Mr Two Bomb (6 page)

That last image that I have of Hiroshima, the epitome of a peaceful city stretching itself awake, is freeze-framed in my mind. I remember it well because it was the last time I ever saw her. And there is always an especial poignancy to that last picture we have of an old, dear friend before they are taken away from us.

In just 96 minutes, Hiroshima would be blown off the face of the earth by that black screaming horror that was Little Boy.

Shinzo was still asleep, his stubbled jowl glistening with sweat. I watched him twitch in the half-light, like an old hunting dog at the hearth, his snoring now as rhythmic as waves on the beach. A hand moved to scratch at the lice in his armpit. In a rare moment of tenderness, I let him be.

By the side of his futon, there was another painfully ridiculous invention of the war: the personal bamboo liferaft, comprising four struts of bamboo that had been lashed together into a square. Now if ever you doubted it, the construct of the bamboo life-raft truly reveals that we were being led by headless chickens.

For some reason, it had been conceived that the Yankees were going to bomb the dams about 50 kilometres inland, and that in the ensuing flood Hiroshima was to be wiped off the face of the earth. That being the case, the military had issued 200,000 ‘life-rafts’. When the great flood came, we were to strap the life-rafts to our backs and bob merrily into the Inland Sea until the waters had abated. You may imagine that I am exaggerating this point, but every word of it is true.

I barely know where to begin as I try to express my contempt for the woolly thinking that went into creating all those thousands of bamboo squares. It was farcical. Even if the dams were bombed – which was never going to happen – it would have taken eight hours for the floods to reach Hiroshima. And, when that occurred, were we seriously going to trust to those bamboo life-rafts?

Sometimes it felt like the authorities were just trying to keep us busy, running us off our feet from one moment to the next so that we could never stand still, be calm, look at the problem rationally. If any of us had done that, we would have surrendered in the blink of an eye.

After I had washed and shaved, I put on my work-clothes; just the usual patched shirt and trousers that were standard in Japan in those days. All clothing was rationed by then, our annual allowance buying a single shirt and pair of trousers. I will say this for the war though – it had made all of us equal. We were all wearing the same tatty clothes and all of us, even the Emperor, were eating the same miserable food.

The last thing I did before I left the room was to slip on my money-belt, which we were all encouraged to wear – just in case we lost everything we owned. It contained over 3,000 Yen, equal to about six months’ pay. Half of the money was Shinzo’s. We had decided to take out an insurance of sorts, by dividing up our money between us so that, even if I lost everything, I would still have half my purse lying snug round his ample belly. That is how much I trusted the man – and in that respect, at least, I showed surprisingly good judge of character.

I popped in on Sumie. She was still asleep, but smiled and cupped my cheek when I knelt and kissed her goodbye. And, like my last image of Hiroshima, I will never forget the sight of her sprawled on her front, arms and legs splayed in wanton abandon, exuding that childlike innocence that comes to all of us in sleep.

Sumie’s white-tiled kitchen was spotless, but I did not linger, wolfing down some rice-balls and a piece of left over pumpkin. In the vestibule, I put on my favourite footwear, my old leather boots, weathered by many years at sea but still far more durable than the usual straw slippers we wore. I had worn them during my days as a merchant seaman, but I loved them because they had belonged to my father. Every time I put them on, I thought of him.

My bicycle was in the shed by the vegetable patch. I wheeled it out and, just as I knew she would be, the neighbour’s girl was already there to wave me off.

She was only seven years old and, like many children of the war, had a precociousness and self-sufficiency that was way beyond her years. She was an orphan and was looked after by her grandmother, who worked long hours as a nurse at the Shima Hospital in the centre of Hiroshima. There were no uncles, aunts or cousins, so the girl spent her days as she pleased; like a young mongrel that scavenges constantly about her patch in search of excitement.

“Good morning,” she called.

I peered about me to see where the voice was coming from, studying the shadows and the alleyways for a sight of her, but still she eluded me. “Good morning yourself, wherever you are.”

“I’m up here,” she laughed. She was right on the top of her home, sitting astride the very apex of the roof-tiles.

