The Souvenir (16 page)

I described to Shoji the controversy in the States over the Smithsonian exhibit on the dropping of the atom bomb. I told him how, in the words of one Smithsonian official,
“the veterans wanted the exhibit to stop when the doors to the bomb bay opened. And that's where the Japanese wanted it to begin.”

Shoji considered this, then said thoughtfully, “Who is at fault, who has the guilt, that is not really important issue for me. Peace should be the main issue. The important thing is that as many people see and remember Hiroshima.”

He'd heard about the tasteless (and since scrapped) plan for the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp showing the mushroom cloud, with the caption, “Hiroshima bomb hastens war's end.” Even this didn't faze him. “I can look at stamp in neutral way,” he said. “Maybe it helps people to think about Hiroshima. Some people may think bomb was good—and maybe that's OK. But to me, bomb is bomb.”

We walked past glass cases containing the devastating relics of the conflagration: a wooden sandal with the imprint of someone's left foot; a carbonized child's lunchbox; the distorted frame of a tricycle that belonged to three-year-old Shimichi Tetsutani, who died in the blast. The legend on the display reads: “Shimichi's father thought his son would be too lonely in the family tomb, so he buried him in the backyard with his best friend, his tricycle.” Later, his father dug up the tricycle and donated it to the Peace Museum. I knew Shoji and I were both thinking about Sage, his fearless four-year-old son. That could be Sage's tricycle.

We walked past the life-size diorama of a procession of sufferers against a background of red sky. Skin hung in strips from their
flayed arms, which they held out in front of them to ease the pain. We silently observed a photograph of a woman's shoulder, the cross-striped pattern from her kimono permanently imprinted on her skin by the intense heat. Horrifying photos of keloid scars, malformed toenails, women with faces transformed into something resembling bean curd. A piano, a radio, a ten-yen bill. There were sake cups, ivory seals, pipes, teapots, vases—all melted into unrecognizable lumps. A blackened and almost obliterated statue of Daikokutsin had been recovered from a ruined Buddhist temple. Daikokutsin, the caption said, was “the god of good fortune.”

This weapon was so insidious, so democratically destructive. The victims' suffering was so grotesque and for many, final.

An uncomfortable thought kept insinuating itself in my mind: part of the story was missing here. I tried to push it away but it bore down with some insistence. There was little introspection here on the larger context of
why
Hiroshima was incinerated, of what else was happening in the world on August 6, 1945. The wording on the Pearl Harbor display was a troubling example: “On December 7, 1941, a bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor and Japan was hurled into the war.”
Was
dropped.
Was
hurled. In this “victims' history,” as one scholar called it, “the war appears as a natural catastrophe which ‘happened' to Japan, as if without the intervention of human agency.”

True, there were some displays downstairs, added as recently as 1994, which showed that Hiroshima was a hub of military activity. But the possible reasons listed in large block type for why the United States dropped the bomb—(1) limiting U.S. casualties, (2) to force Japan to surrender before the Soviet Union could enter the war, and (3) to measure the effectiveness of the bomb—do not mention the responsibility of Japan's own military government's refusal to surrender as a cause.

I had accumulated a collection of books on the subject of
Hiroshima and though the debate rages on, what I read had ultimately convinced me that the Japanese military
would not surrender
. Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, on August 9, half the Supreme War Leadership Council was still determined to fight on. War Minister Anami declared to the Cabinet, “I am quite sure that we could inflict great losses on the enemy, and even if we fail in the attempt, our one hundred million people are ready to die with honor.” Finally, on August 10, the emperor spoke out and the peace faction on the Cabinet overruled the military zealots. The peace faction considered the atomic bomb to be “a gift from heaven” that allowed them to prevail.

In Luzon, on August 6, 1945, when the war-weary soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Division heard the news of the surrender, they did not know what lay under that mushroom cloud, what lay ahead for the human race and the entire planet as a consequence. At that moment, the bomb meant the end of the war, it meant that they did not have to participate in another bloody campaign. They were going to live, after all.

Paul Fussell, in his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” suggests that “the degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War.” Was this some sort of demented mathematical equation—ten times more knowledge, twenty times less shame? Yet I had to admit that my discomfort about what was missing here was directly related to what I'd learned over the last years about the ghastliness of the Pacific War, and the brutality of Japan's military regime. As I'd talked to Pacific War vets, whenever we came to the subject of the bomb, they would not budge from their implacable belief that its use was absolutely necessary to end the war. The historian Ian Buruma suggests that the attack on Hiroshima might be viewed as “a war crime that actually might have helped to bring the war to a quicker end.”

Before we left the museum, I stopped to write in the guest book, waiting first while a woman and her young son made their entries. After they stepped away from the book, I read what the boy, a resident of Hong Kong, had written in a childish scrawl: “I mean, everything here is sad and all, but who started it first? Who attacked other countries first? Who killed first?”

It was not apparent in the museum that, up until the moment the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had been waging a war of aggression.

In a blazing flash, its sins in Korea, Nanking, Burma, and Bataan were dissolved in the greater sins of humankind. In that one instant on August 6, 1945, Japan the aggressor was transformed into Japan the victim. What had gotten lost in that horrific and instantaneous transformation?

W
E STROLLED THE
grounds of Peace Park as a light rain fell. Shoji lit a cigarette as we stood in front of the Peace Cenotaph that contains a box holding the list of the known victims of the bombing. It continues to grow as people die, even now, from radiation sickness. Nearby was a mound of grass under which seventy thousand unidentified bodies lay buried in a mass grave.

