Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Owing to their spectacular speeds – which topped 200 mph – bullet trains had rendered overnight train journeys in Japan almost obsolete, but the rail pass gave us the freedom to dart around the country on a whim. Having read that the city of Hakata was famous for its tonkotsu ramen – one of our favourite dishes – Jem had insisted we make a diversion en route to Nagasaki, and in just under an hour from Hiroshima we pulled into Hakata station, having travelled 170 miles for a bowl of pork bone broth noodles. During rush hour on the Tube, it took me the same time to commute from London Bridge to Bayswater. It was well worth the detour, and with our bellies full, sleep in our eyes, and sweet pork in our teeth, we settled onto the 885 Kamome Limited Express to Nagasaki, drifting in and out of sleep as the train skimmed the edges of the Ariake Sea.

  Over the previous week, I had scoured newspaper cuttings, trawled the Hiroshima museum, and stared at footage of the bombs and their aftermath, but still a glass wall stood in the way of my ability to comprehend the implausibility of surviving not just one, but two atomic bombs. Now, greying with elegance, Tsutomu’s daughter, sixty-seven-year-old Toshiko Yamasaki, sat before me wearing angular brown glasses and a rose-pink smile that matched the colour of her cheeks. Even though her father was no longer alive, Toshiko was the keeper of his story, and I needed to hear her testimony to know the whole. Below us, trains pulled in and out of Nagasaki station. Thousands had gathered for the second memorial ceremony at dawn, leaving most latecomers with nothing to see other than the tops of heads and a slew of angry banners: the heat and hostility had convinced us to abandon the crush and meet in air-conditioned peace at the station’s restaurant. That we were sitting at the very spot where her father had arrived home gave poignancy to our meeting.

  ‘As a child, I didn’t know about war, and I didn’t know about the atomic bombing,’ Toshiko said. ‘There was no peace education and the only thing I knew was that there were two atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father didn’t talk about his experience until I was much older.’

  While working as a naval engineer for Mitsubishi, Tsutomu Yamaguchi had been transferred from Nagasaki to Hiroshima on a three-month contract, and was due to return home on 7 August. On the morning of the bombing, Tsutomu left his dormitory with two other colleagues, but on the way to work he realised he had forgotten something and turned back. Taking a detour through the potato fields he noticed how quiet and peaceful it was, with no one but a lady carrying a parasol to protect her from the sun. Then, the sound of a bomber passed overhead and both Tsutomu and the lady looked up as two white parachutes fell softly from the sky. In a golden flash, a ball of fire rolled upwards. Thrown into a ditch, Tsutomu remembered little of the immediate aftermath, but crawled to take rest beneath a tree as black rain began to fall.

  Toshiko smiled. ‘Rather than go home, my father walked to work. He was a very honest man – company first! He reunited with his colleagues and the three of them tried to find their way back to their dormitory. In Hiroshima there were five rivers, but the bridges were all destroyed and they had to take a small boat to go back to the dormitory.’

  At 7 a.m. the next day, the three began the long walk to Koi station. Rumour had it that the next train to Nagasaki would leave at noon and there would be no train again for another month. With every bridge in Hiroshima burnt, Tsutomu was forced to cross rivers using charred bodies as human rafts.

  ‘Usually, it took one hour to walk to Koi, but it took five hours, and when they arrived at Koi there was a long queue, everybody had heard about the departing train and they were all trying to catch it. My father was able to find a seat at the window side, from where he saw a broken water pipe spouting water. He was so thirsty, but he knew that if he stood up he would lose his seat.’ Toshiko sipped her coffee and wiped a shimmer of sweat from her hairline. ‘He had a high fever, bad injuries to his arm, and he lost consciousness, falling asleep. The conductor recognised him even though he was so burnt, and tried to offer him onigiri – rice balls. I always thought it remarkable that even in this situation there was such a good, generous person. It took my father almost twenty-four hours to travel and he arrived home at noon the next day at this very station.’

