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Authors: Peter Carey

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“Then the factory was attacked.
“We heard the air-raid warning and rushed outside. We were used to seeing fighter planes. They always accompanied the bombers, but in this case there were only fighters. Though we thought the target was the factory, it was the workers they wanted. And as we ran across the rough ground to the riverbank, they already had us in their sights. They came in so low we could see the pilots’ faces as they strafed us. A few hours before I’d been eating with these boys and men, working and joking with them, but now my friends’ flesh was flying through the air, ripped apart by machine-gun bullets. Twenty of us escaped to the banks of the Arakawa. Seven of us died. This would have had a profound effect on a grown man, but on a twelve-year-old boy, I cannot describe the shock. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not discuss this anymore.
“I know that on the night of the big bombing raid on Shitamachi, my parents had been anxious that Yamanote would soon suffer. For a while I thought they had been wrong, but on May 25 it happened. As before, it was at eight o’clock.
“Once again I would hear that sound like heavy rain, and since each incendiary is like a number of bombs, when one hits the ground you don’t know where it’s going to explode. You see this very clearly
in
Grave of the Fireflies
. It’s all around you. In a situation like this, people don’t grab hold of each other’s hands and hide together. They look out for themselves. The first set of planes drops its bombs, then a second lot drop more bombs, and maybe you choose to hide under a tree in a park. If you’re lucky, no firebomb falls on that tree and you survive. But there’s no logic that tells you where to go to hide. You could have chosen a tree at the other side of the park and you’d be dead.
“The irony of it is that our house wasn’t hit at all during the bombing. If we had stayed there, we wouldn’t have seen the horrors we did.
“Until the night of a Yamanote firebombing, my family were resigned to the fact that I would go to fight. Now they had seen war with their own eyes, all they could think of was finding me somewhere safe to hide.
“At the beginning of June, my mother took me to a city in Yamanashi Prefecture. Kofu was a resort, completely surrounded by mountains, one of which is Fuji. In Kofu, my father thought, it would be impossible to be attacked from the air. The bombers would have to go over and between mountains, down into this basin. So my mother bought a house there and we lived there together. Given my father’s important role in propaganda, no one insisted that I
continue to work in a factory. In any case, there were very few factories left.
“July 7 is the day of the festival of Tanabata— you write a wish on paper and you tie it to a piece of bamboo. I can’t remember what I wished for, but it certainly was not what happened on that night.
“Apparently the American air force had planned to attack Niigata with B29 bombers but then they discovered that the weather was bad, so they attacked Kofu instead. Though Niigata is a big industrial port town, all Kofu had was one factory manufacturing aircraft parts and one very small garrison of elite special forces. Somehow these soldiers knew, even before the sirens sounded, that the bombers were coming. So they ran away, leaving the rest of us completely undefended. On that day I understood that the army was not there to protect people after all.
“It’s not so much the sirens I remember as the lights. The Americans had been able to land forces and set up huge searchlights on a hill above the town. One minute it was a lovely silky Tanabata night, next thing we were less than insects, the whole town caught in a blinding white light.
“Our house was on the very edge of the town with nothing but rice paddies for neighbours, so I ran to where there were no buildings worth bombing.
In all the panic, I was separated from my mother, but we’d been looking after this younger kid—he’d lost his parents in the Tokyo attack. This little boy trusted me, depended on me, so there was no question I had to protect him. I even waited while he gathered up toys, carrying them with him as we ran out into the dark. As for my toys, I lost them all.
“We stayed together in the rice paddies until the Americans had destroyed Kofu. Since the town was small, it took only two or three hours until no building remained.
“When I made my wish on Tanabata, three hundred thousand people were living in Kofu. Next morning, one hundred thousand of them were dead. You cannot imagine what it was like to go back. The streets were full of dead bodies and we had to walk over them. Many were still burning, and you could see their smouldering red-pink flesh. There were people who died standing up, completely charred and dead.
“And I thought that it was no longer a matter of winning a war or losing a war. This was the end of the world, or even worse. Maybe hell was something like this.
“I couldn’t go back to Tokyo, because it was being bombed every night. Obviously, I couldn’t stay in Kofu because there was nothing left. So my
mother decided to send me to Mi to, where my sister was, and then she went back to Tokyo to be with my father.
“This was when I wished I had died in the first air raid, so I would not have had to experience all these terrible things. However, I went to Mi to, where I would be safe—and guess what happened?
“Three days before the end of the war, Mito was shelled by the American navy. Fortunately, my grandmother’s house was very close to the coast, so the shells passed overhead. But the noise was horrific. It felt like an earthquake and the earthquake was happening every second. The house shook and shuddered. There were pauses in the shelling, though never a pause we could calculate. We’d think it was all over, and begin dinner again, but then it would start and go on and on and on. We knew why they were shelling us. They were getting ready to land their troops.
“I went to school most days. We spent our time making bamboo spears we could use to kill the American soldiers when they invaded. Because our school was about an hour and a half from my grandmother’s place, I was sometimes too frightened to come home alone and often spent the night at school.
