Hiroshima (14 page)

Mom commuted to her job painting clogs. The finished clogs were consigned to a guild; if payments from the guild stopped, Uncle H. was in a bind. In the absence of payments, Mom's wages were delayed and delayed again, and because we had no cash income, it stood to reason that we were strapped for food. Seeking work at a coal mine in Kyushu that was doing well and offered work, K
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ji set off with one trunk. I thought we could count absolutely on him. We saw him off in the expectation that he'd send money and our situation would become a bit easier. But after several days, he came back, dejected. Mom was surprised and asked the reason. It turned out the mine had an age restriction, and K
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ji was too young, so he was turned away: “We can't hire you.” We were discouraged. Mom went on working herself to the bone as she supported the household. Seeing her set out, I thought, “Poor woman!”

One day a neighbor reported, “Your mom's collapsed!” Quickly, Akira and I ran to check, and we found Mom groaning, doubled up, under the eaves of someone's house. We had seen her in that condition many times. Coarse food and overwork brought on stomach cramps, and Mom suffered time and again. No one extended a helping hand to us outsiders; it came home to us how tough the life of survivors is.

Fortunately, Eba had its shore, and when the tide ebbed, Akira and I ran with buckets and, digging in the sand for all we were worth, scooped up crawfish, seaweed, marine plants—anything edible we took home and ate. The seaweed we hung from a line to dry in the open air, then stored it, and ate it fried. When salt ran out, we scooped up seawater, threw in weeds, marine plants, crawfish, whatever we had, boiled it, and ate it. Akira and I went to the shore at Eba every day to find food.

The mouths of the Honkawa and Temma Rivers constituted the Eba shore, and when the tide ebbed, the rivers were full of human bones aligned perfectly with the current. That's how many bodies had been washed down into the Inland Sea. And crawfish teemed precisely where the bones were. The crawfish grew fat on the corpses. Not having the luxury of being disgusted, we focused on catching the crawfish and groped about among the bones.

I carried Tomoko on my back, changed her diaper, and at the appropriate time made the thick soup and fed her. Akira and I took turns cooking instead of Mom, who went off to work. All too soon it was cold when we went in the water, and our feet grew numb and ached; we knew fall was over.

School opened again, and Akira and I transferred to Eba Elementary School. In the old two-story wooden school building were living bomb victims who had burns and injuries and couldn't move. We pupils were forbidden to approach those classrooms. When we did sneak a look, we saw many people bandaged, groaning as they lay on the floor.

Our teacher, a woman, told us, “From now on Japan will be friendly with the Americans, and we must make ourselves likeable.” I thought it really strange. Until just recently we'd been taught to make fun of them: “British and U.S. Beasts! Damn Yanks!” Praise of America, an about-face, confused us.

For Akira and me, school life was unbearably tough. We were the targets of bullying by the young brats, hardened in their hostility to outsiders. Akira was polite by nature. Watching him being chased about the school and bullied in all sorts of ways, I trembled with anger. I too was surrounded and made fun of: they pointed at the spots on the back of my head where burns had finally scabbed over—“Baldy! Baldy!” And they hit me just for the fun of it. My scabs broke, bloody pus went flying and ran down my neck, giving off a stink, and they laughed at me. I got so hot all the blood in my body reversed course, but I clenched my fists and endured it. One on one, I'd never have lost to them, but when they attacked in a group, I was truly mortified.

Bullying continued, not only in the world of the children but in the adult world, too. With Uncle Y.'s son and Akira, our household had grown to six, and the mother-in-law of the M. family that rented us the room didn't like it that Mom did as she pleased. She took the lead, summoning the neighborhood wives and falsely accusing Mom of stealing an umbrella. “This woman's an ungrateful alley cat from the city!” Screaming at the top of her lungs, the mother-in-law grabbed Mom's arm and pulled her outside: “I'm taking this woman to the police to have her locked up!” She didn't accept Mom's suggestion, “Whether I stole it or not is easy to tell. Simply search our one nine-by-twelve room. Be my guest!” Instead, saying, “I can't stand alley cats,” she dragged Mom to the police substation on the Eba riverbank. Burning mad inside, I followed after them.