  Toshiko gestured for me to walk with her through the station, past the Seattle’s Best Coffee shop, to the platforms. ‘When my father arrived, he went straight to a clinic that was on his way to his parents’ house. The doctor was a friend of the family and he peeled off the dead skin and cleaned the muscle. He wrapped my father from top to toe with white bandages, and when my grandmother came home from the air-raid shelter she found him sitting by the Buddhist altar, praying. She and other family members had heard about the new type of bomb in Hiroshima, and the damage, and they thought he might have died. They were already talking about going to Hiroshima to collect his bones. My grandmother asked him: “Do you have legs?” You see, in Japanese culture, ghosts do not have legs. The next day my father went to Mitsubishi to tell his boss what had happened. His colleagues didn’t recognise him and his boss didn’t believe what he was saying. “One bomb could not destroy the whole city. You must be crazy,” he told him. And at that very moment, at 11.02 a.m., my father saw another flash of light and he hid under the desk. His bandages blew off and his injuries were covered in dust. Once again, my father had to flee, and ran outside the building and up the hillside behind the company. From that hill, he saw the mushroom cloud rise above the Urakami area, and it was on fire.’

  Tsutomu Yamaguchi shied away from speaking about his experience as a double-bomb survivor in order to protect his family from irrational criticism, and in turn, they were reluctant for him to become a peace activist out of fear that Americans would see him looking outwardly healthy, and declare that nuclear weapons couldn’t be all that bad if he had survived both. However, Tsutomu had lost hearing in his left ear, his gallbladder was removed and he had a perpetually low white blood cell count. Every summer his hair fell out and his old burns festered. A few years before his death, while on a rare visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, he had a chance encounter with a pair of American tourists from Hawaii who learnt that he had survived both bombs, and apologised on behalf of their country. From that point on he decided to tell his story publicly. Tsutomu spent his final years giving lectures, talking to schoolchildren, even applying for his first passport at the age of ninety to travel to the UN in New York to make a direct appeal for the ban of nuclear weapons.

  Thinking back to Sir Harold Atcherley’s remark that the bomb had saved his life, and the lives of more than 200,000 Allied prisoners, I asked Toshiko how she felt about the idea that the bomb had ended the war. She was standing next to a local train, staring at the nose. ‘My father lived until ninety-three, but all my family suffered the effects of the bomb. My mother had cancer, my brother died from cancer, and I have a low white blood cell count. The bomb was not just one person’s story, it became the story of so many afterwards, for generations. That is not right. The nuclear bomb was inhumane, killing indiscriminately. My father used to say that it was no way for people to die with dignity. In the past, I hesitated to tell my father’s story, but now I strongly feel it’s important to tell the story to the next generation.’

  The JR Seaside Liner rumbled up a hill with the rhythm of a proper train. Sunlight flooded the carriage through wall-sized windows and passengers gazed at the waters of Omura Bay, pleased with its sparkles, murmuring and pointing at the mountains, and photographing each other with fingers flicked out in victory signs. During previous journeys, I’d had nothing but portholes to peer out of in the sad hope of glimpsing some scenery. Towns, woodland and paddy fields had rushed by in a blur. Compared with Shinkansen, the Seaside Liner shambled along allowing me to absorb the world beyond the windows. After a breakfast of miso soup, pickles and rice, we had left Nagasaki, passing yellowing paddy and life-sized Monopoly houses, the edges of roofs curled like piped icing. Leaving the gloom of the city behind, this journey oozed energy and life. In just u
nder half an hour the train wove through valleys flanked by trees that appeared like gigantic broccoli florets, tumbling down the hillside in bundles of green. Slipping in and out of tunnels, we overlooked the water’s edge, the wheels drumming the tracks, and eventually pulled into Huis Ten Bosch station, ready to indulge in an altogether different side of Japan.

