DanB Seattle
Memorial to Sadako Sasaki, The Peace Park, Seattle Washington.
Every August 6, the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I think of the people I met there fifteen years ago while doing research in Japan.
This August 6, some of the world will be thinking about Hiroshima. But on off years, like this year’s 72nd anniversary, with all that’s going on across the globe, much of the world will probably be looking elsewhere. And when the world does think about Japan and nuclear radiation, it will likely think about the destruction of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, and the radiation unleashed in the aftermath.
Sometimes it seems that the Hiroshima hibakusha, as the atomic bomb survivors are known, have been forgotten. Even those who were young children at the time are now closing in on eighty. Those older, most likely to remember and tell their story, will soon be gone.
Disabled since birth, I went to Hiroshima expressly to visit with a disabled hibakusha. I arrived in Hiroshima the afternoon before I was scheduled to interview Suzuko Numata. By the time I had checked into my hotel, it was too late to go to the Peace Memorial Museum. So I took the streetcar to the north side of Peace Park and walked across the reconstructed T-shaped Aioi Bridge, the target for the bomb. The bomb actually exploded only 300 meters southeast of its target, quite accurately for the days before radar, approximately 580 meters above the Shima Hospital in a busy downtown Hiroshima district then known as Saiku-machi.
On the banks of the Motoyasu River, I reached the ruined building known as the A-Bomb Dome, 160 meters northwest of where the bomb exploded. The red brick building originally opened in 1915 as the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall. The building’s architectural skeleton and dome somehow survived the blast that killed all its occupants on the morning of August 6, 1945.
In the twilight, I found the Children’s Peace Monument, also known as the Tower of the Paper Cranes, a memorial inspired by Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two at the time of the bombing. She developed leukemia when she was twelve. While in the hospital Sadako thought that if she could fold a thousand paper cranes, according to Japanese legend, her wish to survive would be granted. Sadako had reached 644 paper cranes when she died on October 25, 1955.
Sadako thought that if she could fold a thousand paper cranes, according to Japanese legend, her wish to survive would be granted.
Sadako’s fellow students finished folding the cranes. They were also instrumental in building this monument to their dead classmate and to the thousands of children who died from the bombing. Visitors leave streams of multicolored paper cranes at Sadako’s memorial. The bell in the center of the monument is in the shape of a gold paper crane.
I rang the bell. The echo through the empty park scared some birds that quickly flew away.
I made my way to the Cenotaph, the central monument to those killed by the A-bomb. The Cenotaph is in a shape evoking primitive shelters of the Kofun Period (300 to 600 AD); its parabolic arch is reminiscent of haniwa, the pottery found in prehistoric Japanese tombs, representing what the deceased might find useful in the afterlife.
Walking in the hauntingly quiet park, I tried to imagine this island in the middle of two rivers as Hiroshima’s once-bustling Saiku-machi district.
The next day, I interviewed Numata-san at the International Conference Center, just west of the Peace Memorial Museum. Mariko served as translator. I hoped not only to hear Numata-san’s hibakusha story but also to learn how her disability influenced her life after the war.
“I was a military girl,” Numata-san began. “I believed Japan would win the war and I would do anything for Japan to win the war.” She showed me a map of the city, familiar from my walk in the park yesterday afternoon. On the map the hypocenter of the bomb strike was circled. Also circled was the school, converted to wartime use, where Numata-san was working at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when the A-bomb exploded. The night before, sirens warned that B-29 bombers might be approaching, but by morning the all-clear signal had sounded.
“We always wondered why no B-29-san hit Hiroshima,” she told me. “We kept waiting for that to happen.”
When the building collapsed, a beam fell on top of her. “I must have passed out, I don’t remember. The next thing I knew I heard my mother’s voice. She had come looking for me and found someone to help her move the building beam off of her daughter. That’s how I lost my leg. For many years I taught in school. After I retired, a few years ago, I finally realized I was disabled and found a group for older disabled women. Only with them did I find I could once again complain.”
I had wanted to talk to a disabled hibakusha about her experience being disabled, but this is the only time Numata-san mentioned being disabled. It is as if the experience of the A-bomb, of being a hibakusha, subsumed all her identity, leaving little room for being, more commonly, disabled.
Numata-san’s story of what happened on August 6, 1945, and the following days did not differ from the other stories I had read in preparation for my trip to Hiroshima. But about a year after the bomb was dropped, something happened to her.
“I had given up hope,” Numata-san confessed. “Then one day I was by the river and I saw this tree—I will take you to see it after lunch—and I noticed this tree had died in the bomb blast. It was still black and charred, but I noticed small branches beginning to grow. Somehow the tree had found a way to come back to life. And I thought, if this tree can do it, so can I. I came to visit the tree many times. When they built Peace Park, they moved the tree so it was easier for everyone to see.”
“Somehow the tree had found a way to come back to life. I thought, if this tree can do it, so can I.”
I accompanied Numata-san and Mariko to the small café off the lobby of the museum. Numata-san pointed out the window. “That is the tree. We will visit it after lunch.”
After lunch, we took photos under Numata-san’s thin-branched tree. Was this the actual tree that Numata-san had seen on the riverbank, the tree that inspired her to survive? I thought about the myth my parents have told for decades about my childhood—how although I was never supposed to walk, I learned to walk in two casts—and I felt closer to Numata-san than I did while listening to her story. I understood the need for the tree planted by the museum to be Numata-san’s tree.
I gave Numata-san and Mariko omiyage, traditional thank-you gifts. We bowed and bowed and continued bowing until we finally parted.
I went on to the Peace Memorial Museum, revisiting the now familiar story that began with a clear, cloudless Monday just after eight in the morning. The museum is filled with technical information about the impacts of the bomb, as well as remnants from the blast: The burned lunchbox. A human shadow burned into the stone stairs of a bank. A white wall stained with black rain—which contained large amounts of radioactive soot and dust—contaminating areas far from the hypocenter. The charred skeleton of a child’s tricycle. The cracked face of a pocket watch stopped at 8:15 a.m.
It was almost twilight when I once made my way through Peace Park. I once again stopped in front of the A-Bomb Dome. After my day in Hiroshima, I now thought of the ruins as a monument to reconstruction as much as to destruction.
Back at my hotel, physically and emotionally drained, I sorted through the day’s images. Neither the objective numbing numbers (1,000,000 degrees Celsius, thirty five percent energy released as heat rays, fifty percent as blast, 140,000 dead) nor new words (hypocenter, cenotaph, keloid) nor old dates (July 16, 1945, August 6, 1945, August 15, 1945) can successfully tell the story of what happened in Hiroshima.
Numata-san’s story transformed from that of aggressor to victim, from victim to survivor. Her story was filled with both guilt and innocence, with as much shame as pride. But Numata-san’s telling of her story seemed fixed, closed. Even the story of her tree, which actually might not be her tree, seemed scripted. Even if I had asked more questions, I knew that I could not interrupt, or disturb, her story.
This is an excerpt adapted from In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature grant, and will be published in September by University of Wisconsin Press. Fries is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan/US Friendship Commission and National Endowment of the Arts, and a faculty member in the creative writing program at Goddard College.