Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (23 page)

Bring back the fathers! Bring back the mothers!

Bring back the old people!

Bring back the children!

Bring me back!

Bring back the human beings I had contact with!

For as long as there are human beings, a world of human beings
,

bring back peace
,

unbroken peace
.
²⁵

Among the many things that the paintings of the Marukis and the writings and reminiscences by
hibakusha
provided was a vocabulary and iconography of nuclear annihilation that soon became familiar to most Japanese. Textually and visually, the closest existing approximation to the experience of August 6 and 9, 1945 was to be found in medieval writings and pictorial scrolls depicting the horrors of the Buddhist hell. Phrases such as “it was like hell,” or “hell could not be more terrible than this,” were the most commonly heard refrain in recollections by survivors. The first detailed Japanese survey of the effects of the atomic bomb—made public on August 23, 1945, a week before the American victors arrived—described Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a “living hell.”
²⁶
In the Marukis' paintings, the fire that consumed men, women and children in Hiroshima was painted in the same manner that medieval artists had used in rendering the flames of the underworld—and, indeed, the only real Japanese precedents for the naked, mutilated figures in the Marukis' depictions of atomic-bomb
victims were the tormented sinners in these old Buddhist hell scrolls. Years later, in selecting a title for a collection of drawings by
hibakusha
, Japan's public television network turned naturally to the phrase “unforgettable fire.”
²⁷

The “procession of ghosts” that was the subject of the Marukis' first, stark, India-ink mural—depicting naked, stunned, maimed
hibakusha
with hands outstretched, skin peeling from them—captured another enduring image of the bomb experience. In this instance, the nuclear reality resonated with traditional depictions of ghosts and ghouls, who also moved with eerie slowness, hands stretched before them (many bomb survivors had their hands severely burned when they covered their eyes against the blinding flash of the bombs, and almost invariably walked holding their hands palms down in front of them because this eased the pain).

Benign images grotesquely transformed also emerged as unforgettable metaphors of the nuclear disaster. Water, for example, became a central fixation in several forms—the parching thirst that victims felt (the most often heard last words spoken by victims were “
mizu kudasai
,” or “water please”); the enduring guilt that survivors experienced because they did not heed these pleas (the Japanese had been told, as a matter of general principle, not to give water to injured people); the seven great rivers of Hiroshima, running out to the beautiful Inland Sea when the bomb fell, all clogged with corpses (people threw themselves into the rivers to escape the fires, and drowned or died there of their injuries).

Black rain fell after the bombs had transformed the clear-day atmosphere. The ominous rainfall stained skin and clothing and became in time an indelible metaphor of the unprecedented aftereffects of the new weapons. Although subsequent research by the ABCC found no lethal connection between the black rain and radioactive fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in popular consciousness the rain became associated with the terrible radiation sickness that soon killed thousands of individuals who appeared to have survived the bombings. After a few hours or days, they experienced fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abnormal thirst, and sometimes
convulsions and delirium. Beginning in the second week after the bombs were dropped, apparent survivors found blood in their spit, urine, and stools; bruise-like discolorations (
purpura
) appeared on their bodies; their hair fell out in clumps. At the time no one knew what such grotesqueries portended. The Japanese government report made public on August 23 captured the local horror by describing what we now know to be radiation sickness as an “evil spirit.”
²⁸

Other traditionally benign symbols also were transmogrified. Mother and infant, universal icon of love and life, were transposed into a symbol of the broken life bond—mothers attempting to nurse dead babies, infants attempting to suck at the breasts of dead mothers. (Classic medieval texts such as the early thirteenth-century
H
ō
j
ō
ki
had offered such fractured images as evidence of
mapp
ō
, the Buddhist apocalypse or “latter days of the Buddhist law.”) Bizarre iconographies became commonplace in August 1945: monstrously mutilated people, of course, unrecognized by neighbors and loved ones—but also a man holding his eyeball in his hand; hopping birds with their wings burned off; live horses on fire; permanent white shadows on scorched walls where what had made the shadow (grass, ladders, people) no longer existed; people standing like black statues, burned to a crisp but still seemingly engaged in a last energetic act; legs standing upright, without bodies; survivors as well as corpses with their hair literally standing on end; maggots swarming in the wounds of the living.

