Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  “You could’ve asked a Japanese friend to go over the procedure with you," he said calmly. “They would have warned you; I would’ve brought over some Vicodin. You didn’t even try to prepare.”

  I was as close to hating him as I had ever been. So what if he was right? Why rub my face in it when I’m lying prostrate beneath a hotel room sink? I just wanted chicken soup and sympathy.

  The cramps subsided later that night, and I slept for a few hours before heading back to Dr. Makabe’s office, where she would perform the procedure. Although seemingly unconcerned with the discomfort caused by the expanding seaweed sticks, she used general anesthetic for a D&C. I lay down on a table with stirrups that were set much too short for my five-foot, eight-inch frame. My legs jutted out into the center of the room. The nurses kept whacking into them and giggling. “Sumimasen,” they would repeat each time with a slight bow—excuse me.

  Dr. Makabe came in to administer the anesthesia. “This will put me to sleep, right?” I asked anxiously.

  She cocked her head, considering, her syringe poised in the air. “It puts Japanese women to sleep,” she mused. “I don’t know about foreigners.”

  Get me the hell out of here was my last thought before everything went black.

  The next morning it snowed—almost unheard of in Tokyo in late March. The powder settled onto the pink and fuchsia blooms of the plum trees, drifted onto the cherry trees, which were just beginning to loosen the grip on their buds. I already felt like myself again. Steven and I lay in bed wiling away the day with a haiku contest, taking turns writing verse about the weather, the straight-backed old ladies on their black bicycles, about love. I felt like one of the bruised but unbowed characters of a Yasujiro Ozu film.

  “Let’s just say good-bye here,” Steven said when it was time for him to go. He didn’t even want me to walk him to the subway station. I nodded, didn’t cry. Our love had become so caught in recriminations, so buried in layers of misunderstanding. He drew me to him. “It’s over,” he said. He was referring to the miscarriage, the surgery. At least I hoped he was.

  7

  CHERRY BLOSSOM HEARTS

  The Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet trains, travel at speeds of 187 miles per hour, the fastest land transport in the world. They connect virtually every major city in the country. They are never late. They are never early. You can set your watch by their schedule, and you’d better or you’ll be in danger of missing them. Three days after Steven left, at precisely 10:04 A.M., I boarded a Nozomi bullet train to Hiroshima. I’d planned the trip weeks before, and as when I’d zipped off to St. Louis after my previous miscarriage, there seemed no reason to cancel. I would only mope in Tokyo; better, I thought, to bury myself in work.

  Steven’s first film had been about atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha as they’re called in Japanese; through him I had developed my own passion for the subject, and was considering writing a novel about the fate of women and children in the years after the Bomb was dropped. No one, neither Japanese nor American, likes to dwell on the discrimination survivors faced from the outsiders who poured into the city after the war, the presumption that their radiation-induced wounds were contagious. Young women in particular, visibly scarred or not, became pariahs, shunned for fear they’d bear deformed children.

  On previous visits I’d befriended several “Hiroshima Maidens”: twenty-five young women whom Saturday Evening Post editor Norman Cousins, along with a group of Quaker families, brought to New York in 1955 for reconstructive surgery. They were our country’s first glimpse of the Bomb’s victims. Photographs of Hiroshima were still classified at that time, and President Truman told the press that the Bomb exploded over a military target. Even if he’d told the truth, Americans, who had been subject to years of anti-Japanese propaganda and still mourning their own dead sons, weren’t inclined to be sympathetic. But the Maidens’ plight transcended all of that. One woman’s face was reduced to pulp, her lips and nose seared off, her chin fused to her neck. Another had webs of red, ropy keloids stretching from her face to her wrists. A third had no eyelids. Cousins chose shrewdly; the Maidens, who had been junior high and high school students in 1945, were embraced as innocent victims, broken creatures whom America, in its postwar largesse, would fix both physically and spiritually.

