Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  It was a brilliant blue Sunday and, especially in times of war, you take your chances when you can. You seize every moment of happiness exactly as it comes along, for who knows what the morrow will bring.

  How ironic that phrase seems now. Although we do not know what tomorrow will bring, we usually have a good idea of what is going to occur: tomorrow, more than likely, will be just like today, and likewise the day before it. But every so often, something really different does happen. Something so extraordinary, so outside your experience, that it changes your entire world-view. And, perhaps once a century, something occurs that changes not just your world-view, but the world’s view. Something so monumental that no single human being’s perception of life will ever be the same again.

  If there was one single benefit to our country being at war, it was that it had heightened my desire to live in the moment. This attitude, to savour every single taste of happiness that passed me by, had been forming throughout my life. But after four years of war, it had crystallised into the position where I snatched at everything that came my way, whether a kiss, a joke, a shot of Sake, or the delicious ecstasy of sex. Yes, especially that sweet delight.

  I should mention, by the way, that I was very different from my fellow citizens. Perhaps they were just like beasts of burden, bowed down by the war. For we were in the middle of not just a war, but the war of wars – the biggest war the world had ever seen. There was no end in sight. There was never any end in sight.

  All we had was this relentless barrage of propaganda from the papers and the radio, which claimed that we were driving the Yankees off the face of the earth. But all we knew for certain was that food was scarce, the Nazis were finished, and that even the children had stopped going to school in order to join the war effort.

  When Japan had launched her attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Sumie had been as much of a proud patriot as anyone else. But since we had become lovers, some of my natural cynicism had rubbed off on her. She had started to be more sceptical of what she read in the papers. She had become greedy to seize not just the day, but every minute, every second; she wanted to grab every magical moment.

  Even so, even considering the fragile state of our existence during those climactic closing stages of the war... only the most foolhardy would have deliberately courted misfortune by travelling to Miyajima.

  “Come on!” I said. “The ferry is leaving in five minutes!”

  Sumie laughed at me. “I’m not coming!”

  I had leaned out over the side of the boat and beckoned her with my little finger. “But it is beautiful!”

  “I know it is beautiful!” She giggled as she stood not five metres away on the dock at the far end of the gang-plank. “I know it well.”

  “Come on!” I said. “You are feeble!” I was laughing, but I was still desperate for her to come. Around me were 30 daytrippers, lining the decks of that battered old ferry as they made the most of the summer sun. There were clusters of benches to the fore and aft, as well as a small functional cabin. Black wood smoke spumed out of the funnel.

  “I said I would come to wave you off and that is what I am doing,” she said. “You will enjoy yourself without me and I will be waiting here for you when you get back.”

  “I want you to come. Come! Come with me!”

  She laughed at the thought of it. How fine it was to be in the middle of that most gruesome of wars and yet still to be able to laugh.

  “You are incorrigible!”

  “That is why you adore me!”

  “I adore you despite that, not because of it!” She looked quite lovely, standing there laughing in the sunshine. Even though she was wearing just a simple patterned shirt, frayed trousers and straw-sandals, on that day, with her long oiled hair curling back over her shoulders, she seemed more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Not a line on her face, not a bag under her eyes, an exquisite porcelain doll that I longed to cradle in my hands. And just to the side of her mouth, a beautiful black mole. To some it might have been a blemish, but I loved to kiss that little beauty spot as much as I loved to kiss her glistening lips.

  “Dearest one, there is a war on,” I said. “I am sure the Goddess has more important things on her mind.”

  “After all – why should she be jealous over you?”

  “You are right,” I said, “I would not be to her taste.”

  Sumie stepped aside to allow the last of the passengers on. A girl, barely a teenager, was readying to cast off. She was one of the tens of thousands of schoolgirls who’d been forced to join the war effort. Other children had been put to work doing hard manual labour, but this girl, with her quick easy movements and her deft fingers, was serving her time as a cabin-girl. I observed with cool professional detachment how she coiled the ropes; she had the makings of a competent sailor.

  Sumie, hand still on the plank-rail, stared down as she placed her toe onto the ground, suddenly coy. Or more precisely, she was playing at being coy. “And why do you want me to come?”

  “Why? Because you are beautiful; because it will be a wonderful day; and... because when we make love, I feel that I am savouring a little taste of heaven.” Yes, I could be quite the charmer when I was so minded. It is a very useful tool for manipulation. And I may as well be candid: women liked me. I had a breezy patter which never dried up in the face of beauty.

  Two elderly men, bent and bald, shuffled onto the boat, staring at me as they walked past. I did not care what they thought. I did not care that, in those days of thrifty hardship, it was not considered seemly for a man and woman to be in love. But then I did not care much what anyone thought.

  “A taste of heaven?” Sumie asked, echoing my words. One foot strayed onto the gang-plank.

  The captain, oily and belligerent, had limped out of his rathole of a cabin and was standing beside me.

  “Are you coming or staying?” he yelled at Sumie, spitting over the side of his boat. “Either get off the gang-plank or get on board.”

  Sumie stared at the surly captain for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think I will come.”

