Hiroshima (4 page)

After the war Uncle Y. visited us in our hut, and he often said to us brothers, “Your father was a great man!” I hadn't had the faintest idea why he was great. It was from Uncle Y. that I first learned of Dad's thinking.

Uncle Y. said, “I was the model gung-ho militarist young man.” He was a believer, without the slightest doubt: “I would have died happily for the country, for the emperor; Japan was the eternal land of the gods; it was only natural for a ‘son of Yamato' to offer up his life to that land of the gods.” Forcing a smile, he said he was the model male conforming to the mold of patriotic education. With a flourish, this Uncle Y. said to Dad, “I'm off now to take part in the Pearl Harbor attack. I'll die a splendid death for the country, for the emperor.” Dad glared at Y. and said angrily, “Down with the emperor system! This war is wrong. Japan will surely lose! Don't die a dog's death!” Dad went on and on, arguing about how terrible the emperor system was, speaking earnestly about its structure, and arguing about the process whereby the Japanese people, bound hand and foot in the coils of emperor-system fascism, were plunging into war.

When Uncle Y., a firm believer in militarism, heard, “down with the emperor,” whom he had thought a god, he thought his head would explode. Stunned, he left for Pearl Harbor. Against all odds, he survived, and with Dad's words always in mind, he avoided exposing himself to danger. When, under fire-bombing by B-29s and strafing by Grumman fighter planes, he was running about at Kure Naval Base, he thought to himself, it's happened just as Dad said it would, and he understood just how prescient Dad had been.

But I found it hard to talk with Uncle Y. He had lived a long time amid the din of submarine engines, so he spoke in a very loud voice, and it was tough for me, listening—I felt I was always being yelled at.

I figured Dad had given that advice only to Uncle Y., but I learned years later from a visit by S., one of the young men who were in and out of our house, that Dad gave them the same advice.

S.'s call-up notice came, and his dispatch to “Manchuria” (now northeastern China) was set. He came to take his leave, and Dad told him, “Down with the emperor system! Japan will surely lose this war, so don't throw your life away!” and Dad made him listen in detail about the process leading from the structure of emperor-system fascism to defeat. S., a militaristic young man, turned white with shock. But when he got to Manchuria and saw Japan's situation, it was as Dad said. He realized that Japan's home islands would be beaten hollow, and he sent frantic letters to his family living in the center of Hiroshima. There was censorship in the service, so he couldn't write what he wanted. He could write only, “Get out!”

S.'s family was puzzled to read all the letters saying, “Quickly, get our possessions together and evacuate from Hiroshima to the countryside.” There must be some reason their son was always writing from Manchuria telling them to get out. They gathered their possessions and evacuated. Soon after the family evacuated, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. S. listened to Dad's warning, so the lives of his family were saved, and his cherished collection of books didn't burn up, and he was grateful to Dad—that I learned when he came to Tokyo and visited me. I'd had no idea how much influence Dad had exerted over the young men.

Dad was antiwar. I remember the song popular among children—“Mr. T
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, Mr. T
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, Mr. T
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, great man.” When we sang it, Dad glared fiercely at us, took us up to the second-floor workroom and angrily told us: “That guy T
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you were singing about just now is a bad guy. Don't sing that song!” Dad couldn't excuse T
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Hideki, prime minister when they pushed the war. At the time I couldn't understand why Dad was so angry.

“Traitor's Kid”

For me, “head of the neighborhood association” resonates unpleasantly. Since Dad had been released from jail, the head of the neighborhood association began to appear at our house for one reason or another and got into big arguments with Dad. To my child's mind, it was very strange that at each visit Dad and the neighborhood association head fought like cats and dogs. On the other hand, it was fun, too, to watch them fight.

When the head of the neighborhood association came to our door—“Anyone home?”—and climbed from the entryway up to Dad's workroom on the second floor, Susumu and I would be downstairs looking up the staircase, scoping out the situation and thinking, “Now the fireworks will begin.” Gradually, the conversation grew agitated, and when Dad snarled, “Get out!” the neighborhood association head hurried down the stairs, burst out the entryway, and ran off. Chasing and arguing, Dad came after him. The scene was both diverting and strange.