  “The girls,” as they were known, became a media sensation, appearing on the cover of Life, shown in Collier’s eating hot-dogs at Yankee Stadium, and publishing bubbly “diary entries” in women’s magazines. The man who accompanied them, Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto—a protagonist of John Hersey’s Hiroshima—was celebrated on This Is Your Life (though the Maidens who appeared with him were veiled by a screen to avoid upsetting viewers). He would go on to become the world’s most famous hibakusha, criss-crossing America giving lectures and raising money, even offering an opening prayer on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

  The Reverend Tanimoto had died in the 1980s, but I wrote to his wife, Chisa, who still lived in Hiroshima, requesting an interview about their years with the Maidens. She replied that she’d be pleased to meet me, but first I’d have to be screened by her oldest daughter, Koko, a minister’s wife herself who lived in Osaka. That was easy enough—I could stop there on my way down to Hiroshima.

  My interpreter in Tokyo had told me to grab a cab at Osaka Station and tell the driver to take me to Kita-Senri Church, which was a short ride away. She neglected, however, to tell me the Japanese word for church. “Kita-Senri” is the name of the neighborhood; it would be like repeating “Upper West Side” over and over to a New York cabbie and expecting him to take you to St. John the Divine. Still, Christian churches are unusual in Japan. How hard could it be to figure it out? I fumbled for a pen, drew a house with a cross on top, and showed it to the driver.

  A travel tip: Japanese will never say they can’t help you. If a clerk doesn’t have your size at a department store, she’ll hem and haw and bring you random merchandise until you go away. Although he nodded vigorously, my cab driver had no idea where I wanted to go. He drove around Osaka, stopping occasionally and opening the automatic door, hoping I would take the hint and get out. On his third attempt to dump me, in front of a nondescript apartment building, he left the meter running and refused to close the door. I wasn’t about to get out of a cab in the middle of nowhere in a strange city. So I tried again. I clasped my hands in prayer and looked reverently upward. Nothing. I repeated “Jesus” several times. No luck. Then I sang "Silent Night,” followed by “Jesus Christ Superstar.” His face lit up. “Ah!” he said. “Christo!” and, to our mutual relief, quickly drove to my destination.

  Koko Tanimoto Kondo was waiting for me outside, craning her neck to look down the street, impatiently bouncing on the balls of her feet. A round woman in her mid-fifties, she was surprisingly plainspoken for a Japanese and remarkably short; when we stood side by side, her eyes were level with my ribs. Neither her parents nor her siblings were so tiny, she explained, leading me into the church. She suspected her growth was stunted by radiation exposure. Koko was one of the youngest hibakusha, an eight-month-old in her mother’s arms when their house collapsed. Mrs. Tanimoto was knocked unconscious and might have remained where she was, dazed, if it weren’t for Koko’s cries. Instead, she instinctively dug both herself and the baby out of the rubble and fled. Their house burned, but mother and daughter lived.

  Like many children of great men, Koko spoke cautiously about her father, but admitted she was jealous of his relationships with the Maidens. “Everyone was so interested in them,” she recalled. “He didn’t pay much attention to me. I felt left out, like I wasn’t important.”

  Koko grew up defined by the Bomb, always in the shadow of her family name. She hated it. Later, as a college student in Washington, D.C., she claimed to be from Tokyo. She confided the truth only once, in her twenties, to her Chinese American fiancé. He immediately called off the engagement. “I was so angry,” she said. “I thought, If there is a God, why did he let this happen to m
e?’ I didn’t want anything to do with that kind of God.”

  Koko eventually returned to Japan, settling in Tokyo and marrying an atheist documentary filmmaker named Yasuo Kondo. But film is a fickle business; short on money, the couple was forced to move back to Hiroshima, where Yasuo took a job with his father-in-law at the Peace Center. The two men took long walks in the evening, debating the existence of God. Apparently, the minister won—a few years later, over Koko’s objections, Yasuo entered the seminary. “So I’ve come full circle,” she said. "Me! A minister’s wife working for peace.” She shrugged, a Buddhist to her Christian core. “I guess this is my en, my destiny.”

  The Reverend Tanimoto bequeathed his daughter something else: a commitment to finding homes for orphans. Adoption is rare in Japan, where blood ties determine everything from marriage prospects to career potential. It would be difficult for a Japanese to view someone else’s child as her own. What’s more, the country’s Buddhist culture considers a person born to his en. If you are orphaned, well, shikataganai. You must gaman.

