Sumie’s white-tiled kitchen was spotless, but I did not linger, wolfing down some rice-balls and a piece of left over pumpkin. In the vestibule, I put on my favourite footwear, my old leather boots, weathered by many years at sea but still far more durable than the usual straw slippers we wore. I had worn them during my days as a merchant seaman, but I loved them because they had belonged to my father. Every time I put them on, I thought of him.
My bicycle was in the shed by the vegetable patch. I wheeled it out and, just as I knew she would be, the neighbour’s girl was already there to wave me off.
She was only seven years old and, like many children of the war, had a precociousness and self-sufficiency that was way beyond her years. She was an orphan and was looked after by her grandmother, who worked long hours as a nurse at the Shima Hospital in the centre of Hiroshima. There were no uncles, aunts or cousins, so the girl spent her days as she pleased; like a young mongrel that scavenges constantly about her patch in search of excitement.
“Good morning,” she called.
I peered about me to see where the voice was coming from, studying the shadows and the alleyways for a sight of her, but still she eluded me. “Good morning yourself, wherever you are.”
“I’m up here,” she laughed. She was right on the top of her home, sitting astride the very apex of the roof-tiles.
“Is that as dangerous as it looks?”
“Not for a dancer,” she said, and with that she got up and starting skipping along the roof-ridge. She was over two storeys high but was parading herself as easily as if she had been on the pavement. I remember how surreal it was to see that circus act silhouetted against the sun, with the girl’s pigtails flying behind her as she danced in the sky. What a picture of carefree abandon, so unaware that she was teetering on the very edge of disaster. She danced along the roof, skipping, one step, two step, as blithe as a ballerina. With a final twirl, she landed against the chimney stack and curtseyed to me.
“Very impressive,” I said, clapping lightly. “What would your grandmother say?”
“She’s gone to work.”
“So you’ll be getting up to mischief?”
She laughed and twirled again. “I thought I would join the local schoolgirls. You have never heard a sound like it when we pull the houses down. And the dust, it gets everywhere! It gets into your mouth, your nose and your eyes. It’s very exciting.”
I laughed at the thought of the girl tugging away at the cables. I could almost picture the fierce frown of concentration as she joined 30 other toiling schoolgirls in this ceaseless tug-of-war. “I am sure you are very good at it.”
“I am,” she said, and with that she grabbed hold of a drainpipe and shimmied down the side of the house as effortlessly as a monkey. She jumped the last metre and then skipped over to me, hands clasped behind her back, skirt billowing about her. “They say we’re pulling down many more houses now that I’m with them.”
“I am sure they are.” I climbed onto my bicycle, kicked up the pedal.
“When are you going to make me a kite? You promised me one weeks ago.”
“Every time I make a kite for you, the Navy takes it off me. They say they need them for their ships.”
“To kill more Yankees?”
“That is the idea.”
“That is good then. I hope we kill every one of them.”
“They are not that bad. I think you would quite like them.”
“Never! They killed my father!”
“I will see about that kite.”
I was about to push off, when the city’s siren opened up in a series of short blasts. It was more of an alert signal than the full alarm. High up in the sky was a single B-29, a gleaming streak of silver set against the most brilliant blue; I am told that the sight of it moved some people to poetry. The name of that particular B-29 was ‘Straight Flush’, and it was in the very act of signing our death warrant – its radio operator was reporting back that the weather conditions over Hiroshima were perfect.
Over the previous weeks we had seen scores of these B – 29s, and – just as Colonel Paul Tibbets had planned – were so used to them that we barely gave them a second glance. We had seen so many of these passive planes drifting high over Hiroshima that we had all but forgotten that they were the world’s most advanced killing machines.
“A single Mr B,” I said, using the affectionate ‘B-san’ name by which the children called the B29s. “Will you go to the shelter?”
The girl kicked at a stone in front of her, scuffing up the dust. “If I die, I die,” she said, squinting at the innocuous single plane.