“Is that as dangerous as it looks?”

“Not for a dancer,” she said, and with that she got up and starting skipping along the roof-ridge. She was over two storeys high but was parading herself as easily as if she had been on the pavement. I remember how surreal it was to see that circus act silhouetted against the sun, with the girl’s pigtails flying behind her as she danced in the sky. What a picture of carefree abandon, so unaware that she was teetering on the very edge of disaster. She danced along the roof, skipping, one step, two step, as blithe as a ballerina. With a final twirl, she landed against the chimney stack and curtseyed to me.

“Very impressive,” I said, clapping lightly. “What would your grandmother say?”

“She’s gone to work.”

“So you’ll be getting up to mischief?”

She laughed and twirled again. “I thought I would join the local schoolgirls. You have never heard a sound like it when we pull the houses down. And the dust, it gets everywhere! It gets into your mouth, your nose and your eyes. It’s very exciting.”

I laughed at the thought of the girl tugging away at the cables. I could almost picture the fierce frown of concentration as she joined 30 other toiling schoolgirls in this ceaseless tug-of-war. “I am sure you are very good at it.”

“I am,” she said, and with that she grabbed hold of a drainpipe and shimmied down the side of the house as effortlessly as a monkey. She jumped the last metre and then skipped over to me, hands clasped behind her back, skirt billowing about her. “They say we’re pulling down many more houses now that I’m with them.”

“I am sure they are.” I climbed onto my bicycle, kicked up the pedal.

“When are you going to make me a kite? You promised me one weeks ago.”

“Every time I make a kite for you, the Navy takes it off me. They say they need them for their ships.”

“To kill more Yankees?”

“That is the idea.”

“That is good then. I hope we kill every one of them.”

“They are not that bad. I think you would quite like them.”

“Never! They killed my father!”

“I will see about that kite.”

I was about to push off, when the city’s siren opened up in a series of short blasts. It was more of an alert signal than the full alarm. High up in the sky was a single B-29, a gleaming streak of silver set against the most brilliant blue; I am told that the sight of it moved some people to poetry. The name of that particular B-29 was ‘Straight Flush’, and it was in the very act of signing our death warrant – its radio operator was reporting back that the weather conditions over Hiroshima were perfect.

Over the previous weeks we had seen scores of these B – 29s, and – just as Colonel Paul Tibbets had planned – were so used to them that we barely gave them a second glance. We had seen so many of these passive planes drifting high over Hiroshima that we had all but forgotten that they were the world’s most advanced killing machines.

“A single Mr B,” I said, using the affectionate ‘B-san’ name by which the children called the B29s. “Will you go to the shelter?”

The girl kicked at a stone in front of her, scuffing up the dust. “If I die, I die,” she said, squinting at the innocuous single plane.

“It would be nice to think we had some control over our future,” I said.

“It is fate.”

I have often wondered about that since. All of us like to believe that we are masters of our own destinies. But once you have been caught up in something like Hiroshima, when small matters of happenstance mean the difference between life and death, you can start to believe that fate may have lent a hand. This is exponentially so if you have also survived Nagasaki; it is fate squared. For most of our lives, there is not much of true import. It makes no odds if we go into work early, or if we have a leisurely breakfast at home. It does not matter if we spend all day in bed, or if we diligently go about our chores. But, for one single second that day, fate ruled the world and every chance decision that we made that morning would determine whether we lived or died.

It is best not to dwell on these matters; it plays havoc with your brain. If you have survived not one but two atomic bombs, you can be constantly tormented over whether the small things do matter. Should I boil some rice, or should I go for a walk? Will it make a difference? Will my life depend on it?

With luck, though, you will eventually come to the serene conclusion that, most likely, nothing will make a blind bit of difference; and, even if it did, there is nothing you could do about it anyway.

I waved to the girl as I weaved off down the dusty lane, with not an inkling that we were but an hour from Armageddon. With the wind in my face, it felt like I was in a safe haven, a world away from the death and destruction that was daily being visited on Toyko.