“In the years right after 1945, people in Hiroshima really tried to forget about the bombing,” Shoji began. “My ex-wife's grandparents—both survivors—didn't tell me anything about the bomb. They just told me a lot about how they recovered. How they planted corn right after the burning.” Surprisingly, streetcars were up and running within three days of the blast. The sight of the functioning streetcars gave hope to the survivors.

“I was raised—almost forced—to believe that America wanted to test a bomb in Japan,” Shoji volunteered. Did he believe that? “I do believe that the Americans wanted to use it. They wanted to use it in actual situation. This war was the last chance. The crazy people
got a new toy.” Did he think the emperor was ready to surrender
before
the bomb was dropped? Shoji paused, “No, I think the emperor really made the decision to surrender because he saw photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Can both of these beliefs be true?

During my visit to Japan, I met Japanese who (unlike Shoji) had lived through the war years. They shocked me when they offered their opinion that the atomic bomb had been necessary to end the war, that the military government would have urged them to mass suicide if the conflagration of Hiroshima hadn't happened.

My veteran friend Baldwin Eckel was one of the first American soldiers to be on Japanese soil after the surrender. He had the opportunity to speak to many high-ranking people associated with the Japanese military industrial complex—officers, government officials, businessmen. To all of them he posed the same question: “What made you willing to surrender?” Every person answered, “Atomic bomb.” Baldwin explained to me, “Japan's spiritual fabric was destroyed. It wasn't the Americans who did it. It was the atomic bomb, something supernatural. They could emotionally live with that explanation.”

Paul Fussell wrote, “To observe from the viewpoint of the war's victims-to-be that the bomb seemed precisely the right thing to drop is to purchase no immunity from horror.” The phrase offers a helpful way to live with two opposing ideas: that the bombing was necessary to bring peace and that the bombing was inexcusable under any circumstances.

Maybe in order to begin to understand Hiroshima, if that is even possible, you have to be willing to live with paradox and contradiction. In Shoji's Zen koan, “Bomb is bomb.”

D
URING THE WAR
, the Japanese military trained the Special Attack Forces at Etajima, the island across the bay from Hiroshima's Ujina Port. The Imperial Navy Academy was established on Etajima in
1888, and was closed at the end of World War II. It reopened in 1956, as the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force School. I was curious to visit the military museum on Etajima and Shoji agreed to take me there.

The ride on the nearly empty ferry took fifty minutes. The busy harbor, cradled by rolling hills forested with pines, reminded both Shoji and me of Seattle's Puget Sound.

Our tour guide was a genial fellow in a black suit and tie. We were a group of nine, all similarly attired middle-age men except for me and Shoji. From the playing fields in the distance echoed the “hut hut hut!” of the cadets. Clusters of them, all crew cut and lean, jogged past our walking tour.

The guide was in a good mood. One of his remarks provoked laughter from the group. Shoji nudged me with a translation: “He says that American military planned to move into these beautiful buildings at Etajima, that's why they only dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.”

Our last stop on the campus was the Educational Museum. We climbed the central marble staircase, which was cloaked in a cascading red carpet. The brochure in English said the museum was intended for students “who come to review the heroic actions of those who have preceded them.”

The Nine Heroes of Pearl Harbor were memorialized here, as were the 2,633 Special Attack Forces and kaiten “human torpedo” forces who “died a heroic death.” In case after case, as at Yasukuni, the photos and effects of the young pilots were reverentially displayed. Many of them were highly educated young men who were drafted when university deferments were terminated by the government in late 1943.

In 1992, Theodore and Haruko Cook, both historians, published the first oral histories of those few soldiers trained as Special Attack Forces who survived the war. Kozu Noiji was one such survivor:

The word
kaiten
means literally “return to heaven.” Theodore Cook describes a kaiten “not so much a ship as an insertion of a human being into a very large torpedo.” The “pilot” sat in a canvas chair practically on the deck of the kaiten, a crude periscope directly in front of him, the necessary controls close at hand in the cockpit. The nose assembly was packed with three thousand plus pounds of high explosive; the tail section contained the propulsion unit.

Kozu Noiji received a postcard from a comrade who'd departed on a mission ahead of him: “On it was ‘Say hello to Kudo.' That was our code phrase for ‘Escape is impossible.' Until that moment we had had no confirmation that the Kaiten was a self-exploding weapon which gave you no chance to escape death.”

Kozu had been unable to verify his fears with his fellow cadets, for fear he would disgrace his university. It was a privilege to be chosen for the Special Attack Forces, a sacrilege to question one's possible fate.

A
T DUSK, WE
took the ferry back home. The steady hum lulled Shoji to sleep. I stared out the window at the busy tugboats out on the bay.

No American president has apologized for Hiroshima. No Japanese prime minister has directly apologized for Pearl Harbor, or Nanking. Words like
regret
and
remorse
are parsed out by national
leaders, and victims understandably find them insufficient. Perhaps my own conflicted feelings inside the Peace Museum were a reflection of the larger ongoing and unresolved debate.

Here's progress, I thought: Before I opened my father's ammo box and found the letters and the flag, I didn't
know
enough to be conflicted. I wished I could have talked to my father about Hiroshima, about how his feelings toward the bombing had changed since that ecstatic day in Luzon in August 1945, when he and his buddies learned the war was over. I felt confident we could have had a good discussion, even a rational discussion.

In
An Ethic for Enemies
, theologian Donald Shriver writes, “In the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, the Japanese mean to show that ‘an evil thing happened here. Americans did it.' It may be a half-truth, but it is a truth.” Were an American head of state to apologize for Hiroshima, suggested Kenzaburō Ōe, “should he not do so to the children of his country, now and in the future, and the children of the world, and do this because our planet is still haunted by nuclear annihilation?”