After the war I learned that the head of the neighborhood association functioned as the lowest level of governmental authority. It was his role to make sure Dad, who'd been jailed for a thought crime and released back into the neighborhood, wasn't speaking or acting “seditiously.” Dad was unapologetically antiwar in thought and deed, so to come to remonstrate with Dad to “be careful what you say and do” was to start a major argument. The neighborhood association head feared he'd be blamed if the neighborhood produced a criminal. Today, too, the neighborhood association system is being revived, and I get really angry when the local boss becomes head and comes around to lecture people arbitrarily. They built the fascist order wrapped in pretty talk: “Improve human relations, make the neighborhood happy. . . .” I think we should be leery of the neighborhood association system.

People extended their spite for Dad, their dislike of Dad, to daughter Eiko, too. The scene comes back to me clearly. Here's what happened.

In the rays of the evening sun, the houses are dyed red, the mountains turn into a black silhouette, and soon the sky will be dark. Looking up at the sky, Mom seems worried and mutters to Dad and me: “Hmm. . . . Eiko's late. Something must have happened. All her classmates are already home. What's up?” Uneasy, she kept looking up at the darkening sky. Dad, too, began to worry and said he'd go to the school to get her. Just then, Eiko appeared, and we were all relieved. Mom asked Eiko why she was late. Silent, Eiko shut herself in her room and wouldn't come out. Soon we heard her faint sobs, and as they consoled the weeping Eiko, Dad and Mom found out why.

That day at school a classmate's money had gone missing. Eiko sat in the seat next to her and was suspected of having stolen it. She was taken to the teachers' room, stripped to the skin, and questioned. No matter how often she pleaded her innocence—“I didn't take it!”—the teacher wouldn't believe her. He blamed her—“You took it. Confess!”—and she was kept in the teachers' room until late. Red-hot mad, Dad dashed off on his bike, heading through the dusk for the school.

That day Dad didn't come home until late. I don't know what Dad said at school, but when he got home, he was angry, as if still not satisfied. He said to Mom: “They give a child a scar she'll never forget! The principal and that teacher—I really told them off!” Dad asked the teacher, “What evidence do you have that Eiko stole it?” The reply: the missing money had turned up in the classmate's notebook. She'd forgotten where she'd put it, then reported the money stolen. The teacher had suspected Eiko had taken it. Dad had a short fuse, so he was undoubtedly really angry. Afterward I heard from Mom that the teacher remembered that Dad was a thought criminal who'd been in jail and disliked Eiko, the “traitor's kid.”

Next day Dad encouraged Eiko, who was off to school, “Hold your head high!” Then he said, “I'm off to the school once more; I'll give that principal and teacher a talking to!” Not listening to Mom, who tried to stop him, Dad set off for the school. Even to my child's mind, Dad was tenacious, dependable.

Days of Hunger

Toward the end of 1944 Hiroshima suffered severe food shortages, and every day was a struggle against hunger. To eat our fill of white rice, we thought, would be the greatest good fortune; white rice haunted us even in our dreams. Each day we held bowls filled with sodden soybeans; we pushed the soybeans aside and searched first for the grains of rice—that soybean-rice was horrible to eat. The soybeans clunked against each other in our mouths; no matter how hungry we were, they were hard to swallow. Yet even that might have been okay if we could have eaten our fill, but it was always a single bowl and an empty stomach.

Under the wartime controls, everything was rationed, and Mom's job—making ends meet, dealing with our hunger—was huge: scarce soy beans, potatoes, kaoliang, dehydrated potatoes, squash, vegetables, fish. She made dumplings by pulverizing soybeans in a grindstone, and she tried all possible edibles. We wanted to cry from hunger and blame Mom, but watching Mom, even we children knew we couldn't do that. Mom continued to work at getting food. When Blackie, our cat, brought home a fish or a sparrow, Susumu and I were green with envy and chased Blackie up onto the second-story drying porch. Every day was a day spent searching for food—“Isn't there anything to eat?”

