Return to Hiroshima

by Bob Van Laerhoven

  “Do you think he’s still alive?”

  “I’m not sure. But if he is, then I can ask him about my father, what he was like.”

  “I can use my ministry contacts to find out.”

  Takeda tried to hide the excitement his friend’s words aroused inside him. He wasn’t sure if it was working. Adachi gave him a strange, bemused look.

  But the doctor said nothing. A week later, Takeda had a name and an address. And, finally, a way of finding out who he was.

  * * *

  The dog-tags belonged to a soldier named Masajiro Amitani, fifty-three year old, living in a home for the disabled in the city of Morioka in the Iwate prefecture. In spite of the patient’s relatively young age, his official malady was “atypical muscular dystrophy”. Takeda visited the place and gave a false name and occupation. He was well prepared. His job made it easy for him to secure forged papers and lying was a piece of cake. To add to his disguise he wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, which completely transformed his face, and a cloth cap, which was popular in Japan at the time, to hide the colour of his hair. Takeda felt awkward as he entered the building, but the management and the nursing personnel had no reason to suspect him. He was allowed to see the patient without the least problem.

  What had he expected? A sturdy, robust man like himself? Masajiro Amitani was crumpled in his wheelchair, his eyes sunken, his cheeks hollow, his limbs dried out and brittle as a twig. But there was something determined in his gaze and tenacity in his demeanour that his wasted muscles belied. Takeda introduced himself as a civil servant doing research into veterans and their war past with a view to improving their maintenance allowances. Masajiro fell for it hook, line and sinker. Without the slightest hesitation – he was still every inch the patriot – he reeled off dates and the places he had been stationed.

  “Camp Pangkalan-Balei?”

  “Absolutely. Two years as a guard. Then they transferred me to Xinjing in China.”

  “What did you do there?” Takeda avoided focusing his questions too quickly on the women’s camp in South Sumatra.

  Masajiro hesitated for the first time in the conversation. His eagerness melted. The large Adam’s apple in his emaciated throat bobbed up and down.

  “In my day that was classified information, sir.”

  “I know,” said Takeda, although he had no idea what the man was talking about. He was relying on his intuition, and his intuition told him he had to pretend he knew exactly what the invalid ex-soldier was referring to. “But the government has decided we have to put matters right on the war. Patriots like you who fought for their country were left with a shadow over their heads. Isn’t it time you received the proper reward for your patriotism?”

  Masajiro stared at him. The whites of his eyes were yellow and bloodshot. Takeda felt a prickling sensation in his hands, very weird. But he was otherwise calm and even a little lightheaded, as if he was watching this encounter as a third party witness.

  Then the ex-soldier nodded.

  And Akio Takeda learned for the first time in his life about Unit 731.

  * * *

  “It was a secret operation ordered by senior military officials who were in direct contact with the emperor. They insisted that we were the most courageous of patriots, the most loyal of soldiers, the guardians of Japan’s honour. Our superiors didn’t say much beyond that, but you know how things are: soldier to soldier. We heard stories from ex-servicemen that the seeds had been sown in occupied China and Japan for a master race that would avenge Nippon if capitulation in the war turned out to be unavoidable. In those days our cities had suffered heavy bombing, and while no one dared suggest that Japan was losing the war – on punishment of execution – we all knew it in our hearts. But that made us all the more determined, do you understand? It might sound strange to someone from a different generation like yourself, but we thought it was normal and even desirable that our best doctors conducted experiments on prisoners of war. I’m not a monster. I was often left shivering in my shoes when I had to carry the dying and the dead to the quarry outside the camp and saw what had happened to them. But I turned my heart into a stone because I knew that these sacrifices were being offered for the future of Nippon. They injected the prisoners with experimental agents designed in theory to strengthen their cells. They were then infected with the black plague or typhus, exposed to dioxins, extremes of cold and heat. They even tested how long they could stay under water before they drowned.

  The experiments failed one by one, but new ideas emerged to replace them. Pregnant Chinese women were fed chemical cocktails designed to produce super strong wonder babies. They were then infected with syphilis and the doctors observed how the foetus reacted. Every now and then we were ordered to inspect the women’s manko. They had to stand on their hands and knees with their naked vulvas pointing upwards to allow the doctors to see if their medication had prevented the syphilis from taking hold. Sometimes they resisted, so we sat on them and held them by the throat to keep them still. If they didn’t do what they were told we strangled them. The syphilis made the manko swell, of course, and you didn’t need to be a doctor to see it. One day the doctor on duty was hit in the face by puss spurting from a vaginal wound he had pressed too hard. In the commotion that followed – the woman was immediately decapitated – I must have picked up some of the infected fluid. A few days later I came down with a fever and fainted. For some unknown reason, probably because of the chemicals they had injected into the woman’s body, the syphilis had mutated. The doctors were mystified. My muscles swelled up then wasted away and my bones started to disintegrate. I was rushed from Xinjing and admitted to a military hospital in Hiroshima located in a separate building a distance from the civilian hospital. No one was allowed in without authorisation. The doctors working in the place had all been recruited by Unit 731. I was given a pension of thirty-six yen per month. In those days a headmaster earned eighteen yen per month. I was proud. The government clearly valued my sacrifice for the fatherland.