“It would be nice to think we had some control over our future,” I said.
“It is fate.”
I have often wondered about that since. All of us like to believe that we are masters of our own destinies. But once you have been caught up in something like Hiroshima, when small matters of happenstance mean the difference between life and death, you can start to believe that fate may have lent a hand. This is exponentially so if you have also survived Nagasaki; it is fate squared. For most of our lives, there is not much of true import. It makes no odds if we go into work early, or if we have a leisurely breakfast at home. It does not matter if we spend all day in bed, or if we diligently go about our chores. But, for one single second that day, fate ruled the world and every chance decision that we made that morning would determine whether we lived or died.
It is best not to dwell on these matters; it plays havoc with your brain. If you have survived not one but two atomic bombs, you can be constantly tormented over whether the small things do matter. Should I boil some rice, or should I go for a walk? Will it make a difference? Will my life depend on it?
With luck, though, you will eventually come to the serene conclusion that, most likely, nothing will make a blind bit of difference; and, even if it did, there is nothing you could do about it anyway.
I waved to the girl as I weaved off down the dusty lane, with not an inkling that we were but an hour from Armageddon. With the wind in my face, it felt like I was in a safe haven, a world away from the death and destruction that was daily being visited on Toyko.
Out on one of the Drill Fields, soldiers were already going about their training, thrusting with bayonets at the stuffed straw bags that were our make-believe Yankee enemy. Cherry trees, peach trees and the great willows by the rivers, all of them verdant, green, lush with life. The teeming waterways, so full of energy – destined by noon-time to be so clogged with death that you could have walked the water on a bridge of corpses.
It is difficult to think back to that 30-minute bike ride through the city without also remembering how in a single second Hiroshima was turned into a wasteland. The clusters of schoolgirls, devoted to their duty, were already hauling at their ropes to create ever bigger fire-breaks. I watched as a team of 20 of them hauled at a rope attached to a wooden pillar. At first nothing seemed to happen, and then suddenly the front of the house tumbled down in a rumble of dust, tiles and wooden planks.
The Aioi T-bridge, the biggest of our 49 bridges, so broad, so impregnable and within the hour set to become the very aiming point for Bombardier Tom Ferebee. Already the bridge was alive with cyclists, pedestrians, wooden push-carts, all of them going about their business, not knowing that the wheel of fate was on its final spin. I can especially recall the sight of a lone beggar, squatting on the stone steps of what might have been a bank. He was on a blanket, wooden stick by his side, tranquilly watching the world go by. Four hours later I walked past him again. He was still staring sightlessly out over Hiroshima, his shrunken body turned into a solid piece of black charcoal, incinerated from head to toe. His shadow was etched into the stone wall behind him, an eerie echo of his last moment on earth. I remember the shock as I recognised him. I had stooped to touch his hand; his charcoaled arm snapped in half like a dry twig.
The sedate streets, with their long lines of tinder-dry wood houses – just perfect for a city
-wide fire-storm. It did not really need Little Boy to destroy us. I am sure we could have been just as effectively wiped out by the incendiary bombs that had worked so well on Tokyo. But what was the point of spending $2 billion on a new atomic toy if you were not going to use it?
And those posters; how I remember those posters. As I think back to Hiroshima before the bomb, I get these little snap-shots of memory. Plastered on every available piece of wall-space were these jingoistic posters, which constantly bleated that the end was in sight: ‘Victory is definitely with us! Our sacred country will repel the hated enemy!’; ‘The enemy must be defeated!’; ‘We ask for nothing but to win the war!’
Yes, indeed – just give us the chance to get stuck in with our bamboo spears and we would grind the Yankees to dust. Forgive me if my words do sometimes drip with sarcasm, but if you could not laugh at the irony of it all, it would make you weep. And I have done that too; many times.