“Suddenly, on August
I
, the ships disappeared from the coast. It was a very quiet, peaceful time.
Then, on August 15 the war ended. This current prime minister is too young to know anything about the war, so this is why he feels he can visit the shrine of the army’s war dead, and why he thinks we should change the constitution so Japan can have an army once again.
“When I talk to young people, they all say war is bad, war is frightening, but if you ask if they would defend their country, they all say yes. This attitude is very different from mine.
“How about you, Carey-san, I don’t suppose you experienced the war?”
“Not really, Mr. Yazaki, but I do remember playing with Japanese army occupation money as a child.”
Mr. Yazaki was silent a moment. I had no idea what he was feeling.
“I am thinking,” he offered, “about the people in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, and I think about how it is for those children. We read a book called A
Farewell to Arms
, but when will we finally say good-bye to them?”
6.
Heart of Animation
Beats in a Robot Boy
By James Brooke
TOKYO, April
6—
Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, search-light eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots.
To make the 100,000 horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003.
Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy’s official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan’s animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atom [literally Iron-Arm Atom] is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and-ruby likeness in a downtown department store display.
“We Japanese want to live alongside robots, that is why we love Astro Boy,” said Takao Imai, a 72 year old lawyer, dressed in a white smock and a white wig of cotton curls to look like Professor Elefun, Astro Boy’s eccentric scientist protector.
This appeared in the
New York Times
well after our return from Tokyo, but that quote—
we Japanese want to live alongside robots
—recalled again this common but inexplicable enthusiasm.
At first I had been tempted to regard the robot as a kind of mechanised Godzilla, a metaphor for the technological might of the atomic bomb. This, however, was undercut by my discovery of a wild and
terrifying cartoon produced two years before Hiroshima, titled
Kagaku Senshi Nyū Yōku ni Shutsugen su
(“The Science Warrior Appears in New York”). In it, a giant robot with vast spiked feet stamps flat the buildings on Manhattan whilst it puffs steam or smoke or poison from every hinge and hole of its Tin Man body. Though the bomb could not explain the robot, one cannot escape the impotent rage, and even obsession, that the image conjures up. When Commodore Perry broke through the wall that had surrounded Japan for two hundred years, he perhaps engendered passions suggested by the robot, but I kept this notion to myself. Because once I was in Japan, I understood that, as a foreigner, I could never know the truth.
Certainly I saw the effects of World War II in almost every anime we watched, in the continually crumbling cities, in those ever-present preternaturally powerful children who threatened to obliterate the universe, and most particularly in the series Mobile Suit Gundam, whose creator we set off to meet one sunny summer’s day. We were accompanied by my friend from the English Agency, Paul Hulbert and—this was a complete surprise— Takashi, who appeared from behind a newsstand near Asakusa Station. My son immediately brightened.
“Charley, did you invite him?”
“Dad, please. You don’t know what this means to him.”
I looked at Takashi. His tension was palpable, his cheeks a heightened rosy colour. He smiled at me, although what that meant I could not guess.
“But we haven’t asked Mr. Tomino,” I told my son as we boarded the subway. “This interview has taken months to arrange. They’re very formal about all this.”
Poor Takashi was not insensitive to my feelings. On the train he stood a little apart, very erect in his bearing.
“He won’t ask questions, Dad. He just wants to come. Don’t be so mean. Mr. Tomino is his hero.”
I saw his point. If Charley had endured Kabuki for me, I could handle whatever ripples Takashi’s presence might cause. Having resolved that he should come, I was surprised again when, during the short walk from Kichijoji Station to Sunrise Studios, he vanished.
It is the nature of tourism that one returns not only with trinkets and postcards but also with memories of misunderstandings, hurts ignorantly inflicted across the borderlines of language and custom. At Kichijoji Station, it seemed I had acquired one more. As it turned out, however, Takashi Ko, second lieutenant of the third battalion, was simply
unable to confront his creator. Still, the bad taste lingers: social anxiety had made me less generous than I should have been.
Sunrise Studios occupies an office building of no particular charm, and it was not until we entered the second-floor studio that we met the twelve-foot-high plastic robot. Here, at last, I saw my son’s face take on that complete and utter blankness which reveals his deepest secret pleasures. Who could believe we were here? Which of his friends would even believe it possible?
We were led into a meeting room where we were seven in all, one boy and six men, most notably Yoshiyuki Tomino himself, a youthful sixty years of age, slim, balding, with large eyeglasses and that curious combination often seen in artists, an obvious sensitivity linked with a paradoxically unbending will.
My friend Paul brought to the table not only extraordinary fluency in Japanese, a highly educated literary sensibility but also an intimate familiarity with manga.
In addition, there was Irie-san, a senior editor of Kodansha, the giant publishing firm that produced much of the printed material, some of it physically immense, generated by Mobile Suit Gundam. He was a man with an untidy mop of hair and such
obvious kindness and intelligence that it was with him more than anyone I met that I felt my lack of language most acutely.
BOOK: Wrong About Japan
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