Hiroshima

by John Hersey

  The girls, staying with American host families who spoke little or no Japanese, were often lonely, and Dr. Fujii devised ways to cheer them up. He was playful and considerate. He organized outings for Japanese food, taking two or three girls at a time. Once, a party was to be given by an American doctor and his wife just three days after one of the Maidens, Michiko Yamaoka, had undergone a major operation. Her face had a dressing on it, and her hands were bandaged and strapped to her body. Dr. Fujii didn’t want her to miss the party, and he got one of the American doctors to arrange for her to ride through the city to the party in an open red limousine, behind a police escort with a siren. On the way, Dr. Fujii had them stop at a drugstore, where he bought Michiko a toy horse for ten cents; he asked the policeman to take a picture of the presentation of this gift.

  Sometimes, he went out alone to have a good time. The other Japanese doctor, named Takahashi, was his hotel roommate. Dr. Takahashi was a light drinker and a light sleeper. Late at night, Dr. Fujii would come in, crash around, flop down, and break into a sleep-shattering symphony of snores. He was having a wonderful time.

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  WAS he, nine years later, in Hiroshima, still so happy-go-lucky? His daughter Chieko’s husband thought not. The son-in-law thought he saw signs of a growing stubbornness and rigidity in him, and a turn toward melancholy. So that Dr. Fujii could ease up in his work, his third son, Shigeyuki, gave up his practice in Tokyo and came to be his assistant, moving into a house that his father had built on a plot of ground about a block from the clinic. One cloud in the father’s life was a quarrel in the Hiroshima Lions Club, of which he was president. The fight was over whether the club should try, through its admissions policy, to become an exclusive, high-society organization, like some of the Japanese doctors’ associations, or remain essentially a service organization, open to all. When it appeared that Dr. Fujii might lose out in his fight for the latter view, he abruptly and disappointedly resigned.

  His relationship with his wife was growing difficult. Ever since his trip to America, he had wanted a house like that of one of the Mount Sinai doctors, and now, to her chagrin, he designed and built, next to the wooden house Shigeyuki was living in, a three-story concrete home for himself alone. On the ground floor it had a living room and an American-style kitchen; his study was on the second floor, lined with bound books, which Shigeyuki eventually found to be volume after volume of meticulous copies he had made in medical school of course notes by a classmate named Iwamoto, who was brighter than he; and on the top floor were an eight-mat Japanese-style bedroom and an American-style bathroom.

  Toward the end of 1963, he rushed its completion, so it would be ready to house an American couple who had been host parents to some Maidens and were coming to visit after the first of the year. He wanted to sleep there for a few nights to try it out. His wife argued against the haste, but he stubbornly moved in, late in December.

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  NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1963. Dr. Fujii sat cozily on the tatami matting of Shigeyuki’s living room with his legs in a kotatsu, an electrically heated foot-warming recess in the floor. Also gathered there were Shigeyuki and his wife and another couple, but not Dr. Fujii’s wife. The plan was to have some drinks and watch an annual New Year’s Eve television program called “Ko-haku Uta-Gassen,” a contest between red (female) and white (male) teams of popular singers who had been chosen for the program by a poll of listeners; judges were famous actresses, authors, golfers, baseball players. The program would run from nine to eleven-forty-five, and then there would be bell ringing for the New Year. At about eleven, Shigeyuki noticed that his father, who had not been drinking much, was nodding, and suggested that he go off to bed. And in a few minutes, before the end of the program, he did—this time without the ministrations of a nurse who, most nights, massaged his legs and tucked him in. After a while, worrying about his father, Shigeyuki went out and around to the river side of the new house, where, looking up, he saw a light burning in the bedroom window. He thought all was well.