  As a Christian, Reverend Tanimoto thought differently. Thousands of elementary school students had been evacuated from Hiroshima to the countryside the spring before the bombing to protect them from possible air raids. They returned to find their parents vaporized, their homes incinerated. In a city of tragedies, there was nowhere for them to go. Some were taken in by extended family. Others were rounded up and shipped to Dickensian orphanages. The rest huddled near the railroad station, begging and stealing to survive. Many of the girls were coerced into prostitution; the boys into becoming “human bullets” in yakuza gang wars. It is another part of the past that goes unmentioned. Reverend Tanimoto placed as many children abroad as he could, running what was essentially an adoption agency out of his home. Long after the Bomb orphans had grown, young women continued leaving newborns at his door, desperate to spare both the child and themselves the taint of illegitimacy.

  Koko herself was unable to bear children. She believes that this, too, was a result of radiation exposure, though no one can say for sure. In the church office she introduced me to one of her two adopted daughters, a gangly teenager, who looked up from her homework, pushed up her glasses, and smiled shyly. “Harro,” she said in charmingly accented English. “Pleased to meet you.”

  That was all it took. Rather than interviewing Koko, I confided in her, spilled the details of my pregnancies and miscarriages. "Just last week?” she said, touching my hand. I nodded, struggling not to cry. “There is a doctor in Hiroshima,” she continued. "Occasionally, because of my father’s work, she asks me to find a home in America for a baby. It’s not predictable—sometimes I get three babies in three months, sometimes I don’t get one for two years.” She went on to say that the birth mothers were usually teenagers who didn’t realize they were pregnant and didn’t get abortions in time. Or the babies were products of extramarital affairs. I felt adrenalin course through me. “And once in a while,” she said, eyeing me carefully, “they are the babies of rape victims.”

  I nodded. “It’s not the children’s fault," I said, with more conviction than I felt. Could I really adopt the child of a rapist? What surprises would lurk in those genes? My outward response, however, was the one Koko was looking for. She smiled. I had passed her test. What’s more, she was familiar with Steven’s work. We even had a mutual friend in California, Berkeley Symphony conductor Kent Nagano. If he vouched for us, she said, she would put us at the top of her adoption list. I assured her we were interested, though again, I didn’t know if that was true.

  Koko hugged me as I left, promising to call her mother on my behalf. “She is caring for a baby boy right now who is being adopted by an American,” she said. “You can see him, too.”

  I boarded the train to Hiroshima feeling energized. Maybe this was fate. Maybe all of my work in Hiroshima, all of Steven’s work, was destined to lead us here, to Koko, to an adopted Japanese child. On the few occasions when we had discussed adoption, ethnicity had been a sticking point. Adopting a white baby, even if we could find one, seemed wrong for Steven. I suggested a Chinese or Korean child, but he rejected that, too, given Japan’s atrocities against those countries during World War II. "That would be like a German adopting an Israeli,” he said. I nixed Latin America, reluctant to raise someone from a staunchly Catholic culture as a Jew. We never imagined we’d be able to find a baby in Japan. I began drafting a letter to Koko confirming our interest and asking for more details. Then I gazed out the window, dreaming of Japanese babies, until the train pulled into Hiroshima Station.

  Hiroshima is a city of water, shaped like a fan whose ribs are the six branches of the Ota River. Beyond the bombing, it’s not a noteworthy place; visiting is like traveling to the United States and staying in Omaha. “I know you think Hiroshima is boring,” Steven e-mailed, “but try to use your spare time to relax and think. Find a warm bench in the Peace Park and contemplate the future.” I ignored him, stacking my days with back-to-back interviews.

  Reporting in Hiroshima is a process of excavation. Part of it is the physical reality of the place; at any moment I could be walking on the bones of the dead, trampling on shards of past lives—broken crockery, a child’s toy, a doctor’s scalpel—that were long ago plowed under. Over fifty years after the bombing, ceramic buttons from junior high school uniforms still washed up on riverbanks rolling among smooth, round pebbles. Information, too, was buried under a sediment of fear, guilt, and shame, only sporadically, unexpectedly revealed. It was maddening for a can-do American like me, but hibakusha had reason to be wary. Even today, if a young man expresses interest in marrying a Hiroshima girl, his family may hire detectives to ensure she’s not the descendant of survivors. The hibakusha who were willing to talk, who were more or less professional volunteers at the Peace Museum, were mostly childless, their relatives long dead. But they’d spoken to so many groups of tourists and schoolchildren that their stories, as valuable as they were, tended to sound canned.

