Hiroshima
Page 16
In the summer on Pearl Buck’s farm, the Tanimoto children had played with the dozen orphans, mostly Oriental, that the American author had taken under her wing. The family had been impressed by Mrs. Buck’s generosity, and now they decided to keep and raise the child who had been entrusted to them.
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ON February 13, 1960, France tested a nuclear weapon in the Sahara. On October 16, 1964, China carried out its first nuclear test, and on June 17, 1967, it exploded a hydrogen bomb.
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KOKO went to the States with her father in 1968, to enter the Centenary College for Women, in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Tanimoto had previously been back to America in 1964–65, when he visited his alma mater, Emory University, and then travelled home by way of Europe; and in 1966, when he received an honorary degree from Lewis and Clark College. Koko eventually transferred to American University, in Washington, D.C. There she fell in love with a Chinese-American and became engaged to marry him, but her fiancé’s father, a doctor, said that because she had been exposed to the atomic bomb she couldn’t bear a normal child, and he forbade the marriage.
Back in Japan, Koko took a job in Tokyo, working for an oil-drilling firm, Odeco. She told no one she was a hibakusha. In time, she found someone she could confide in—her boyfriend’s best friend. He turned out, in the end, to be the man she married. She had a miscarriage, which she and her family attributed to the bomb. She and her husband went to the A.B.C.C. to have their chromosomes checked, and though nothing abnormal was found they decided not to try again to have a child. In time, they adopted two babies.
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THE Japanese antinuclear movement had begun to split up in the early sixties. Gensuikyo, the Japan Council, was dominated at first by the Japanese Socialist Party and by Sohyo, the General Council of Trade Unions. In 1960, it had tried to block revision of the United States-Japanese Security Treaty, on the ground that it encouraged a renewed militarism in Japan, whereupon some more conservative groups formed Kakkin Kaigi, the National Council for Peace and against Nuclear Weapons. In 1964, a deeper division came about, when Communist infiltration of Gensuikyo caused the Socialists and the trade unions to pull out and form Gensuikin, the Japan Congress against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. For Tanimoto, as for most hibakusha, these quarrels reached the zenith of absurdity when Gensuikin argued that all nations should stop testing, while Gensuikyo argued that the United States was testing to prepare for war and the Soviet Union was testing to insure peace. The division persisted, and year after year the two organizations held separate conferences on August 6th. On June 7, 1973, Kiyoshi Tanimoto wrote the “Evening Essay” column in the Hiroshima Chugoku Shimbun:
These last few years when August 6th approaches, voices are heard lamenting that this year, once again, the commemorative events will be held by a divided peace movement….The sentence inscribed on the memorial Cenotaph—“Rest in peace, for the mistake shall not be repeated”—embodies the passionate hope of the human race. The appeal of Hiroshima…has nothing to do with politics. When foreigners come to Hiroshima, you often hear them say, “The politicians of the world should come to Hiroshima and contemplate the world’s political problems on their knees before this Cenotaph.”
ON May 18, 1974, India conducted its first nuclear test.
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AS the fortieth anniversary of the bombing approached, the Hiroshima peace center was nominally still in place—now in the Tanimoto home. Its principal project in the seventies had been to arrange a series of adoptions of orphans and abandoned Japanese babies, who had nothing particularly to do with the atomic bomb. The adoptive parents were in Hawaii and the mainland United States. Tanimoto had made three more speaking trips, in the mainland States in 1976 and 1982, and in Hawaii in 1981. He had retired from his pulpit in 1982.
Kiyoshi Tanimoto was over seventy now. The average age of all hibakusha was sixty-two. The surviving hibakusha had been polled by Chugoku Shimbun in 1984, and 54.3 per cent of them said they thought that nuclear weapons would be used again. Tanimoto read in the papers that the United States and the Soviet Union were steadily climbing the steep steps of deterrence. He and Chisa both drew health-maintenance allowances as hibakusha, and he had a modest pension from the United Church of Japan. He lived in a snug little house with a radio and two television sets, a washing machine, an electric oven, and a refrigerator, and he had a compact Mazda automobile, manufactured in Hiroshima. He ate too much. He got up at six every morning and took an hour’s walk with his small woolly dog, Chiko. He was slowing down a bit. His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Since 1947 he has devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and is a past president of the Authors League of America and past Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is married and has five children and three grandchildren.
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