  The family had made a plan to meet the next morning at eleven for drinks and the traditional New Year’s breakfast of ozoni, a soup, and mochi, rice cakes. Chieko and her husband and some other guests arrived and began drinking. At half past eleven, Dr. Fujii had not appeared, and Shigeyuki sent his seven-year-old son, Masatsugu, out to call up to his window. The boy, getting no answer, tried the door. It was locked. He borrowed a ladder from a neighbor’s house and climbed to the top of it to call some more, and still there was no response. When he told his parents, they became alarmed and hurried out, broke a window next to the locked door to get it open, and, smelling gas, rushed upstairs. There they found Dr. Fujii unconscious, with a gas heater at the head of his futon turned on but not burning. Strangely, a ventilator fan was also turned on; the draft of fresh air from it had probably kept him alive. He was stretched out on his back, looking serene.

  There were three doctors present—son, son-in-law, and a guest—and, fetching oxygen and other equipment from the clinic, they did everything they could to revive Dr. Fujii. They called in one of the best doctors they knew, a Professor Myanishi, from Hiroshima University. His first question: “Was this a suicide attempt?” The family thought not. There was nothing to be done until January 4th; everything in Hiroshima would be shut down tight for the three-day New Year’s holiday, and hospital services would be at a minimum. Dr. Fujii remained unconscious, but his life signs seemed not to be critical. On the fourth, an ambulance came. As the bearers were carrying Dr. Fujii downstairs, he stirred. Swimming up toward consciousness, he apparently thought he was being rescued, somehow, after the atomic bombing. “Who are you?” he asked the bearers. “Are you soldiers?”

  In the university hospital, he began to recover. On January 15th, when the annual sumo wrestling contests began, he asked for the portable television set he had bought in America, and he sat up in bed watching. He could feed himself, though his handling of chopsticks was a bit awkward. He asked for a bottle of sake.

  By now, everyone in the family was off guard. On January 25th, his stool was suddenly watery and bloody, and he became dehydrated and lost consciousness.

  For the next eleven years, he lived the life of a vegetable. He remained in the hospital, fed through a tube, for two and a half years, and then was taken home, where his wife and a loyal servant cared for him, feeding him through the tube, changing his diapers, bathing him, massaging him, medicating him for urinary infections he developed. At times, he seemed to respond to voices, and sometimes he seemed to be dimly registering pleasure or displeasure.

  At ten o’clock on the night of January 11, 1973, Shigeyuki took his son Masatsugu, the boy who had climbed the ladder to call his grandfather on the day of the accident, now a premedical student of sixteen, to Dr. Fujii’s bedside. He wanted the boy to see his grandfather with the eye of a doctor. Masatsugu listened to his grandfather’s breathing and heartbeat and took his blood pressure; he judged his condition stable, and Shigeyuki agreed.

  The next morning, Shigeyuki’s mother telephoned him, saying that his father looked funny to her. When Shigeyuki arrived, Dr. Fujii was dead.

  The doctor’s widow was against having an autopsy done. Shigeyuki wanted one, and he resorted to a ruse. He had the body taken to a crematorium; then, that night, it was taken out a back way and was delivered to the American-run Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, on top of a hill to the east of the city. When the post mortem had been done, Shigeyuki went for the report. Finding his father’s organs distributed in various containers, he had the strangest feeling of a last encounter, and he said, “There you are, Oto-chan—there you are, Papa.” He was shown that his father’s brain had atrophied, his large intestine had become enlarged, and there was a cancer the size of a Ping-Pong ball in his liver.

  The remains were cremated and buried in the grounds of the Night of the Lotus Temple, of the Jodo Shinshu sec
t of Buddhism, near his maternal family home in Nagatsuka.

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  THEN came a sad ending to this hibakusha’s story. His family quarrelled over his property, and a mother sued a son.

