‘Problem on the tracks,’ he said, which was fairly obvious to everyone on board. ‘Staying here for one hour.’ Even before the collective sighs of annoyance, the train jerked and began moving towards the next station.
Leaves and jungle inched closer to the track until the greenery began to climb into the train, twigs and flowers snapping off through the windows and scattering around the carriage as passengers shrieked and ducked away from the glass. It shouldn’t have taken more than three hours from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, but we broke down three more times, finally stopping in the middle of the jungle where creepers with pink flowers dripped down towards the tracks. A couple of hawkers started to work their way up the carriage, one selling fishcakes and noodles, the other dragging an ice bucket stacked with cans of Nescafé. It was a good time for a lunch break, and most other passengers had pulled out their bags of biscuits and fruit, offering their goodies to one another. A Dutch family swapped a few of their bananas for a couple of my Snickers bars and between us we were managing to forge a pretty decent meal.
‘It’s so lovely,’ said the mother. ‘We have a word in Dutch, gezellig, which means that there are no boundaries and that everyone is sharing and getting along with everyone else.’
‘Is there an English equivalent?’
‘No, it’s a word that describes an atmosphere or feeling … like we are a train family.’
No one had ever summarised the nature of train travel in such a simple and wonderful way, and as the train clanked and jolted on its way, I kept repeating the word to myself, gezellig …
*
Sweat trickled down my neck and the backs of my knees, as I bent over, struggling to find my breath. Welts had risen on both legs, my ankles were bitten and bleeding. We’d drained both water bottles, and as we stood at the top of the clearing, licking our lips and panting, we could see Burma to the west of the mountains, thunder clouds milling above.
Every morning just before dawn, a handful of prisoners would gather here before beginning their work, looking down onto the Khwae Noi Valley, which was now thick with bamboo, but then a cheerless woodheap. Unable to walk any further, we slipped and stumbled back down towards Hellfire Pass. We had come to visit the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, which sits in the middle of the jungle, above the most deadly stretch of railway, so named owing to the hellish sight of emaciated workers toiling at night by firelight. Carved out by hand, using picks, shovels, hammers, and sticks of gelignite lit by cigarettes, the Konyu rock cutting along the mountainside measured 600 metres long and 25 metres deep at its highest point. Wide enough for the train to travel through, the pass was lined with remnants of wooden sleepers, spikes and rails, paving the way along the old trail. Clambering up the rocky pathway, we reached the top and looked down onto the pass. It was from this vantage point that Japanese guards had thrown rocks onto the prisoners starving and slaving below. Abusing and torturing the very workers that they needed to do the job seemed so counter-intuitive to their long-term goal. There was little point in trying to rationalise what had happened, yet I was desperate to understand. Reading books and watching documentaries conveyed some idea of the weight of what had taken place around us, but treading through the teak and bamboo jungle, hearing the crack of twigs break the silence, made it real. Smothered in insect bites and bleeding, I needed to see and feel to be able to begin to understand the mental strength and physical endurance required to survive in what Sir Harold called ‘the most indescribable ghastly jungle, geographically speaking, an appalling 250 miles’, where he and others had had to tie string from their big toes to their calves in order to hold up their injured feet and walk.
We should have missed the last train back to Bangkok, but understanding how Thai railways worked – or didn’t work – we’d tried our luck and arrived at Nam Tok to find the train delayed and the platform full of passengers. Nam Tok marked the end of the functioning line, the remains of the track tapering off forlornly into the bushes, the sleepers overgrown with grass. Now, Jem and I stood in the open doorway as the train slowed towards the Wampo Viaduct and inched onto the wooden trestles as though unsure they could take the weight. Thumping down, the train squeaked and wailed, and I held my breath, convinced it would break the bridge and tumble down the slopes into the river. Just over a year later, the line was completely rebuilt, with continuous welded heavier rails fixed to concrete sleepers, so the train could travel faster and was almost always then on schedule. But to me, the charm lay in its shabbiness. The braver passengers swung out of the door, their T-shirts flapping in the wind as they snatched at wet leaves dangling within arm’s reach. Sliding wide around the jungle, the river was a milky brown, muddied by rains but beautiful, restaurants and houses bobbing by its banks where trees peered over one another into the water. Scanning the caves and sheer cliffs as the train twisted towards Tham Krasae bridge, I was increasingly in awe of the challenges the workers had faced, and sat back preparing for the approach to the bridge on the River Kwai – which I’d discovered wasn’t actually the River Kwai at all, but the Mae Khlung. When writing The Bridge on the River Kwai, the French author, Pierre Boulle, had made a lazy error, attributing the railway track to the wrong river. When fans of the book and David Lean’s film of the same name had turned up looking for the bridge, the Thais made a quick decision to rename the river the Kwai Yae, meaning ‘big Kwai’, which appeased the tourists.