  “With your boyfriend?” The captain shook his head as he slunk back to the cabin. The ship’s whistle blew, the lines were cast off, and just as the gang-plank was about to be raised, Sumie scuttled over onto the ship and took my hand. How we laughed, like a pair of truants who had skived off school to go exploring in the woods.

  Few ferries were then operating out to the islands. Fuel was scarce and what little there was left was needed, as always, for the bottomless pit that was the war effort. But occasionally at the weekends, an old boat might steam out from Ujina, in a little bit of make-believe that some vestiges of our lives were still continuing as normal.

  As we glided out of Hiroshima City, we could see squads of soldiers digging holes for their wretched boats. How astonishing it all now seems – that while America was on the very verge of dropping the world’s biggest bomb, Japan had in her turn devised our very own top-secret weapon. Like many of our inventions, this weapon was uniquely Japanese, and spoke volumes about both our country and our ideals. No-one but a Japanese General could have dreamt up this extraordinary machine, combining as it did Japan’s warped sense of patriotism with the most ludicrous impracticality. So I ask in all seriousness, was there ever such a senseless weapon as the suicide boat?

  By now the Yankee invasion of Japan was an absolute certainty; even the most sanguine patriots knew it was going to occur before the end of the year. We did not have much to fight the Yankees with, apart from our bamboo spears, which even the schoolgirls were learning to master.

  It was still hoped, however, that we might yet take the fight to the Yankees with our scores of suicide boats. The Special Attack Forces, who were in charge of Japan’s Kamikaze pilots, had been building hundreds of the wretched things. We may not have had many conventional weapons, such as guns or warships, but we did have whole fleets of those rickety suicide boats.

  Each boat was packed with 250kg of
explosives. I suppose that if they had hit a US warship plumb, then a few GIs might have been killed. But, even though I was a mere merchant seaman, I had always believed there to be a fatal flaw with the very concept of a suicide boat. The Kamikaze pilots, at least, were almost unstoppable. Once they started in on their final death-dive, they arrowed in on the US ships like a guided missile.

  But as for the suicide boats, with their top speed of perhaps 30 knots, they were never going to work in the first place. They would not have got within 300 metres of a US battleship before being blown out of the water.

  Still, the suicide boats were the one secret weapon that Japan had left, and we certainly did not want them destroyed before the invasion had started. So the Special Attack Forces were proving their devotion to the Emperor by digging holes to hide their pitiful craft.

  How pathetic it all seemed, those patriots determined to throw away their lives in the face of an unstoppable Yankee tide. Thinking back though, there was very little in Japan that was not pathetic by the end of the War. We were like a punchdrunk prize-fighter: battered, bloody and tottering blindly on our feet, yet still out of misplaced pride determined to continue the fight.

  As we watched those benighted soldiers digging the holes that might as well have been their graves, I had never felt so grateful to be alive. For the first time in four months, I was back at sea again. Hiroshima City was receding into the distance and, for a short while, the World War with it. We sat on a bench by the aft passenger rail, and I offered Sumie one of the rice-balls and some of the cucumber that she had packed for me earlier. The food in those days was frugal. You thought yourself lucky if you had a piece of fish to eat. As for meat, it was so long since I had eaten it that I had almost forgotten what it tasted like. Our diets largely consisted of unpolished rice and whatever vegetables were at hand.

  Sumie took a bite of the rice-ball and delicately patted a crumb off her lips. “This is very stupid,” she said. “My sister would be very unhappy if she knew that I was visiting Miyajima with you.”

  “She would be very unhappy whatever I was doing with you.”

  “That is so.” She swept her mane of hair off her forehead and behind her ear, where it streamed like a scarf over the passenger rail. “Will the Goddess forgive me?”

  “Probably not,” I replied. “I will try to make it worth your while.”

  The story goes that the island’s shrine is inhabited by the sea goddess Ichikishima, who is fiercely jealous of any couple who comes to visit her. The shrine was built in 593 and legend has it that Ichikishima has been separating couples ever since – usually by arranging some cataclysmic event for the women. The island is so sacred that neither births nor burials are allowed there, and weddings are obviously out of the question.

  “You know that this story of the jealous goddess was made up by the local sailors?” I said.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It was a Red-Light district,” I said. “They first built a shrine here to protect the local seamen and the prostitutes followed soon after. The sailors made up this tale of the jealous goddess because it was the only way they could stop their wives from accompanying them.”

  “Stop it!” she laughed and slapped me on the knee. “That is ridiculous.”

  “It is true,” I said. “My father told me.”

  “As if he would know! And doubtless you were planning to visit one of these brothels when you got there.”

  “Well – now that you mention it ”

  My actual reason for visiting Miyajima was rather less joyous. My father had died the year before and that Sunday, that Sunday 5th August 1945, would have been his 80th birthday. I was going to this old seaman’s shrine to give thanks for his life. After my mother had died when I was two, my father had brought me up almost single-handed. There was my grandmother, too, helping out during the day, but the bulk of what I have learned about life I have learned from him. He had wisdom such as I could only dream of. Long, long before Pearl Harbour, this gnarly old merchant seaman, who had seen so much of the world, was already querying the correctness, the direction, of this crazy unquestioning jingoism that had swept the nation.