  I could still walk, albeit with difficulty, when the bomb fell. The hospital exploded like a nut under a hammer. My memories of that moment are jumbled together. It was as if I had indulged myself in some opium, which I did now and then in Xinjing to escape the things we had to do there. Flames and the screams of the dying are foremost in my mind, that and the feeling that my body was a dried ume, a prune hankering for water, water, water. The black rain fell on us, burning our skin. It tasted like sewage, but I opened my mouth and swallowed it all the same. Growling, groaning, gasping... those were the sounds that filled the world around me. The smoke made it difficult in places to see your hand in front of your face. Chance – or fate? – brought me to a primary school where people had gathered together. There was an enormous pit next to the school full of corpses; adults, children, but also horses, dogs, cats. The sight of it almost drove me insane.

  I was later repatriated to Morioka where they took good care of me when they learned I was a war veteran. After the war I received a visit from a civil servant not unlike yourself who made me swear I would say nothing about Unit 731. We put together a story to explain why my body was in such a state. It was all due to the atom bomb and the hardships I had endured during the war in the Pacific. The man told me that it would take a while for people to realise that the things we did in Unit 731 were heroic deeds, things we did for Japan, things that would influence future generations, perhaps even all humanity. I’ve never forgotten what he said. I think about it when I’m awake and dream about it when I’m asleep. I hoped for years to receive news that our scholars had created a superman. But there was only silence and I continued to waste away. I often return to Xinjing in my dreams, and discover what we were looking for, how to improve the human race and restore glorious Nippon to its rightful place as the world’s leader. I’ve spent my entire life afraid that the Americans would discover our test results and succeed where we failed. The
y managed to exploit dioxin, didn’t they? We discovered it and they use it now already a couple of years in Vietnam.

  I’ve always wondered whether that civil servant – who made sure I could stay here in the home – would ever be proven right. And look, more than twenty-five years later you appear asking about my story, what really happened.”

  “We have to dig a little deeper into the past, Mr Masajiro. I’d like to talk to you about South Sumatra, if I may, about what you did in Pangkalan-Balei women’s camp.”

  “…”

  “Did you understand my question?”

  “Yes... but I’m tired... exhausted to be honest. Can you come back tomorrow? I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  117

  Hiroshima – Funairi Hospital –

  Xavier Douterloigne – morning, March 18th 1995

  “How’s the patient today?”

  “Better. He was conscious for a few minutes. His pupils reacted to light. He mumbled something, a mixture of his own language and Japanese...”

  “Japanese?”

  “Apparently he speaks our language. He said something about the kitsune.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. The kitsune.”

  “If I was a traditional Japanese man, confrere, I would say he was struggling with the fox spirit. And as we all know, the fox represents our conscience.”

  “ A classic explanation, my respected colleague. I couldn’t have put it better. The next few hours are crucial.”

  * * *

  Xavier Douterloigne can hear the murmurs, whispers and sighs of a thousand voices. Guilt, angst and pain are eating him alive. He’s far too young for the tragedy fate has dumped on his shoulders. That awareness is the only thing preventing him from sinking deeper into a darkness that knows no end. He gropes for something solid, something to hold on to, and what does he see? The bronze lights of a tiny temple in a narrow lane in Yanaka, the old part of Tokyo, the oppressive downtown where smells and shadows crowd his twelve year old brain. Slender streets snake upwards on steep hills, littered with tiny ateliers and shops. Xavier follows his father and quickly loses his own sense of direction. His father turns left into an alley that smells of ginger, crosses a tiny courtyard and enters a room on the other side, cool, poorly lit. The yumetoki Xavier is visiting with his father is emaciated, fragile and old; everything one might expect of a spiritual person. The interpreter of dreams pours water in Xavier’s eyes and peers through a hollow bamboo cane at his pupils while his father takes photographs. The ritual was necessary, the clairvoyant explains. It was the only way to see what Xavier’s eyes had seen while he was asleep. The old man peers long and hard and sighs deeply with considerable dramatic effect. He then concludes: “The boy is living in the vicinity of a fox that can transform itself into a girl. We call this spirit the kitsune.”

  Xavier’s father puts down his camera. “Is that good or bad?” Xavier is taken aback at the concern in his father’s voice. It’s all superstition, isn’t it? The old man, his eyes no more than dark pencil marks in his wrinkled face, places his hand on Xavier’s head. “The kitsune is neither good nor bad,” he says. “It depends on the boy himself. If he lives a dutiful life, the kitsune will be good for him. If not...”

  Xavier and his father later laughed with gusto at this colourful intermezzo. Xavier squared his shoulders and felt like a man.

  But for one reason or another, the memory had resurfaced and in his dream he sees a white fox with red eyes skulking towards him with its head close to the ground. The kitsune gets closer and closer and Xavier is aware that his body is getting tenser by the second. He screams when he recognises the eyes of the fox inches from his face.