  KIYOSHI TANIMOTO

  A YEAR AFTER the bombing, Hiroshimans had begun repossessing the plots of rubble where their houses had once stood. Many had built crude wooden huts, having scavenged fallen tiles from ruins to make their roofs. There was no electricity to light their shacks, and at dusk each evening, lonely, confused, and disillusioned, they gathered in an open area near the Yokogawa railroad station to deal in the black markets and console each other. Into this zone now trooped, each evening, Kiyoshi Tanimoto and four other Protestant ministers and, with them, a trumpeter and a drummer tooting and thumping “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Taking turns, the ministers stood on a box and preached. With so little to entertain them, a crowd always gathered, even including some panpan girls, as prostitutes who catered to GIs came to be called. The anger of many hibakusha, directed at first against the Americans for dropping the bomb, had by now subtly modulated toward their own government, for having involved the country in a rash and doomed aggression. The preachers said that it was no use blaming the government; that the hope of the Japanese people lay in repenting their sinful past and relying on God: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

  Because he had no church into which to lure converts, if there should be any, Kiyoshi Tanimoto soon realized the futility of this evangelism. Parts of the reinforced-concrete shell of his Gothic-towered church in the city still stood, and he now turned his mind to trying to find ways to restore the building. He had no money. The building had been insured for a hundred and fifty thousand yen, then less than five hundred dollars, but bank funds had been frozen by the conquerors. Learning that military supplies were being allocated for various kinds of reconstruction, he got requisition slips for “conversion materials” from the prefectural government and began a hunt for things he could use or sell. In that time of widespread thievery and of resentment of the Japanese military, many of the supply depots had been looted. Finally, he found on the island of Kamagari a warehouse of paints. American Occupation personnel had made a mess of the place. Unable to read Japanese labels, they had punctured many cans and kicked them over, apparently to see what was in them. The minister got hold of a boat and carried a big cargo of empty cans to the mainland, and he was able to barter them with an outfit named the Toda Construction Company for a tile roof for his church. Little by little, over the months, he and a few loyal parishioners worked on the carpentry for the building with their own hands, but they lacked the funds to do much.

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  ON July 1, 1946, before the first anniversary of the bombing, the United States had tested an atomic bomb at the Bikini Atoll. On May 17, 1948, the Americans announced the successful completion of another test.

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  IN correspondence with an Emory University classmate, the Reverend Mr. Marvin Green, who was now pastor of the Park Church in Weehawken, New Jersey, Kiyoshi Tanimoto told of his difficulties in restoring his church. Green arranged with the Methodist Board of Missions an invitation to Tanimoto to visit the United States to raise money, and in October, 1948, Tanimoto, leaving his family behind, embarked for San Francisco on an American transport, the U.S.S. Gordon.

  On the sea voyage, an ambitious idea grew in his mind. He would spend his life working for peace. He was becoming convinced that the collective memory of the hibakusha would be a potent force for peace in the world, and that there ought to be in Hiroshima a center where the experience of the bombing could become the focus of international studies of means to assure that atomic weapons would never be used again. Eventually, in the States, without thinking to check with Mayor Shinzo Hamai or anyone else in Hiroshima, he drafted a memorandum sketching this idea.

  He lived as a guest in the basement of Marvin Green’s Weehawken parsonage. The Reverend Mr. Green, enlisting the help of some volunteers, became his manager and promoter. From a church directory he compiled a list of all the churches in the country with more than two hundred members or with budgets of more than twenty thousand dollars, and to hundreds of these he sent out hand-done broadsides soliciting invitations for Kiyoshi Tanimoto to lecture. He drew up a series of itineraries, and soon Tanimoto was on the road with a set speech, “The Faith That Grew Out of the Ashes.” At each church, a collection was taken.

  On and between speaking trips, Tanimoto began submitting his peace-center memorandum to people he hoped might be influential. On one visit to New York from Weehawken, he was taken by a Japanese friend of his to meet Pearl Buck, in the office of her husband’s publishing firm. She read, and he explained, his memorandum. She said she was impressed by the proposal, but she felt she was too old and too busy to help him. She thought, however, that she knew just the person who might: Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. Mr. Tanimoto should send his memo to Mr. Cousins, and she would speak to him about it.