I relished nothing so much as eluding Mom's eye, sneaking a hand into the rice tin, grabbing a handful of raw rice, then hiding out with Susumu and eating it. With Susumu, I immersed myself in clandestine joy: I chewed the kernels of rice, and the sweet juice filled my mouth, white liquid dripped from both sides of my mouth. I wiped it away with my wrist. Soon Mom noticed that the rice was dwindling and put the tin on a high shelf I couldn't reach, and our joy—stealing and eating raw rice—also came to an end. Mom must have realized we were stealing and been sad she couldn't feed us enough. Gently, sadly, Mom said to me: “The rice in the tin—everyone's life depends on it, so don't open it unless I give you permission.”

If we learn, via the kid's grapevine, that “the stew at
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— Restaurant today is so thick chopsticks stand upright!” we brothers get excited, grab food coupon and bowl, hurry to the restaurant, and take our place in the line. In a great vat a fluid bubbles, stew containing a very few grains of rice and some chopped-up vegetables and white radish; one coupon lets us buy only one bowlful. We wait a long time for our turn, finally getting together and setting our chopsticks upright in the bowl of stew; we stare intently as the chopsticks fall over slowly and give off shouts that are close to shrieks of pain.

If the chopsticks fall over slowly, that means the stew is good. The normal stew looks like dark liquid, nothing more, and if you stand your chopsticks upright, they fall right over. When we get hold of thick stew with lots in it, we're as happy as if we have the devil by the neck. We head for home, sloshing the stew back and forth in the bowl, opening the lid and breathing in the smell any number of times, and thinking, each one of us, how lucky we'd be if we could eat this all ourselves—and this is a meal for the whole family.

About twenty minutes by foot from our house was Eba, the end of the trolley line. Just this side of the stop was the army's firing range, a broad field. A tall embankment had been thrown up left and right to stop bullets, and tall poplars had been planted. When the wind blew, the branches moved in unison, and the sound of their leaves carried all over. That firing range field was also where grasshoppers swarmed and bred. After Eiko came home from school, we went often, the two of us urging Eiko on, to hunt grasshoppers. We took a bag, hunting grasshoppers till the evening sun set, cramming the bag full. Then happy, singing at the top of our lungs the words of the song, “The evening sky clears, the autumn wind blows, the moon sinks, crickets chirp,” we headed for home. We transferred the grasshoppers we'd caught to a bucket and let them sit overnight, so they'd cough up reddish-black leaf juice. And then we began to make a meal of the cleaned grasshoppers. Splitting bamboo into thin pieces, we made spits, impaled a dozen grasshoppers, painted them with soy sauce, and fried them over the charcoal stove. A delicious smell came wafting. Carving spits with the big kitchen knife we used for cutting vegetables, Susumu cut his finger and cried, “Ouch! Ouch!” But when he bit into a batch of fried grasshoppers, he danced a jig and ate and ate.

On days when the lunchroom in the fishing town of Eba had sales of “Eba dumplings,” we were beside ourselves with anticipation. These were dumplings in the shape of coins, made by mixing wheat and acorn flour, seaweed, and mugwort. They'd let you buy only two per person. We'd line up early in front of the store, buy dumplings, put them in the shopping bag Eiko carried, then go to the end of the line once more, and buy up as many as we could before they sold out. Waiting our turn in line was really tough. Uneasy, we were almost praying, “Don't let them run out before our turn!” They tasted so bad that if you put them in your mouth today, you'd spit them right out. But at that time of no sweets, they were sweet, and we ate every last crumb and were happy.

At the ceremony invoking the spirits of the dead at the Gokoku Shrine, on the grounds of Hiroshima Castle, we persuaded Dad to buy us a sugar cane stalk all of six feet long. Cutting it carefully into sections, we peeled off the husk with our teeth and sucked the fresh sweet juice until the cane was absolutely dry.