I had cycled about five or six kilometres south through the city before I came to the vast Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company, which lies on one of the fingers of Hiroshima that stretches out into the Inland Sea. Warehouses were dotted all about the waterfront, the relics of what had once been a thriving war industry. But the place had long since turned into a ghost town.
The bomb alert ended as I pedalled up to the kite-makers’ warehouse. A few cautious souls emerged from the bombshelters, but most had not bothered to take cover. Hiroshima had not been targeted in months, so why were the Yankees going to start now?
From one of the bunkers stepped Takuo, a woman who I had flirted with and who I would definitely have kissed if she had not been so happily married. I think she worked as a secretary for one of the senior officers, though I never talked about work with her. A lovely smile and, what I remember best, the loveliest breasts, which, though kept under wraps, seemed constantly straining to break through her patterned shirt. In those lean times, it was rare indeed to see a beautiful woman so amply endowed.
“Good morning, Takuo,” I said, leaning my bike against the wall.
“Did I miss anything?”
“Only 20 minutes of sunshine.” I locked my eyes on hers.
“Oh – but the bunker can be quite nice in the morning.”
“With you, Takuo dearest, the bunker would be wonderful at any time of the day.” It was cheesy, I know, but she giggled delightedly all the same.
“Why are you in so early? You’re never in at this hour.”
“All for the greater good of the Emperor and our beloved Motherland.”
“How is it that when you say such things, I never believe you?”
By now I had walked to the warehouse, where I lingered by the door. “Do you believe anything I say?”
“From you?” She raised her finger coquettishly to her lips. “Probably not.”
I opened the door. “One of these days I would like to go on a picnic with you. Can you believe that?”
Takuo tittered in the manner of a Geisha girl, hands in front of her mouth, almost as if she was embarrassed at this unseemly display of humour. “I am a married woman!” she said. She then ruined the effect by giving me the most brilliant smile, and I fluttered my fingers as I walked into the gloom of the warehouse
I think our warehouse might once been used for army stores, but these had long since gone. Instead, all about the high walls and stretching the length of a tennis court were the hundreds of box kites that we had so lovingly constructed for the Japanese Imperial Fleet. I did, I suppose, feel some little pride as I walked in and inspected my handiwork of the previous three months; though, even before Little Boy, I was aware of the futility of it all.
High in the walls were a few dirty windows. The dust spangled as the weak sunlight glimmered through the murk. After the brilliant sunshine, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. I was surprised to find that one of the other kite-makers, Motoji, was already hunched over his work-bench, softly sawing off lengths of bamboo.
He had the radio on and was listening to the glib patter of Masanobu Furuta, one of Hiroshima Radio Station’s ‘sweetsounding voices of reason’. Furuta possessed, said the newspapers, a voice ‘which calmed our anxieties’. I could not stand the man.
“Good morning,” I called out to Motoji. “Enjoy yourself yesterday?”
“I came here to work,” said Motoji, peering up at me over the tops of his little round glasses. His brow was drawn and furrowed, and he had an almost perpetual stoop, the mark of a man who had spent too long indoors. And what a low-slung weasel of a man he was. Motoji was one of the few kitemakers who came from Hiroshima, and I had met him three months earlier. As it was, I think I would only have needed two minutes with him to have come up with a complete character analysis.
The war seemed to have cemented all the most loathsome aspects of his personality. Under the mantle of the war effort, this stifling killjoy was able to vaunt himself as the most ardent patriot. Eating the most frugal food was proof that he was a patriot; arriving early to work and leaving late was proof that he loved his country; and working on Sundays meant he was a devout nationalist who worshipped the Emperor.
There were many like him, though thankfully I rarely came into daily contact with them. To me, Motoji was nothing more than a hamster on his wheel, blindly scurrying onward, onward, because that was his masters’ bidding.
I laughed as I sauntered through the warehouse, my fingers stretching out to trace over the kite-frames. I have always loved the feel of the parchment-dry paper of a new kite.