A few miles past Tham Krasae bridge, we broke down. Within fifteen minutes of our rolling to a standstill, the smell of hot butter billowed through the carriage and I looked out of the window to where an opportunistic hawker had wheeled over her cart and begun to fry fresh khanom buang – crêpes filled with egg and sweet orange shrimp. More than two hours passed and the conductors showed little sign of concern, chatting over a bag of gooseberries covered in chilli and sugar, offering them round. Wandering out onto the tracks, I looked up at the engine’s empty cabin and found the drivers squatting in the grass, smoking. I’d now given up on seeing the bridge before sunset. Indigo shards had already begun to splinter the sky, and even if we’d got moving that moment, darkness would have settled before we arrived. While waiting for the train to move, I noticed a monk in burgundy robes who hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow, let alone his temper. I realised that I could sigh, pace the carriage and swear – and we would still be here – or I could use the time to read, enjoy the warm rain, and try some crêpes and gooseberries. The railway was a memorial in motion; to complain about delays was the height of impertinence while sitting upon wooden sleepers laid by those who had died doing so.
Just as spending the night on board was looking like a distinct possibility, the train was shunted back to Tham Krasae and a new engine attached, which saw us on our way. An hour later we had made it to the river, but before we crossed, the train came to a standstill, passengers hanging from the windows. A long horn blast heralded our arrival and we inched forward, then thudded onto the bridge. Like a grande dame, the train made the two-minute crossing amid the flash of cameras from tourists who had gathered on the bridge to witness the event. A dusk sky reflected off the river where a floating village of thatched restaurants swayed drunkenly around, strung with golden lights. Uplighters threw shadows like spectres onto the sides of the train, wrapping long black fingers around the roof. From the other side of the bridge, I took one last look over my shoulder, and settled in for the ride back to Bangkok. Under the dim lights of the carriage, I thumbed through my notebook and began to read what Sir Harold had told me about his final days, once he’d been transported from Kanchanaburi back to Changi, and the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb:
The Japs assumed of course that the bomb was a massive earthquake – which it could have been – and when we got the radio back on again, we heard what in fact it was. What I found fascinating was that the bomb enabled Emperor Hirohito to call it a day. Japan was bloody starving, which the British are so ignorant about – well, ignorant about most of the world outside Britain beca
use they’re not taught any history of anything else – but very few people know that there was an attempted coup by Japan’s middle-level army officers who refused and didn’t want to give up. The emperor had to send a member of his family down to give a personal order to the commander of Southeast Asia to pack it up. I felt for years that there was a hell of a moral question about the atom bombs, and I think there always will be in people’s minds, but I’m biased, because that saved my life.
5
Bombs and Bullet Trains
Tetsushi Yonezawa took his mother’s hand and boarded the Hiroden streetcar. It was just after 8 a.m., at the peak of summer, and the car was rammed with more than two hundred people on their Monday morning commute. No seats were available, so eleven-year-old Tetsushi wormed his way into the middle of the car, stifled by the heat from sweating bodies chattering and greeting one another. They would soon arrive at his grandmother’s home in Funairi. Fifteen minutes later, the streetcar was rolling past the Fukuya department store, when the skies tore open, turning brighter than a thousand suns. Glass shattered, buildings blew upwards, and the smell of blood came fast. The summer morning turned black as night. Dust and ash darkened Hiroshima’s skies, and the sound of screams and wailing filled the silence that followed the bomb. All around him, the city burned and bled, but Tetsushi and his mother remained unhurt; the sturdiness of the steel streetcar had withstood the blast.