  To find something less rehearsed I had to tread carefully, be referred by the right people. It was perilously easy to err. The Maidens, for instance, disliked one another. From the time they returned to Japan—sporting fashionable circle skirts, round-toed pumps, and a distinctly American swagger, their deformities diminished though by no means erased—they were dogged by reporters, stalked by paparazzi-style photographers. Often the coverage was brutal: so many died in the war, why should these women have received special treatment? Did the United States believe that patching up twenty-five girls was restitution for hundreds of thousands whom the Bomb maimed or killed? The criticism drove the women into semi-seclusion. They refused interviews and avoided one another. Three moved back to the States. Among those who remained, only Michiko Yamaoka talked to the press. “The others want to ignore what happened, to live quietly,” she once told me. “I wanted the people of the world to know. I didn’t want my experience to become a fairy tale.”

  I’d met Yamaoka on several previous trips to Japan, but during this visit, for the first time, she asked me to tea in her two-room home. Japanese generally socialize in public. Living quarters tend to be tiny; I’ve had friends for more than a decade whose apartments I’ve never seen. The invitation indicated a new level of trust. “I’ve lived here for forty-six years,” she told me through an interpreter, as I removed my shoes in the dirt entryway. “It’s falling down around me.”

  It was true—the walls, papered with news clippings and thank-you drawings from schoolchildren around the world, were warped; the sitting room’s straw tatami mats were patched and rotting. In one corner, next to the TV, was a photograph of Yamaoka’s mother, Akino, dressed in a dark kimono, her white hair pulled tightly back. Each morning Yamaoka knelt before it, lit incense, rang a bell, and prayed. The shrine was surrounded by fruit, candles, and cups of coffee. “My mother loves coffee,” Yamaoka explained, deliberately using the present tense. “I make her a cup every day.”

  Yamaoka’s surgeries (t
wenty-seven during her eighteen months in America) restored mobility to her neck, which, because she’d looked up as the Enola Gay passed overhead, had melted into her left shoulder. They also gave her back the use of her fingers, which had fused as she raised her hands against the blast. Still, she fashioned much of her face in the mirror each morning, applying thick pancake makeup that couldn’t fully cover her scars, drawing on an upper lip with pink lipstick, donning rose-tinted glasses to hide a drooping lower eyelid. She pointed to her cheek, to the patchwork of skin grafts culled from her belly. “If I gain weight, these get fat, too,” she said, and laughed.

  Despite her disfigurement, or maybe because of it, Yamaoka indulged in small vanities. She dyed her hair black to hide her age, took pains with her wardrobe. On this day she wore a jacket the color of daffodils over a blue skirt, and a gold band inlaid with onyx on one gnarled finger.

  Yamaoka had asked me to her home for a reason. She wanted me to see the sole picture of her that survived the war. Taken in 1944, when she was fourteen, it showed a girl in a sailor-style school uniform with shoulder-length braids and a square jaw. I scanned the face for some harbinger of what was to come, but there was none. She looked neither happy nor unhappy, merely ordinary.

  I was drawn to Yamaoka’s tale, as I was to Koko Kondo’s, as a story of mothers and daughters, of limitless loyalty and a kind of profound love that I wondered if I would—if I could—ever feel myself.

  Yamaoka’s father had died when she was three. She spent her childhood shuttling between her mother, whom she described as a barmaid, and her wealthy aunt. “I remember taking English class in junior high,” she said. “I remember learning”—she switched to heavily accented English— this is a pen.’” She laughed again and continued in Japanese. “But the next year the war with America broke out. Instead of learning English, we made bamboo spears and practiced lunging at scarecrows dressed in American soldiers’ uniforms. It was supposed to prepare us if we were attacked.”