Out on one of the Drill Fields, soldiers were already going about their training, thrusting with bayonets at the stuffed straw bags that were our make-believe Yankee enemy. Cherry trees, peach trees and the great willows by the rivers, all of them verdant, green, lush with life. The teeming waterways, so full of energy – destined by noon-time to be so clogged with death that you could have walked the water on a bridge of corpses.

It is difficult to think back to that 30-minute bike ride through the city without also remembering how in a single second Hiroshima was turned into a wasteland. The clusters of schoolgirls, devoted to their duty, were already hauling at their ropes to create ever bigger fire-breaks. I watched as a team of 20 of them hauled at a rope attached to a wooden pillar. At first nothing seemed to happen, and then suddenly the front of the house tumbled down in a rumble of dust, tiles and wooden planks.

The Aioi T-bridge, the biggest of our 49 bridges, so broad, so impregnable and within the hour set to become the very aiming point for Bombardier Tom Ferebee. Already the bridge was alive with cyclists, pedestrians, wooden push-carts, all of them going about their business, not knowing that the wheel of fate was on its final spin. I can especially recall the sight of a lone beggar, squatting on the stone steps of what might have been a bank. He was on a blanket, wooden stick by his side, tranquilly watching the world go by. Four hours later I walked past him again. He was still staring sightlessly out over Hiroshima, his shrunken body turned into a solid piece of black charcoal, incinerated from head to toe. His shadow was etched into the stone wall behind him, an eerie echo of his last moment on earth. I remember the shock as I recognised him. I had stooped to touch his hand; his charcoaled arm snapped in half like a dry twig.

The sedate streets, with their long lines of tinder-dry wood houses – just perfect for a city-wide fire-storm. It did not really need Little Boy to destroy us. I am sure we could have been just as effectively wiped out by the incendiary bombs that had worked so well on Tokyo. But what was the point of spending $2 billion on a new atomic toy if you were not going to use it?

And those posters; how I remember those posters. As I think back to Hiroshima before the bomb, I get these little snap-shots of memory. Plastered on every available piece of wall-space were these jingoistic posters, which constantly bleated that the end was in sight: ‘Victory is definitely with us! Our sacred country will repel the hated enemy!’; ‘The enemy must be defeated!’; ‘We ask for nothing but to win the war!’

Yes, indeed – just give us the chance to get stuck in with our bamboo spears and we would grind the Yankees to dust. Forgive me if my words do sometimes drip with sarcasm, but if you could not laugh at the irony of it all, it would make you weep. And I have done that too; many times.

I had cycled about five or six kilometres south through the city before I came to the vast Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company, which lies on one of the fingers of Hiroshima that stretches out into the Inland Sea. Warehouses were dotted all about the waterfront, the relics of what had once been a thriving war industry. But the place had long since turned into a ghost town.

The bomb alert ended as I pedalled up to the kite-makers’ warehouse. A few cautious souls emerged from the bombshelters, but most had not bothered to take cover. Hiroshima had not been targeted in months, so why were the Yankees going to start now?

From one of the bunkers stepped Takuo, a woman who I had flirted with and who I would definitely have kissed if she had not been so happily married. I think she worked as a secretary for one of the senior officers, though I never talked about work with her. A lovely smile and, what I remember best, the loveliest breasts, which, though kept under wraps, seemed constantly straining to break through her patterned shirt. In those lean times, it was rare indeed to see a beautiful woman so amply endowed.

“Good morning, Takuo,” I said, leaning my bike against the wall.

“Did I miss anything?”

“Only 20 minutes of sunshine.” I locked my eyes on hers.

“Oh – but the bunker can be quite nice in the morning.”

“With you, Takuo dearest, the bunker would be wonderful at any time of the day.” It was cheesy, I know, but she giggled delightedly all the same.

“Why are you in so early? You’re never in at this hour.”

“All for the greater good of the Emperor and our beloved Motherland.”

“How is it that when you say such things, I never believe you?”

By now I had walked to the warehouse, where I lingered by the door. “Do you believe anything I say?”