buy. He had made up his mind to walk one whole day with me, and though I warned him that twenty-two fume-choked kilometers along the teeming wet growl of a national highway was the lousiest possible introduction to the joys of long-distance walking, he tugged on his brand new raincoat and hat, and we began, tramping out of the center of Hiroshima, across the gray babble of the swelling rivers and into the bleak industrial suburbs.
Seiichiro was perfectly equipped for the adventure. In addition to his new plastic clothes, he had an Asahi Pentax, a Canon 8mm movie camera with a microphone on a telescopic rod, and a Sony cassette recorder slung across his shoulder. Throughout the day he used these in turn, sometimes skipping on ahead to take pictures of me as I strode grimly through puddles with my anorak zipped round my face, or sitting across a coffee shop table from me with his telescopic micro-phone three inches from my nose. He began each of these coffee shop sessions by recording in his own voice the date, time, and place. Then, with the recorder running, he aimed his movie camera at me, pressed the trigger and whispered, "Go on, say something!"
"I can't think of anything. Ask me a question."
"How do you feel?"
"Rotten."
"Is this a long day?"
"No, it's one of the shortest."
"What gear are we walking in?"
"Reverse."
"How do you feel?"
"Rotten."
It was actually one of the worst days of the journey. The rain never let up for a moment, and we sloshed along the highway sulky and bored, cursing the trucks that sent tidal waves up our thighs. The road hugged the southwest sweep of the coast, and in gaps between gray factories we glimpsed small shrouded islands in the stinking wash of the Inland Sea. By late afternoon we had reached the amusement park near the ferry port for Miyajima island. The park's huge ferris wheel was churni
ng slowly round with no one on it, looming out of the dusk at us like the ghost of some infernal rain machine. We queued up at the ticket counter for the ferry, and Seiichiro bought two card-board cartons of cold sake that we swallowed in three gulps each.
In the twilight the great Itsukushima Shrine stood empty except for the tame deer that huddled in the doorways of shuttered souvenir shops or squatted in concrete porches to sleep. The tide was out, and we trod through the island's oozy mud flats and over the slippery flagstones of the shrine till we reached the government lodging house where Seiichiro had managed to book us a room. There we got painstakingly slewed and played umpteen games of electronic ping-pong, which I lost by unbelievable margins. At dinner we sat with a group of bakers who had come to Miyajima on a two-day company outing and who questioned Seiichiro closely about his eccentric choice of pet.
"What's its name?"
"Alain Delon."
"Where does it come from?"
"London, England."
"Do you think it'd mind if we talked to it a bit?"
And so the conversation piece joined the conversation.
Did I know what giri and ninjo were? No, only Japanese knew that. Did I realize that Japanese was the most difficult language in the world? And that Japanese blood was a different temperature from everyone else's? And that Japanese brains were arranged in a different way? And that Japanese bread was the best ever baked? And Japanese beer the best ever brewed...?
I went and played electronic ping-pong with myself and then sat on a Western-style lavatory trying to read the small print on a label stuck to the door. The label explained, by means of words and pin figures, how men must lift the lid of the seat before pissing and women must lower it before sitting down; and there was a large mirror on the wall, too, so that you could watch yourself performing these exotic operations. Outside the window of our room, cleaning women were chasing deer from the rubbish bins with mops. The rain had stopped, the moon was out, and Seiichiro had primed his camera for one last session.
"Monday, October third. Ten-thirty p.m. Government lodging house, Miyajima island. How do you feel?"
"Better."
"How many days has it been now?"
"Ninety-seven."
"How much longer will it take?"
"Maybe a month."
"How do you think you'll feel at the end of it?"
"Tired, relieved, boastful, empty."
For much of the night the bakers stumbled up and down the corridor outside our room, and when the cleaning women had gone to bed the deer rolled the rubbish bins down the slope and the saplings on the lawn collapsed like ninepins.
It was a warm blue morning, and after prodding his blisters for a while and telling me how much he had enjoyed our miserable walk, Seiichiro took the ferry back to the mainland, and I spent the next couple of hours exploring the chief sights of Miyajima island.
Like Amanohashidate, Miyajima is considered one of Japan's Three Most Beautiful Scenic Places, and since ancient times the island has been recognized as an abode of powerful gods. The ceremonies of Shinto— Japan's indigenous religion—are almost entirely concerned with purification, cleanliness being not merely next to godliness, but far and away the preferred choice. Until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, for example, no births or deaths were permitted to occur on Miyajima, since both are regarded as forms of pollution. Even today, there is neither a crematorium nor a graveyard here, the dead being sent to the mainland for burial and the mourners undergoing ritual cleansing before taking the ferry back to their island homes.
