Hiroshima (16 page)

Some seven thousand orphans, alone in the world because their parents and relatives had all been killed, were cast adrift and wandered the burned-out ruins of Hiroshima. Clad in raggedly clothes, grimy, scrawny, their filthy black bodies exposed, they clung to repatriated soldiers and passersby begging for food. Those unable to get food became malnourished and collapsed on the pavement, unable to move. If passersby stepped on their heads, they barely opened their eyes; they'd lost the energy to show anger. The orphans teemed in the plaza in front of the railroad station; each morning several died.

In winter the orphans poked holes in large metal drums, threw in the charred remains of telephone poles and branches from the trees that lived on in the ashes, burned them, and slept in circles about the drums. Watching those orphans, I trembled. Had Mom died, I too would have been orphaned and become one of them, malnourished and unable to move. My survival was a matter of sheer luck: I simply couldn't think otherwise. I gave thanks that Mom had survived.

At one time in the postwar era, Hiroshima led the nation in juvenile crime. To survive, the orphans either became lone-wolf thieves or banded together in groups and entered the underworld. For those orphans unable to commit crimes, the only end was malnutrition, collapse, and death. Only a small fraction of the total number gained entry to the several orphanages that were set up; help for the atomic bomb orphans was extended only seven full years after the atomic bomb was dropped. During that time the orphans persevered, wandering about the burned-out ruins and leading desperate lives.

By 1952, kids who had been sixth graders at the time of the atomic bomb were already young men. There were people who preyed on these adult orphans. Gangsters seeking turf in the new Hiroshima got involved, and in the postwar era, fierce gangster wars took place. In those gang battles many adult atomic bomb orphans died. They were sweet-talked—“Kill one of the other gang's leaders, and we'll make you one of our leaders.” They were as expendable as bullets: they jumped into fights, took return fire, and were killed. Because atomic bomb orphans had no parents and no relatives, no one complained when they were killed. So the gangsters found them very useful. I heard any number of stories of children who lived lives of leisure before the war, were orphaned by the atomic bomb, and after the war were in and out of jail.

What bitter days and years the orphans spent! I was deeply angry at the war and the atomic bomb that made the weak—only them—endure so bitter a fate. Those guys, war leaders who started the war and those who dropped the atomic bomb, no longer merited the word human being: I really wanted to kill them all.

August 15, the day of Japan's defeat: on that day, our
true
war began.

Reduced to the Status of Beggars . . .

The days of our hunger stretched on and on. When I'd walk in the black market, I'd stare in wonder: “Wow! All those goodies!” Steamed rolls made of brown rice, dumplings, candy, rice cooked with red beans. Swallowing my saliva, I'd look around. Skin was still attached to the meat on skewers, and it betrayed the fact that dogs and cats, too, were being turned into food. All this was too expensive for us to buy, and the prices made us gasp. But it made us feel good simply to see it. I had to wonder at the strange state of the world: even when everyone was hungry and starving to death, if you just had the money, you could buy and eat all sorts of luxury foods.

The spiels of the charlatans selling patent medicines were fascinating: “Let me show you how effective this medicine is! I'll let this terribly poisonous snake bite my arm. Then I'll show that I'll recover quickly simply by applying this salve!” Listening to it, thrilled, for hours at a time, I kept waiting to see the snake actually bite the man. But it was only a pitch for the medicine, a dodge. Street performers—the monkey man, the swordsman—flourished in the black market. It was my favorite place.

When there was a break in Mom's work and she had the time, she took me with her, and we went selling. Carrying a knapsack, two or three pieces of clothing to barter, and coins, we'd make the rounds of the farmhouses in Gion and ask, “How about letting us have some of your potatoes and rice?” The overbearing attitude of the farmers at the time was enough to make you puke.