  I will return to my father later. But the reason why I was travelling to Miyajima on that bright blue morning was to give thanks for his life, and to honour everything that he had given to me.

  At length, Miyajima’s century-old Torii gate came into view, while Hiroshima was just a grey speck 15 kilometres away on the horizon. The tide was high and, with its green backdrop, the floating shrine truly looked like something from another planet; certainly a world away from the war and the grinding poverty and endless air raid sirens that had us daily scurrying for our bunkers. They said that the Miyajima’s vermilion pagoda was so sacred that it could not be sited on normal soil – and for a moment, even a complete non-believer such as myself could scent a faint whiff of spirituality.

  Sumie marvelled at the site of the shrine, clutching at my hand. Since she was brazening it out and visiting this Holy of Holies with her lover, then why should she not have held my hand? How much more could it have provoked that island’s jealous goddess?

  “I have never seen it so beautiful,” she said.

  “Nor I.” I wish I could have boxed up that time, as for a single moment everything about us seemed so simple and so refreshingly uncomplicated: the clear blue sky, not a cloud on the horizon; the verdant forest, as green as I had ever seen it; the almost turquoise blue of the cove; and then, in stunning contrast to all else, the red shrine, like a ruby gemstone set in the middle of the most gorgeous crown.

  “Could I... would you mind if I stayed on board?” Sumie asked.

  “It will be all right.” We stood among the swirl of passengers that was disgorging onto the shore.

  “You know how superstitious I am,” she said, tugging at her baggy trousers.

  “Do not worry,” I said, and, like a father leading a recalcitrant child, I took Sumie firmly by the hand and led her onto the gang-plank. And she, still filled with such terrible foreboding, followed.

  Even before I had set foot on the land, even as I walked down the gang-plank, the omens were disastrous. I had walked but three steps when a shriek of intense pain rent the air. We all stopped and turned, and there by the anchor chain was the young cabin-girl, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of horror as she stared at her mashed and bloody arm. Her hand had somehow got caught in the winch mechanism of the anchor chain, and she had lost two, three fingers, the blood already streaming onto the deck.

  All she could do was stand there, stock still, and stare at the wreckage of her arm. She was whimpering, her brain numb with shock, little severed fingers lying at her feet.

  And it says so much of Japan as a nation that not one of us, not one, moved to help her. We stood and watched, bowed down by the weight of national apathy. I, like the sheep I was, did not move a muscle towards her. Was not I the perfect wretch? Now, now I would do anything at all to have helped. But then, I was still so self-centred as to think that her pain had nothing to do with me. I could watch. I could observe. But I was not a part of it and it was not for me to help her.

  I shudder to think of the utter callowness of that man that was myself. I may well have been doing what all of us had been conditioned to do. We did nothing out of the ordinary unless we had received a direct order. But it is not a humane way to behave; it denies every natural impulse to help your fellow man.

  One person did finally go over to the girl. It was that captain, that monstrosity of a man. Yet rather than embrace her, or tend to her injuries, he merely launched into the most terrible harangue. “You!” he shrieked. “What do you think you are doing? Why did you not take more care? Go into the cabin and bind up your hand.”

  The girl, still with her bleeding limb outstretched in front of her, cowered as if he was about to hit her.

  “Get off my deck!” he said. “Get off my deck and get into the cabin! And stop crying! Stop crying! What are your inju
ries compared to those who have given their lives for their country? Stop crying, you hear me?”

  But even then, even then, it was not too late. I could still have stepped in, could have comforted that shattered, bleeding girl – and, at the very least, defended her from the foulmouthed captain.

  I should have and it still makes me wince that I did not. Perhaps it was just in our nature in those days. We had about us a natural reserve which meant you did not get involved; you let people sort out their own problems.

  But my cold-hearted inaction was down to much more than mere conditioning. The truth was: I did not care. It was not my problem. The girl was in pain and had been maimed for life. But what could I do? What could anyone do?

  The other passengers remained glued to the spot. Sumie at least was trembling at the horror of it all. Everything inside her was telling her to get back onto the ship and to go to the girl. But even Sumie could not find it in herself to go against a lifetime of conditioning. That was how it was in Japan: you knuckled under. You obeyed orders. You did not think for yourself. And you played the part of the good citizen by stifling the slightest impulse of emotion.

  We stood for a moment longer, watching as the girl tottered to the cabin, the stump of her hand in her mouth. The captain showed his disgust by spitting over the side.

  “What are you all looking at? Have you not got anything better to do?” With that, he kicked at the severed fingers, those pathetic little scraps of bone and flesh, knocking them into the sea. “Be off with you!” he said, not bothering to look up. “Go say your prayers.”

  I have so many regrets in my life, but one of my greatest is my complete spinelessness in the face of that awful monster. What did I have to lose? I could, at the very least, have berated the man. Better yet I should have knocked him down and forced him to clean up the blood with his own tongue. But I did not and I despise myself for it. No, like all the other peasants on the ship, I registered that the show was over and I tramped onto the landing-stage. Not my problem. None of it was my problem. But how much horror does one have to witness before, eventually, it does become your problem?