Now eighty-one years old, Tetsushi wiped the orange juice from his mouth, and peered from under velvety lids.
‘For me, Japanese trains are a symbol of strength.’
When the atomic bomb struck Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the city was all but flattened; the skeletons of a few buildings stayed standing, along with a number of camphor trees, but the trains were up and running almost immediately. Sensing the need to flee, Tetsushi and his mother ran through the sticky, dirty, black rain that had begun to fall across the city, as it smoked and hissed. Arriving at Yaguchi station, they found three trains on the tracks and more than a thousand people picking their way through dead and writhing bodies.
‘The first train was going north to Miyoshi,’ Tetsushi recalled. ‘Everyone was trying to get on this train, but the weak were trampled. People with bones poking out were clinging to the rooftops and hanging from the sides. Parents forced their children through windows. I remember a woman with a triangular shard of glass in her back, like a shark’s fin, and blood running down her legs. Her skin had blistered and peeled off, like gloves hanging from the ends of the nails. Even those about to die crawled into the train to escape the city. Everyone had to get on.’
Tetsushi leant forward and cupped a liver-spotted hand under one eye. ‘There was a grandma opposite me, her right eyeball was hanging out of the socket and she was trying to hold it in her hand.’ He paused and wiped his mouth again.
‘At 3.30 p.m. the train moved and we arrived at Shiwaguchi station at 5.30 p.m. If I had stayed in Hiroshima, I would have died. These trains saved my life.’
Japan’s railways are synonymous with Shinkansen, the bullet trains that put the rest of the world’s railways to shame. To the Japanese, however, the railways embody the resilience of their nation. The Hiroden streetcar began to run soon after the uranium bomb hit Hiroshima, and even today, two bombed cars continue to sail up and down the city’s streets. We were in Hiroshima for the seventieth anniversary of the dropping of the A-bomb, and to meet Tetsushi, who was determined to keep alive the story of the pika-don (pika meaning flash, and don meaning tremendous sound). Year after year, he travels by train from his home in Kyoto to talk to schoolchildren and tour groups about the day the ‘Little Boy’ bomb fell from the Enola Gay and all but annihilated Hiroshima, changing Japan’s fate for ever. Tetsushi was frightened that the memory and enormity of what happened would die with him and the few remaining bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, most of whom were nearing their nineties. However, as Jem and I squeezed through the crowds awaiting the memorial ceremony, it was clear that the memory was embedded not only in the psyche of the city, but in the thousands who had flocked from around the world. Representatives from a hundred nations had gathered in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, along with the families of survivors, and local schoolchildren handing out colourful paper cranes in memory of Sadako Sasaki – a little girl who had died from leukaemia more than ten years after the bomb. On hearing the legend that whoever folded a thousand paper cranes would be granted a wish, Sadako had passed her time in hospital folding as many cranes as she could before she eventually died at the age of twelve, having made more than 1,600. After her death, her parents gave a number of the cranes to her classmates and teachers, keeping some for themselves and placing the rest in her casket. A statue of Sadako now stands in the centre of the park, covered with colourful origami birds left by visitors.
For a memorial ceremony, the atmosphere was ripe with unease. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was on the verge of introducing legislation that would commit a pacifist Japan to transporting the nuclear weapons of foreign forces, and protesters had packed in to heckle his hypocrisy. At 8.15 a.m. a peace bell marked the moment the bomb fell. The air was heavy with humidity, and as the crowds hushed, the sound of cicadas shook from the trees like a million tiny maracas. I glanced up at the blankness of the sky: a plane passed overhead and I shuddered, knowing that someone somewhere on that day had looked up at the sky, seen a plane, oblivious to the horrors that were seconds away. A flutter of doves broke the silence and a cheer rippled across the crowds. Three days earlier, we had walked through the Hellfire Pass and witnessed the remnants of Japanese evil; yet here I was mourning for Japanese souls. The human capacity to hurt one another was so great and unstoppable that we were doomed forever to make the same mistakes. Hiroshima had risen from the ashes and bloomed into a green, thriving city filled with bars, cafes, and kids wearing Nike, but the memory smouldered beneath our soles.