In the yard of a farmhouse, Mom would bow and scrape like a toady and beseech the farmer, “Can't you please spare ten pounds of potatoes or a five-gallon bag of rice? I beg you.” Standing on his veranda and looking down at Mom, the farmer would puff on his pipe and glare at her, putting on airs, and shout angrily, “Get out!” Mom still begged desperately. As I watched from behind, my stomach would churn with bitterness toward the farmer and sympathy for Mom. A child of that farmer came out onto the porch chewing on a steamed potato and glared at me with hateful eyes. He let the potato he was holding fall to the ground, mashed it with his sandal, then pointed to the yellow lumps of potato and taunted me, “You want it, don't you? Then eat it! Eat it!” Trying desperately to suppress the urge to fly at him, I put up with the humiliation: I won't forget that day as long as I live.

Mom and I walked from one farmhouse to the next, begging, “Won't you please spare us some food?” But the farmers never went easy on us. We met only crafty farmers: grabbing the clothing Mom held out, they'd say, “What makes you think this is worth ten pounds of potatoes?” They'd try to take advantage of our plight and get Mom's good clothes for a few potatoes.

When evening came and the farmhouses were only silhouettes, we'd reach the end of our tether, our feet dragging along the paths between paddies. Mom would whisper, “We'll try one more house. If that's no good, we'll give up and go home.” We'd aim at the lantern of one of the farmhouses scattered in the distance. Giving in to Mom's desperate entreaty, that farmer said, “I had set it aside for seed, but your persistence is too much for me.” We stuffed potatoes pulled out from beneath the veranda into our knapsack. How long the road home seemed! And how heavy our legs, as we shouldered sad thoughts! The farmers swaggered so because they realized that having food gave them that privilege. Even my child's mind thought: the time will come when you get yours!

Nor can I forget the day we had no fuel. Dragging a handcart, Mom and I went to a woodlot in Koi to gather windfall wood. Gathering dead branches and tying them in bundles, I rejoiced with Mom, “This'll last us two weeks!” We shouldered the bundled branches, making many trips to carry them to the entrance of the lot. And just as we finished, a stolid, middle-aged farmer appeared and thundered at us, “Hey, you! Who gave you permission to come here? You can't take dead branches without permission!” He insisted to Mom, “Leave the branches and get out!” Mom asked whether he couldn't share the branches with us, and he said no, brusquely. We'd come to the lot early in the morning, and we'd worked so hard to collect the bundles, carrying them in exhaustion to the gate at the foot of the hill. To leave them made me resentful beyond endurance.

We learned afterward that the farmer had known we'd entered the woodlot and were collecting firewood. And smiling tightly, he'd waited until we'd carried the wood to the gate. He was a schemer, making us work and profiting dishonestly from our work collecting the firewood. Complaining about having labored to no purpose, we went home, pulling the empty handcart. I can never forget how wretched we felt. Among the brothers, it was I who went most often with Mom. Mom's sad bitterness in all these cases is seared onto my retinas.

From our house in the ruins we'd looked out in all directions over a panorama of ruin. But soon huts covered it, and our panorama closed in. People who had evacuated came back to the ruins, and our house, too, was enveloped in sounds of daily life. Naturally, as the number of people increased, there was competition in gathering wood for fuel for daily living. Such boards and trees as remained in the ruins disappeared quickly. Akira and I dug in the ruins and collected charcoal, and we dug up the stubs of telephone poles that had burned down. A scant six feet of telephone pole remained unburned underground. It took a day to dig out a pole and cut it up with a saw. Desperately we poured energy into collecting fuel. But even those buried telephone poles became the object of competition, and soon they disappeared from the ruins. Each day was a struggle for survival.

After a while our classrooms at school, too, got blackboards on the walls, courtesy of contributions from all over the country. With rows of two-person desks and chairs, the atmosphere began to be that of a place of learning. But there weren't enough desks to go around, so three of us sat at the two-person desks, each trying to establish his own workspace. There were endless quarrels. For textbooks, we received some dozens of sheets of coarse paper, mimeographed; we took the pages home and each made a book of our own design and finally had one textbook apiece. There was no glass in the windows, and the cold wind blew through the classroom. As we shivered, 1946 came to an end.

