The 40s: The Story of a Decade (29 page)

“Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University of Literature and
Science, and one of my church members, was buried by the bomb under the two storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo University. Both of them could not move an inch under tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already caught fire. His son said, ‘Father, we can do nothing except make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the country. Let us give
Banzai
to our Emperor.’ Then the father followed after his son,
‘Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!’
In the result, Dr. Hiraiwa said, ‘Strange to say, I felt calm and bright and peaceful spirit in my heart, when I chanted
Banzai
to Tenno.’ Afterward his son got out and digged down and pulled out his father and thus they were saved. In thinking of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, ‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.’

“Miss Kayoko Nobutoki, a student of girl’s high school, Hiroshima Jazabuin, and a daughter of my church member, was taking rest with her friends beside the heavy fence of the Buddhist Temple. At the moment the atomic bomb was dropped, the fence fell upon them. They could not move a bit under such a heavy fence and then smoke entered into even a crack and choked their breath. One of the girls begun to sing
Kimi ga yo
, national anthem, and others followed in chorus and died. Meanwhile one of them found a crack and struggled hard to get out. When she was taken in the Red Cross Hospital she told how her friends died, tracing back in her memory to singing in chorus our national anthem. They were just 13 years old.

“Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”

A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s conception of it—and awe of it—was typical. “The atom bomb,” she would say when asked about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it was six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add,
“Shikata ga nai,”
a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word
“nichevo”:
“It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge
one evening, in German: “
Da ist nichts zu machen.
There’s nothing to be done about it.”

Many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase. “I see,” Dr. Sasaki once said, “that they are holding a trial for war criminals in Tokyo just now. I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all.”

Father Kleinsorge and the other German Jesuit priests, who, as foreigners, could be expected to take a relatively detached view, often discussed the ethics of using the bomb. One of them, Father Siemes, who was out at Nagatsuka at the time of the attack, wrote in a report to the Holy See in Rome, “Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population. Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-
san
told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”

O
ne summer evening in 1943, Orson Welles performed a
New Yorker
piece by E. B. White on CBS Radio, reading with a double bass what White had written with a clarinet. White had been asked by the Writers’ War Board to explain the meaning of democracy. “Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he began. “Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.” Living on a farm in Maine, White had been mailing his pieces to
The New Yorker
, pitching in, more than he wanted to pitch in, because Harold Ross had lost much of his staff to the war and also because White believed that the magazine had sometimes failed to say “things that seem to need saying.” (Ross said he was glad to have him, even “if only by the thimble-full.”) What needed saying White usually knew how to say. “Democracy,” he closed, “is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”

Every war cleaves time. Before the war,
The New Yorker
was one kind of magazine; after, it was another. In the late thirties and into the forties, Ross’s reluctance to take an editorial position about the relationship between the United States and the Allied Forces had made the magazine seem muffled and aloof. “Tilley’s hat and butterfly return to plague us all,” White wrote, bitterly. If, in the end, the war brought the world into
The New Yorker
and carried
The New Yorker
to the world, it also changed how the magazine reported on Americans at home. The clock in McSorley’s seems hardly to have ticked between 1854, when the saloon opened, and 1940, when
The New Yorker
published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of it, but in an article by Mitchell that appeared in 1949, Caughnawaga Mohawks living in Brooklyn build bridges and skyscrapers out of iron and steel; on weekends, they watch television. “MARRIAGE BLAMED AS DIVORCE CAUSE,” a headline from the Memphis
Commercial
Appeal
, was one of only a handful of bottom-of-column notices posted in the Ho Hum Department in a decade. As Ross explained to White in the summer of 1946, “These are not Ho Hum times.”

· · ·

Most of the following essays about the American scene offer one answer or another to the question the War Board asked in 1943: What is democracy? The answers in these essays are darker than White’s, and for one reason: in peacetime, the wartime defense of American democracy yielded to criticism of its failures. Democracy might be the score at the top of the ninth, but one suspects the game’s been rigged.

In “Letter from a Campaign Train,” Richard Rovere reports on the contest between Thomas Dewey’s 1948 presidential campaign, with its “junior-executive briskness,” and the “general dowdiness and good-natured slovenliness” of Truman’s. The difference between the two campaigns, Rovere writes, “is the difference between horsehair and foam rubber, between the coal-stove griddle and the pop-up toaster. Dewey is the pop-up toaster.” Lopsidedness is also the theme of the story Lillian Ross tells in “Symbol of All We Possess,” in which Ross rides to Atlantic City in a 1948 Pontiac sedan with Wanda Nalepa, a twenty-two-year-old registered nurse from the Bronx. She is competing in the Miss America Pageant. Miss New York State doesn’t stand a chance. She’s too short, she’s too skinny, and she can’t dance. Ross writes about her with a searing affection:

Rebecca West’s “Opera in Greenville,” the story of a trial held in South Carolina in 1947, ran to over thirty pages in the magazine. It is a masterpiece of restraint. Thirty-one white men stood trial for lynching Willie Earle, a young black man accused of robbing and stabbing to death a white man. In the courtroom, the judge allows the defendants to sit with their families; West writes, of one man with his children,
“During the recess, he spread his legs wide apart, picked up one or the other of the little girls under her armpits, and swung her back and forth between his knees.” The city’s blacks sit in the balcony. West peers at them: “Every day there went into court a number of colored men and women who were conspicuously handsome and fashionably dressed, and had resentment and the proud intention not to express it written all over them.” West starts her piece with a stream, ends it with a fever, and issues a verdict of her own about what the court’s ruling has done to every living soul in Greenville County, South Carolina, population 137,000: “These wretched people have been utterly betrayed.”