At the substation, fishermen and children who'd somehow heard that “They've caught a thief!” surrounded her, and Mom was exposed as if a freak show at the circus. People who came to see shouted abuse at Mom: “Gotta watch those city folks!” “Can't let your guard down with city folks!” Mom did her best to explain things to the police, but the police believed M.'s mother-in-law and blamed Mom. Had I been an adult at the time, I might have killed all those people on the spot. That's how angry I was. Mortified and trembling, Mom was forced to sign a statement pledging “I won't steal the umbrella again”—she hadn't stolen it in the first place—and, fingers trembling in anger, stamp it with her seal. That night she cried late into the night, shaking with anger: “I hate it. To be called a thief! I won't forget this day as long as I live!” The sight of Mom sad and trembling engraved itself on my sight forever. The Eba folks who bullied Mom were unbearably hateful.

In Eba I saw humanity stripped naked. I saw Japanese people stripped naked. “Democracy,” “Charity,” “Truth,” “Help the weak,” “Extend the hand of charity to the needy”—what hollow, empty words and slogans! How can humans say such pretty words? I saw the true nature of the Japanese people: lording it over the weak, bullying them unmercifully. Peel back the veneer, and they reveal their ugly nature and pounce. War in particular exacerbates man's ugliness, and it suddenly flares up and spreads. That's why I can't forgive those who start wars that plunge human beings into a condition lower than animals.

In Eba our family was bullied, elbowed, chased. Mom said, “Sooner or later, they'll kill us.” The family took as a sort of motto, “Let's get out of this hateful place as soon as we can.” At night we went to the army barracks that had collapsed, diligently scavenging boards and wood. We wanted to build a house as soon as possible, and we looked forward to the day we'd be able to leave this town behind.

Tomoko Dies

At school there were no instructional materials, so we received a lot of instruction outdoors, observing the plants in the fields. When the weather was good, the teacher took the whole class to the field at the end of the trolley line in Eba; it had been the army rifle range. Each time we got to the field, I fondly remembered getting absorbed in hunting grasshoppers with Eiko and Susumu. When we entered the field, we came to the place where, day and night for nearly three months, the fires cremating corpses had burned. Bones were piled up nearly six feet high, a dozen scattered piles. We pupils cut nonchalantly through the piles of bones to get to where we were going. The skulls piled up on either side seemed to be glaring at us.

The local brats picked out a skull and started playing catch with it. The others copied them quickly, and skulls flew through the air. For children who had survived the days of the atomic bomb, a skull was simply an object. Moreover, they used skulls for soccer balls and kicked them, and the skulls bounced about the field. I didn't count the skulls piled up, but I think more than a thousand corpses had been cremated. Looking at these heaped-up skulls, I discovered something. Every last skull has an expression. Each one expressed an emotion—joy, anger, humor, pathos. The skulls had simply been left there, exposed to the elements.

One day I was walking on the road past the field, and lots of people were on the embankment, looking down and muttering. I wondered, “What on earth?” and climbed up the embankment. My jaw dropped. Four or five U.S. army bulldozers and steamrollers were clattering about. On the edges were several jeeps, carrying U.S. soldiers keeping an eye on things. The bulldozers scraped up dirt from the sides, pushed it to the piles of bones, and covered them with dirt. The steamrollers clambered on top of the piles, crushing the bones and burying them deep. The bulldozers crisscrossed, and before we knew it, the separate piles of bones had become one level field. It was a brilliant demonstration of American mechanized power.

The old folks atop the embankment brought their hands together at chest level and chanted the Buddhist prayer, “All Hail, Amida Buddha.” One person muttered, “I wish I had more gumption! It's butchery to use machines to crush those bones!” The arrogance of the beefy, red-faced U.S. soldiers chomping on chewing gum as they operated the bulldozers turned my stomach, too. Had Hiroshima asked the U.S. army to bury the piles of bones? Or, feeling its own deep guilt for dropping the atomic bomb, had the United States buried the evidence, the piles of bones left exposed to the rain? I don't know. Today the site where the ground was leveled and the bones of thousands were buried is the schoolyard of Eba Middle School. Dig in the schoolyard even now, and you'll turn up tons of bones. From atop the embankment, I witnessed their burial there, so I know.