Year of Anger

Nineteen forty-seven is especially unforgettable, the year that remains forever in memory. On January 1 of that year, in the middle of winter vacation, all pupils were compelled to go to school. Intending to play hooky, I had wrapped myself in my blanket, sleeping on, but a classmate came and lured me: “If we go to school, we'll get red-and-white candy.” Hearing that, I rushed to school. When, tempted by food, I reached the school, all the pupils were lined up in the schoolyard. Dressed in a cutaway, the principal stood on the podium used for morning exercises. Wearing formal clothes, PTA officers, local bosses, and teachers were lined up in the front. The order came: “All together now, face east! East! Face His Majesty the Emperor in his palace in Tokyo and wish him Happy New Year! All together now, bow deeply!” And all the pupils bowed their heads reverently. The teacher walked around instructing us, “Don't raise your heads until I give the word!” I was astonished at the scene. Dad had told me what a horrible thing the emperor system is: that the war had begun at the order of the emperor, that as a result we were burned out by the atomic bomb, many people were killed, and even now many injured bomb victims
were suffering and groaning. I was stunned at how little awareness about the war the principal, teachers, local bosses, and parents showed: to want to thank that emperor, still unpunished, and to delight in making the pupils bow to the palace! With great difficulty, I repressed the urge to thunder, “You people—how stupid!”

Once we'd finished bowing to the palace, we sang the anthem, and in each classroom they handed out the red-and-white candy. On the way home after we were dismissed, I ate the candy at one gulp. I told myself that if I turned it quickly into shit, fertilizer for the field, even the hated candy would serve a purpose. And I went home yelling words that were popular then among the children: “I, your emperor, have farted. You, my subjects, smell it. Hold your noses and step back! Proclamation signed and sealed!”

Someone once said, “War turns small children into adults overnight.” It's really true. If you're thrown into the cruel situation of having to fight a life-and-death struggle, it stands to reason that the pampered days of childhood vanish instantly. I came naturally to have eyes that see the dishonesty of human beings, distinguish façade from reality. Akira often admonished me, “You're a twisted one! You have to be a bit straighter!” If you asked me, I was expressing the reality behind the façade, and that made me appear twisted, not at all childlike. I was old for my age. In the teachers' presence I played the role expected of a child, I behaved with calculation.

The anger of December 7 of that year is engraved on my heart.

Saying, “Today I have an important assignment for you!” the teacher passed out a large sheet of paper to each pupil. He said, “Use a compass to describe a circle six inches in diameter in the center of the paper. Color it in with red crayon. Attach it with paste to a thin piece of bamboo. Bring it to school tomorrow without fail!” He was having each of us make a flag. When I asked what the flags were for, he said, “Tomorrow's a glorious day: His Majesty the Emperor is coming to Hiroshima! Waving flags, we residents of Hiroshima will greet him warmly!”

Once more I was stunned. “Why should teachers and residents be happy?” I was amazed. I despised the foolish teachers who would celebrate and be grateful to the ringleader who turned Hiroshima into a burned-out waste, who stole our homes, killed our relatives, made us suffer and suffer while he himself had it easy in safety. The new constitution had been promulgated, and referring often to Article 9, the renunciation of war, teachers taught us that Japan had been reborn a new country that did not arm itself or use force, one that sought peace. But what they were doing, worshipping the emperor as a god as in the old order, was militarist education. It was “old wine in a new jug.”

The next day I said to Mom, “He was the ringleader in wrecking our whole family, pushing us down into the depths of poverty, causing us to moan every day—and we should wave a flag for His Nibs?” I went to school without making a flag. As a cold wind blew, all the school's pupils, each one holding the flag he'd made, were lined up along the riverbank at the eastern end of Aioi Bridge. It was the route the emperor's car would take on his way to worship at Gokoku Shrine at the castle. Nervous teachers flew about among the pupils, straightening and restraightening the row. I watched them with disgust. I thought of the human being, the emperor. I thought of Hiroshima, with countless bodies buried all around in the rubble. What was the emperor feeling in this place? I was shocked that he could look calmly at these ruins. The emperor, I concluded, must be a cold-blooded, insensitive person. If he were a normal human being, he wouldn't be able to see the sights in Hiroshima, riding in comfort in a car through this site of the horror brought on by the war he himself started. He wouldn't be able to face the ruins.