*
Equipped with a two-week Japan Rail Pass, we had arrived in Osaka at 2 a.m. the previous day and had barely a few hours to nap in a capsule hotel before taking the Sakura Shinkansen to Hiroshima in time for the ceremony. These futuristic pods, each one reachable by a step ladder, were barely long enough to fit a single mattress, and no wider than an arm span. I usually relished curling up in confined spaces, but climbing into the capsule had felt like going to bed in a mortuary refrigeration unit, with bodies lying side by side, stacked one on top of the other. It was my first time in the country, and I was primed to embrace all the consumerist trappings of modern Japan: I’d made giddy plans to roam around cat cafes and robot restaurants, but the sombreness of Hiroshima had dulled my desire to eat matcha cake with a Siamese kitten on my lap – at least for now. Every country has a history of war, but Japan’s had caught me off guard. The inhumanity of the bombs had burnt a hole in the Japanese soul.
Flicking through my notes, I reread the last line of Tetsushi’s testimony. Although the trains had saved his life, irony saw to it that they had also created a unique – albeit wildly unlucky – concentration of survivors known as nijū hibakusha or ‘double-bomb’ survivors. In their desperation to escape Hiroshima and find their way home to loved ones, an estimated 300 people had boarded two different trains to Nagasaki, among them a twenty-nine-year-old named Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Determined to reunite with his wife and five-month-old son, Tsutomu’s survival was all the more remarkable given that he was the only victim to have been standing within the ground zero zones of both atomic bombs, which killed more than 210,000 people. In 2009, he was officially recognised as the first double-bomb survivor, but died a year later from stomach cancer, aged ninety-three. We were now on our way to meet his daughter, Toshiko Yamasaki, who, like Tetsushi, was worried that her father’s story would be lost if she didn’t continue her role as an oral historian.
The Kodama Super Express slid out of Hiroshima station, humming with acceleration. Accustomed to the jerks and thuds of most departures, I was bemused to look up from my notebook and see t
he platform sailing past, yet feel nothing but a clean surge. For the first time in my life I was able to write a sentence on a moving train that didn’t skate across the page. As a student, my father had travelled around Japan and told me the Shinkansen were so smooth you could place a coin on its side and it wouldn’t fall over. Fishing through chewing-gum wrappers, receipts, and dead flowers I’d intended to press, I found one of Sasha’s Sochi Olympics commemorative coins at the bottom of my satchel, and stood it on the table in front of me. With a twist and a whoosh the train entered a tunnel while the coin stayed upright. Another Shinkansen shot past making our train tilt for a moment before it steadied and continued at pace. The coin clattered over and I clamped a hand on top, wincing at the sound. Other than a whistle of wind, the carriage and its passengers were silent.
Easing up the slats on the window, I peered out and watched the evening sun weave in and out of the high-rises, a molten spill on the horizon. Peppered with shrapnel, Tsutomu Yamaguchi had boarded the train at Koi station, now known as Nishi–Hiroshima, and travelled this route to Nagasaki as the city burned behind him. He had left Hiroshima on 7 August, the day after the first bomb, and arrived the following afternoon in Nagasaki, the day before the second bomb. As we passed Kokura station, I caught sight of an orange R, neon-lit above the Hotel Relief, and wondered if the hotel was so named as a result of the city’s relief at being spared the second atomic bomb. The intended recipient of the world’s first deployed plutonium-based bomb, the city of Kokura, had had the good fortune of being covered by a thick grey cloud on the morning that the B-29 bomber, known as Bock’s Car, was circling overhead looking for the arms factory below. Unable to see the target, the pilot had given up and diverted south to hit Nagasaki’s Mitsubishi factory, the back-up target.
Around the World in 80 Trains Page 9