Winter winds blew, and it turned much colder. Lacking winter clothing, we wrapped raggedy underwear about our bodies and wore summer clothes on top. There were tears in the seat of my pants, with open holes, and we had no underpants, so flesh was exposed, plain to see. The local toughs poked their fingers into the holes and made fun of me, laughing uproariously. My skin was dry from malnutrition, I had large boils on my legs, and the pus ran down my legs.

Day after day Akira and I searched for food morning and night. Mom worked late into the night and came home each night exhausted. K
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ji used the welding skills he'd learned as a student-soldier as a temporary worker at a city factory. The whole family kept up its determined struggle to survive, but our poverty didn't change. We thought that since all Japan was starving, there was nothing to be done about it, although we knew that some people were living a totally different life.

The man next door worked at the Army hospital, and virtually every day he brought home unopened five-gallon cans of tempura
oil. The aroma of fish and vegetable tempura came floating on the wind, and it ate at us. At night he'd go out and bring back rice, wheat, beans, fish, and cans of beef and stash it away. I thought he brought all this home from the Army stores, but whatever the case, his family ate very well. He brought chickens home and in our sight cut off their heads, drained the blood, put them in boiling water, plucked the feathers, and made chicken tempura. Seeing him eat it, we were consumed with envy. The next day his children brought chicken bones to school for a snack and ostentatiously smacking their lips, sucked the marrow. Our mouths watered. Both during and after the war, those attached to the military had it good.

In Eba at the time, daily conversation included, for example, the murder of two children, part of a group that came to steal crops from the fields, who'd had their skulls split open by the farmer's wooden sword. The desperate struggle continued, with atomic bomb orphans and starving people coming to Eba in search of food. War and the atomic bomb: it was hell if you died; it was hell if you lived.

One such day baby Tomoko on my back was peevish and wouldn't stop crying. I didn't know what to do. I changed her diaper and tried to humor her, but she kept crying. While preparing the evening stew, I set Tomoko down on the blanket and kept humoring her, but she wouldn't stop crying. Even Mom, when she came home, said, “Something must be wrong. After supper I'll take her to the clinic.” With the whole family gathered around the stew and eating, Tomoko's voice gradually grew faint, and she became quiet. We were relieved, thinking she'd fallen asleep. With supper over, I lay down beside Tomoko's blanket, took her hand, and was shocked. It was ice cold. Quickly I called Mom. Mom picked Tomoko up, whispered, “She's dead!” and went silent.

Born into the carnage of the atomic bomb, Tomoko lived a short life of four months. The continuous crying that day was her voice burning her life's last embers. We didn't know the cause of death—Malnutrition? The effect of radioactivity? Mom stood abruptly, said, “I'm going to the greengrocer's!” and went off. I simply sat there, gazing at Tomoko's face, which was now ashen. Mom returned carrying a fruit crate. She said, “It took some begging, but I finally got one” and silently cleaned the box. Then she dressed Tomoko in her prettiest clothes and placed her body in the box. How long that night was before the silent dark grew light!

The next day we ran about collecting pieces of wood. We placed the box holding Tomoko's body on a borrowed pushcart, loaded anything that would burn, and headed for the Eba shore. At the bleak wintry shore we dug a hole, spread the wood, set the fruit crate on top, and lit the fire. The cold winter sea was rough, and the smoke burning Tomoko danced in the cold wind and was sucked up into the sky. Mom stared at the flames. Silently, we made sure the fire didn't go out. We burned all the wood we'd brought, but when we stirred the embers, Tomoko's body was still not fully cremated, so we rushed about the shore, collecting driftwood to keep the fire going. I felt keenly how much wood it took to cremate even a baby's body.

Silently, Mom picked up Tomoko's small, thin bones and dropped them into an empty can.
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With a fierce, stern expression on her face, Mom urged us on, and we headed for home. The winter ocean beat harshly against the shore, and the cold wind pummeled us and blew past. In her own struggle to survive, Mom hadn't even the energy left to cry.