Japanese people are inclined to boast of the religious tolerance that has characterized their history; and it is true that no such religious warfare as Europe saw for centuries between Catholic and Protestant ever occurred between Japanese converts to Buddhism, the foreign faith imported in the sixth century, and those who adhered to the older pantheistic-animistic religion, parts of which survive today as Shinto. (It is, however, worth noting that this tolerance did not extend to Christians, against whom, for more than two hundred years, a policy of harsh persecution was carried out and for whom were reserved the most imaginative forms of torture and execution.) Buddhism and Shinto were early seen to complement each other. Temples and shrines often nestle close together on the same city sites or mountaintops, and membership of a Buddhist sect has never deterred Japanese people from getting married in Shinto shrines or taking part in such rituals as the first shrine visit of the New Year—rituals that are far closer to gestures of national identity than of religious faith.
Yet no two warring European churches could present a more striking architectural contrast than the Buddhist temple of Eiheiji and Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima island. Where Eiheiji was all earth colors, the shrine is brilliant red and white. While the buildings of Eiheiji seemed laid out in a comfortable anarchic jumble, the buildings of the shrine are symmetrical and crisp and the corridors that connect them are composed of uncompromisingly straight lines. The bright shrine colors, standing in sharp contrast to the greens and dark October browns of the hills, and the mathematical precision of the rectangles combine to create the impression of an imposition on nature, as though the shrine had been placed here to subdue the hills and suck all of their sanctity into itself Where one could imagine living a comfortable —if restricted—life in a temple like Eiheiji, it was more than I could do to imagine living for twenty-five minutes in Itsukushima Shrine. It is a monarch's palace, not a home for humble monks, and I wouldn't mind betting there are blither gods swinging about in the maple trees of Miyajima island than cower in the geometry of its cathedral.
The sea plays a major part in. enhancing all three of Japan's Three Most Beautiful Scenic Places, and at Miyajima the shrine has been built on platforms over the water so that when the tide is in the whole edifice seems to rise away from the shore and float above the reflecting surface of the channel. The most famous of the shrine's attractions is a bright vermilion torii gate—the largest torii gate in Japan and easily the most photographed Shinto structure anywhere—and this stands well away from the shore on the bed of the sea itself. But it was still quite early in the morning when I wandered round the precincts of the shrine and the tide was at its furthest ebb, so the interplay of shrine and sea was a little less magical than I had anticipated. The stilts of the platforms stood revealed above beds of mud and shallow seaweed-clogged pools, and the salt-smeared concrete and faded paint at the bottom of the legs of the torii gate anchored it in the ooze like a mired giant.
But the revealed mud flats provided the morning's visitors— especially the thousands of schoolchildren who were being herded about by megaphone-wielding guides—with the perfect opportunity for indulging in that most important of all Japanese shrine-going rituals, the Taking of the Souvenir Photograph. Teachers, guides, and cameramen arranged row after row of them on benches spread carefully out on the exposed seabed, and all the arrangements meticulously ensured that each child had his back to the shrine so it didn't matter an iota to them whether it was floating or sinking into the mud. Smaller groups took their own photographs. One neat-suited businessman had himself snapped in front of an ancient dance stage practicing a golf swing with his rolled-up umbrella; another was committed to posterity as he fed the pages of a comic book to a hungry deer.
And as I walked through the corridors of the shrine, I couldn't help noticing how different was the determinedly sanctimonious atmosphere that pervades most Christian churches from the breezy nonchalance with which visitors treat the religious monuments of Japan. In a Christian church one is urged to speak in whispers; at Itsukushima Shrine groups of visiting businessmen bawled at each other as though they were on a golf course.
"Oi, look at this!"
"Where's Honda? Is he drunk again?"
"Have you got my camera?"
"Which way to the bus?"
The priests who sat behind strategically placed counters selling fortune papers and travel charms never once asked the visitors to speak mor
e quietly. In fact, they ignored the visitors altogether except when money was changing hands.
"Is the other side of the shrine just the same as this side?" one businessman asked as he bought a charm.
"More or less," yawned a priest, slipping his coins into a cash box.
"Well, there's no point in looking at it, is there, then?" said the man, and he turned and strode purposefully back the way he had come.
The road from the shrine to the ferry terminal was lined with souvenir shops where the commonest items were deer—wooden deer, clay deer, plastic deer, inflatable rubber deer—and there was a waxwork museum where I could just make out, beyond the dim recesses of the foyer, two lifesize figures: one a court dancer in a magnificent lacquered lion mask and the other Oh Sadaharu swinging the baseball bat that most visitors would have given ten chips of the true cross to possess.
The tide had turned by the time I took the ferry, and where the children had squirmed on their wooden benches, the cosmetic water rose inch by inch to hide the mud, the flaking paint, and the worn, earthbound foundations of the platforms. When I reached dry land and set off along the highway, Miyajima's godly geometry was floating clean and prim again above the mirror of the sea.