  At 2.55 p.m. everyone was asleep. Behind the reception desk sat a young woman with delicate features. She wore a cream jacket, a neckerchief, and a look of satisfaction. To her left, a velociraptor leant forward sporting a bow tie and a bellhop’s hat at a jaunty angle. Its wrists hung limply, its mouth agape. Unsure who to approach, I noticed a sign by the woman that read ‘only Japanese’, and stepped up to the velociraptor. I waved and it stared past.

  ‘Maybe it’s voice-activated,’ Jem suggested.

  ‘I’d like to check in, please,’ I said.

  Nothing.

  ‘I have a reservation,’ I said, feeling suddenly ridiculous.

  ‘Speak slowly, maybe it can’t understand English accents.’

  ‘As opposed to what? I can’t speak any slower.’

  ‘Just try again. Or maybe push one of those red buttons on the pad.’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake, I WANT TO CHECK IN!’ I hollered, shaking my passport in front of two glazed eyes.

  A door flew open to the right and a harassed man in a black T-shirt looked out.

  ‘Check-in opens at 3 p.m.,’ he mumbled, closing the door.

  Marketed as the world’s first robot hotel, the Henn na Hotel had opened two weeks earlier to much excitement. Newspapers reported talking dinosaurs, robotic porters, and a foot-high concierge that could order taxis, so we had arrived to see what all the fuss was about. Expecting an army of R2D2s beeping around pulling suitcases, and androids opening doors, I was disappointed to see no more than the receptionist and the dinosaur – unless the vending machine counted as a member of staff. At precisely 3 p.m., the velociraptor jerked to life.

  ‘Welcome to the Henn na Hotel. If you want to check in, please press one,’ it announced, in an American accent. ‘Please say your name in full.’

  ‘Monisha Rajesh.’

  ‘Thank you for your business,’ it replied. ‘Your name and the room’s card, on top of the fill in the phone number. Please put us to the bottom of the post. Please press to proceed.’

  Flummoxed by this instruction, I pressed the red button and began to tap my name into the computer screen, when the door opened again.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a camp voice. ‘Please give me your passports.’ It was the man in the black T-shirt.

  ‘Wow, they’re so lifelike,’ Jem whispered.

  The experience was beginning to feel like an embarrassing party trick that wasn’t going to plan. It transpired that the dinosaur was unable to process British passports, so we hovered around until the humanoid checked us in, and appeared for a third time with a key card. Too poor to stay in the premium wing, we carried our own bags, as electronic ‘porters’ were reserved for guests in those rooms only. Arriving at our door, I scanned my key card and paused as a camera snapped a photograph of my sceptical face. From then on, I was able to use facial recognition to enter our room. It was a nifty security measure and one that also negated the need to traipse back and forth to reception to reactivate defunct cards. Jem pushed open the door and turned to me with a grim expression.

  ‘Minimalist,’ he muttered.

  Hotel literature usually contains the kind of jargon no normal person uses in conversation, and so far on our travels I had tried a massage that claimed to ‘restore polarity’, dined in a ground-floor restaurant described as an ‘elevated amenity’, and washed with a ‘moisture infusion facial bar’ – otherwise known as soap. Yet to stay in a ‘well-appointed’ room that had ‘stunned’ me, taken my breath or made my ‘jaw drop’, I was most wary of ‘minimalist’ – a cunning term for a room in which I was destined for boredom. Staff would insist it was designed for the benefit of the guest to take full advantage of the hotel’s amenities. It was anathema to me why anyone would book a room hoping to feel compelled to leave. Hotels are for reliving the student experience in luxury: where else can you wear a dressing gown all day, eat and drink in bed, have plenty of afternoon sex, and know that someone else will replace the toilet roll? The room was minimalist. Painted a shade of Scandinavian bland, the walls were bare and begged for us to spend the afternoon elsewhere; two single beds ensured that afternoon sex – if any – was highly unlikely. The floors were tiled and looked cold, and the only electronic items were a kettle and a cute little toy with a tulip-shaped head, sitting on the bedside table. Dressed in a pink dress and yellow shoes, Chu-ri-chan was an in-room concierge with a set of laminated instructions that would prompt her to switch on lights, offer weather forecasts, tell the time, and provide a wake-up call – all in Japanese. Launching himself onto the sofa, where his head and feet hung off each end, Jem tossed me the instructions, which read as follows:

  How to well communication.