“You know what they say – a day away from the warehouse is a day wasted.”
“That is so,” Motoji replied, ignoring my irony.
I stopped by the door at the far end and called out to him. “Tell me, Motoji. Do you think any of your kites will ever be used in action?”
“Without doubt. They will help us to ultimate victory.” He stood up to look at me, his round shoulders continuing in a smooth curve from his neck.
“And where are the ships on which your kites are going to
fly?”
“They are out fighting on the oceans. We are making more of them as we speak. Our armaments factories are working through the night.”
“Strange how none of the ships ever put in to Hiroshima anymore,” I goaded.
“The fighting spirit of the people lives on,” he said, as if repeating some hallowed piece of wisdom.
“Is that another line you are spouting from that rag Chugoku Shimbun?”
“It is,” he said, toying with the saw in his hands. “It is a paper that I am proud to buy. You would do well to read it.”
“So that they can tell me about all the fleets of Yankee ships that we have sunk?”
“The Yankee ships have been sunk. I know it.”
“So I can read more uplifting stories about the life and times of a Kamikaze hero? So I can garner more delicious recipes for grass soup?”
Motoji bristled, the saw quivering as it flexed between his fingers. “That is disgraceful,” he said. “You are a disgrace. You are disloyal to your country and you are a disgrace to your Emperor.”
I could have said more, but I saved my breath. I could not be bothered. It would have been easier to talk a pig into denying his constant appetite for food. Yet there were so many like Motoji, people for whom it was easier to believe the government’s lies than to deny the evidence of their own eyes. How cleverly our leaders had dressed up the war effort, as if it was our patriotic duty to believe in Japan’s ultimate victory, and that to doubt it for even a moment was tantamount to treason.
I clicked the metal door shut behind me and walked into the small common room that adjoined the main warehouse. Shinzo and I would occasionally have lunch there. It had a few bamboo chairs and a low table, as well as the sacred picture of our Emperor Hirohito, his chest dripping with medals, braid and bejewelled honours. How singularly out of place all that gilt and gold looked on our mild-mannered Emperor. With his wisp of a moustache and thick pebble
glasses, Hirohito gave every appearance of being an earnest academic. And indeed he was – before the war, he had been a world expert on marine microbiology.
Actually, though once I may have sneered at Hirohito and everything he stood for, I do now admire the man. From the very first, he had been against the war. Just before Pearl Harbour, Hirohito had read out a poem to that blood-thirsty band of warmongers that ruled our country:
‘When I regard all the world
‘As my own brothers
‘Why is it that its tranquillity
‘Should be so thoughtlessly disturbed?’
Wise words from the great man. Not that anyone listened to him but, in the end, Hirohito did manage to bring about a speedier close to the war – and I have always been grateful for that. If he had not, I would have been shot dead, and what a tragic end that would have been for a man who had just survived two atomic bombs.
You may wonder what I was doing at the warehouse so early on a Monday morning when I had little interest in making kites. The reason was simple enough: I was there to nose round the foreman’s office. Like Motoji, our foreman was another upstanding Japanese patriot, but the difference with Major Akiba was that he had power with it. He was a short thug of a man in charge not just of our kite-making operation but the entire complex. With his smooth, waxen face and trim little moustache, he was a blistering cauldron of rage. Even for a civilian like me, he could make life very unpleasant.
Akiba is now dead and so I will strive to be fair to the man. He was a typical product of Japan’s ‘no surrender’ school of army training. There were thousands like him and I do not doubt that I would have loathed them too. I was so sick of the daily diet of lies fed to us, and Akiba and his ilk were all part of the system which kept the entire 100 million population under heel.
I do not especially blame Akiba; he was doing just exactly what he had been trained to do. But I certainly did not have to like him either. For the past three months I had been in almost daily contact with that barking martinet, with his shrieked orders and his eye-watering petty sanctions, and I had come to loathe the man.
Mr Two Bomb Page 5