  One day not long afterward, while the minister was touring a rural area near Atlanta with his lecture, he got a telephone call from Cousins, who said he was deeply moved by the memorandum—might he put it in the Saturday Review as a guest editorial?

  On March 5, 1949, the memorandum appeared in the magazine, under the title “Hiroshima’s Idea”—an idea that, Cousins’ introductory note said, “the editors enthusiastically endorse and with which they will associate themselves”:

  The people of Hiroshima, aroused from the daze that followed the atomic bombing of their city on August 6, 1945, know themselves to have been part of a laboratory experiment which proved the long-time thesis of peacemakers. Almost to a man, they have accepted as a compelling responsibility their mission to help in preventing further similar destruction anywhere in the world….

  The people of Hiroshima…earnestly desire that out of their experience there may develop some permanent contribution to the cause of world peace. Towards this end, we propose the establishment of a World Peace Center, international and nonsectarian, which will serve as a laboratory of research and planning for peace education throughout the world….

  The people of Hiroshima were in fact, to a man, totally unaware of Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s (and now Norman Cousins’) proposal. They were, nonetheless, acutely aware of the special role that the city was destined to play in the world’s memory. On August 6th, the fourth anniversary of the bombing, the national Diet promulgated a law establishing Hiroshima as a Peace Memorial City, and the final design for the commemorative park by the great Japanese architect Kenzo Tange was revealed to the public. At the heart of the park, there would be, in memory of those who had died, a solemn cenotaph in the shape of a haniwa, an arch of clay, presumably a house for the dead, found in prehistoric tombs in Japan. A large crowd gathered for the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony. Tanimoto was far away from all this, touring American churches.

  A few days after the anniversary, Norman Cousins visited Hiroshima. Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s idea had been pushed aside in Cousins’ mind by a new one, of his own: that an international petition in support of the United World Federalists—a group urging world government—should be submitted to President Truman, who had ordered the dropping of the bomb. Within a short time, 107,854 signatures had been gathered in the city. After a visit to an orphanage, Cousins returned to the States with yet another idea—for “moral adoption” of Hiroshima orphans by Americans, who would send financial support for the children. Signatures for the World Federalist petition were being gathered in the United States as well, and Cousins thrilled Tanimoto, who until then had known very little about the organization, by inviting him to be in the del
egation that would present the petition to President Truman.

  Unfortunately, Harry Truman declined to receive the petitioners and refused to accept the petition.

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  ON September 23, 1949, Moscow Radio announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb.

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  BY the end of the year, Kiyoshi Tanimoto had visited two hundred and fifty-six cities, in thirty-one states, and had raised about ten thousand dollars for his church. Before he left for home, Marvin Green happened to mention that he was about to give up on his old green Cadillac. His friend Tani asked him to donate it to the church in Hiroshima, and he did. Through a Japanese acquaintance in the shipping business, Tanimoto arranged to have it transported free of charge to Japan.

  Back home at the beginning of 1950, Tanimoto called on Mayor Hamai and the Prefectural Governor, Tsunei Kusunose, asking their official support for his peace-center idea. They turned him down. Through a press code and other measures, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the occupying forces, had strictly prohibited dissemination of or agitation for any reports on the consequences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings—including the consequence of a desire for peace—and the officials evidently thought that Tanimoto’s peace center might get the local governments in trouble. Tanimoto persevered, calling together a number of leading citizens, and, after Norman Cousins had set up a Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation in New York to receive American funds, these people established the center in Hiroshima, with Tanimoto’s church as its base. At first, it found little to do. (Only years later, when a Peace Memorial Museum and Peace Memorial Hall had been built in the park, and lively—and sometimes turbulent—annual international conferences on peace issues were taking place in the city, could Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s early planting of seeds for these things, and his courage in ignoring the MacArthur restraints, be acknowledged by at least some Hiroshimans.)