  Please talk in front of the chu-ri-chan as much as possible!

  If reply or reaction are no so good, please talk near the chu-ri-chan.

  If become unable to know what you talking, please call again ‘chu-ri-chan’.

  If you want to stop talking or wakeup timer function, please hand over in front of the forehead for heart mark on your right hand side.

  Shuffling up to the toy, I leant towards her. ‘Chu-ri-chan?’

  She remained smiling.

  ‘Chu-ri-chan?’

  ‘Maybe her batteries are dead,’ Jem suggested, trying and failing to get comfortable.

  ‘CHU-RI-CHAN!’ I screamed where her ear should have been, as Jem rolled off the sofa in giggles.

  ‘Nandeshouka?’ came the reply. Asking ‘What is it?’, Chu-ri-chan’s voice had the cloying sweetness of a tiny child.

  ‘Akari-tsukete!’ I commanded, reading the phonetics off the sheet.

  Nothing.

  ‘Ak-a-ri-tsu-ke-te!’

  We both glanced up.

  ‘Did she just put the lights on?’ Jem asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Great. Can you ask her where the TV is?’

  Within ten minutes the novelty of Chu-ri-chan had worn off, and Jem was now standing on the balcony watching teenagers careering down the grounds on a zip wire. Adjacent to the hotel was Huis Ten Bosch theme park. Nothing in Japan came as a surprise, but for no apparent reason the park was built as a replica of the Netherlands – a Dutch Disneyland of sorts – and provided a way for Japanese families to take their kids to Europe without actually travelling there. The proximity of the park also explained why the Henn na resembled a glorified Premier Inn: it was where families stayed when they visited the park, needing nothing more fancy than a place to sleep, shower and have breakfast before setting off for a day of zip wires, barging on canals, and chasing children through tulip beds. After a few minutes’ standing below the screaming teens, Jem decided that the zip wire was not for him and instead we wandered around the park with ice creams and hot chocolate waffles, dodging hordes of schoolgirls wearing backpacks, and lovers linking fingers. It was an incredible little kingdom with a games zone featuring old Sega, Nintendo and Atari consoles. For a place designed for children, there was something strangely romantic about theme parks, whether it was the fairy lights and fireworks or the illusion of permanent happiness, and we strolled back hand in hand to the Henn na, clutching a bag of hot teriyaki beef, as toddlers slept in pushchairs and the illuminations sprayed magic in the sky.

  Worn out, we watched the lights from the balcony before turning in. Fishing my cleanest pyjamas out of my rucksack, I headed towards the bathroom. ‘There aren’t any light switches.’

  ‘There must be.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know, by the door?’

  ‘Where do you think I’ve been looking?’

  ‘Maybe they’re on the bedside table.’ Jem rolled across his bed to
have a look. ‘No, can’t see anything. Just use the torch on my phone.’

  ‘Oh, come on, there must be lights around here somewhere,’ I insisted, patting the wall to the bathroom.

  ‘Maybe we have to use that toy to put them on.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Where’s the sheet?’

  Jem passed me the instructions, and I read out the command.

  ‘Akari-tsukete!’

  Nothing.

  ‘Akari-tsukete!’

  The lights in the room went off.

  ‘For god’s sake. Tell her to switch them off and they’ll probably come back on.’

  ‘Akari-keshite!’ I called. ‘AKARI-KE-SHI-TE!’

  After a third attempt, I flung the card on the floor. ‘Forget this, I’d rather go in the dark.’

  Taking it in turns to clean teeth, we felt our way around the room and slid into our single beds.

  ‘This hotel is ridiculous,’ Jem grumbled in the darkness.

  ‘I know, I can’t believe so many journos wrote glowing guff about this place.’