  His eyes wide open and gasping for breath, he stares into the eyes of a nurse dressed in white, leaning over his bed.

  118

  Kyoto – Ryokan Yachiyo – 34 Nanzenji Fukuji-cho –

  Takeda thinking back to 1973 –

  morning, March 18th 1995

  This is going to be the longest night of my life, Takeda thinks. It’s pouring outside the motel. He’s lying in bed. He shifts his right arm from behind his head and turns. He has pins and needles in his elbow. This night is never going to end, he thinks. Is it because he’s bored? Powerless? He’s definitely uneasy, no question about that, and not only because of the meeting he’s hoping to have the following morning with the Public Security Commission. But for some reason he can’t get the memory of the events that took place twenty years earlier out of his head, and they’re only making things worse.

  What now irks him most is the awareness that he always denied the role of fate in what happened to Masajiro Amitani.

  Was it an accident, he asks himself so many years later, that his wife told him when he got back from his first meeting with Masajiro that her confused mother, a diabetes patient, had been admitted to hospital after injecting too much insulin and had sunk into a coma. Her doctor had only recently prescribed R-Regular U-500 Humilin, a new concentrated form of insulin, but his mother-in-law had used the same old dose she had been injecting for years. It could easily have been fatal. Takeda and his wife visited her in hospital that same evening. He wasn’t usually so interested in his mother-in-law, but this time he was curious for some reason and asked the old lady what had happened. She had injected twenty units of the new insulin concentrate, and the overdose had almost killed her.

  Sitting in his car the following morning in front of the home, Takeda put on his horn-rimmed glasses, cloth cap and civil servant face. Less than ten minutes later he was sitting opposite Masajiro Amitani. This time the man seemed a little uncomfortable.

  “Why do you want to know about the camp? They didn’t conduct secret experiments there as they did in Xinjing. It was a camp for women, nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Why were you transferred from the camp to Xinjing?”

  Masajiro tried to straighten his back: “The answer to that is simple: my superiors had taken note of my patriotism and my readiness to follow orders to the letter.”

  Takeda peered deep into the man’s sunken eyes and asked himself if Masajiro could sense a bond between them. He looked at the soldier’s hands: long fingers with surprisingly coarse knuckles, as if his skeleton had already gone to war with the skin covering it. Takeda noted that the fingers were tense and twisted.

  “Your readiness to follow orders to the letter... Tell me, Mr Masajiro, how were the women in the camp treated?”

  “According to the regulations of the imperial Japanese army.”

  “So the prisoners of war had to be productive.”

  The man’s fingers relaxed and he rested his hands on his thighs. “There were production quotas, that’s true.”

  “I mean: productive in another way.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Did they have to produce babies?”

  The fingers tensed. His nails were clean and neatly cut, but his hands appeared to be covered with patches of dirt, or was it subcutaneous bleeding?

  “Where did you get such strange ideas?”

  “What were the nationalities of the women in the camp?”

  “English, America...”

  “Dutch?”

  “Yes, Dutch too. There were a lot of Dutch people in Sumatra when the war broke out.”

  “They have beautiful women in the Netherlands, don’t you think? Tall, sturdy, blonde.”

  “They disgusted me. Graceless peasants, smelled of... ”

  “Milk and honey?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Did you enjoy raping them?”

  “I...”

  “Was there a tall woman, half-blonde, half-redhead?”

  A shudder ran through Masajiro Amitani’s body.

  “I think it would be better if you...”

&nb
sp; “No, it would be better if you confessed.” Takeda took off his glasses. The man opposite him blinked.

  “Who…?”

  “I’m the son of Barbara Gerressen. Does the name ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “A Dutch woman.” For the first time in the conversation Takeda removed his cap. Masajiro had made nothing of Takeda’s impoliteness during their last meeting and had seemed equally indifferent on this occasion.

  “A Dutch woman with red hair.”

  Did Takeda catch a glimpse of recognition, a memory, a flash of guilt, or a dark shimmer of incomprehension?

  “I don’t know any Dutch women with red hair.”

  “You’re lying. Or should I say: father, you’re lying?”

  The man’s lips stiffened. Takeda noticed his left hand tighten around the wheel of his chair, its knuckles white. “Are you mad? I’m not your...”

  “What was it like when you raped her? When you penetrated her sumptuous flesh with your war-crazed prick?” The exhilaration felt good, a glorious liberation.

  “You’re not my son. I was a soldier. I was following orders.”

  “Ah so. Then your superior was to blame. Did he hold your prick and use it as a bayonet to stab the enemy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Masajiro moistened his dry lips. “Of course not. We were soldiers. We had to follow...” His eyes turned towards the door. Takeda was afraid and angry: he didn’t feel the satisfaction he had predicted, at least not as much as he had expected. He felt less and less at ease with the situation. He didn’t know the routine followed by the nursing staff. The previous day he had spent more than an hour with Masajiro without being disturbed. He hadn’t seen a call bell in the room. But who could guarantee that they wouldn’t interrupt them this time round?