All this, and much more, became familiar to most Japanese when those who witnessed Hiroshima and Nagasaki belatedly began to express what they had experienced.

The delayed timing of these first intense Japanese encounters with the human tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had unanticipated consequences. For example, censorship began to be lifted at approximately the same time that the Tokyo war-crimes trials ended (December 1948). The culminating moments of the protracted
Allied juridical campaign to impress Japanese with the enormity of their wartime transgressions thus coincided with the moment that many Japanese had their first encounters with detailed personal descriptions of the nuclear devastation that the Americans had visited upon them. While former Japanese leaders were being convicted of war crimes, sentenced to death, and hanged, the Japanese public simultaneously was beginning to learn the details of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time. For many Japanese, there seemed an immoral equivalence here.

Of even greater political consequence, the Japanese really confronted the horrors of nuclear war three years or more after Americans and other unoccupied peoples did—at a time when China was being won by the Communists, the Soviet Union was detonating its first bomb, hysteria in the United States had given rise to rhetoric about preventive war and preemptive strikes, runways all over occupied Japan and Okinawa were being lengthened to accommodate America's biggest bombers, and, in short time, war came to Korea. In effect, the Japanese confronted the bombs and the most intense and threatening moments of the Cold War simultaneously. They did so, moreover, at a level of intimate concern with the human consequences of nuclear weapons that ran deeper than the generally superficial American impressions of a large mushroom cloud, ruined cityscapes, and vague numbers of abstract “casualties.”

The impact of John Hersey's classic text
Hiroshima
in the United States and Japan can be taken as a small example of the ramifications of this aberrant collapse of time. Hersey's terse portraits of six victims of the Hiroshima bomb stunned American readers when first published in 1946. His account originally was written for the urbane
New Yorker
magazine, however, and reached a rather narrow upper-level stratum of the American public. By 1949, moreover, when anti-Communist hysteria had take possession of the American media, the initial impact of the book had eroded. By this time, Hersey's masterwork had no conspicuous hold on the American mind. A Japanese translation of
Hiroshima
,
on the other hand, was not permitted until occupation censorship was terminated in 1949. The translation became a best-seller in 1950—four years after Hersey's account first appeared in the United States—and reinforced popular Japanese sentiment against active commitment to U.S. military policy in the Cold War.

It was in this context that the Japanese “peace movement” (
heiwa und
ō
) took shape between 1949 and the mid-1950s. Vivid recollections and re-creations of the old war coincided with confrontation with new Cold War realities—including, beginning in July 1950, Japanese rearmament and, beginning in April 1952, the indefinite maintenance of U.S. military bases in sovereign Japan. In attempting to mobilize public support behind a more neutral position for their country, liberal and leftist intellectuals starting with the prestigious “Peace Problems Symposium” (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai) adopted a policy of promoting pacifism by appealing to the personal experiences of Japanese in the war just past—essentially appealing, that is, to the Japanese sense of victimization.

An internationalist peace consciousness, this liberal and left-wing argument went, was like the outermost ring in a series of concentric circles. To promote such a consciousness, one had to begin at the center with the intimate experience of suffering in the recent war, and strive to extend this aversion to war to the outer rings of a national and ultimately international outlook. The atomic-bomb literature contributed to this. So did a complementary vogue of publications evoking the experiences of other Japanese who had suffered in the war. Conspicuous here were collections of the wartime letters of student conscripts killed in battle.
²⁹
Even on the left, in short, victim consciousness was seen as the essential core of a pacifist and ultimately internationalist consciousness.

By the early 1950s, fear of a nuclear World War III had become almost palpable in Japan. President Truman's threat to use nuclear weapons in the Korean conflict in November 1950 inflamed these fears; and even after a truce had been arranged on the battlegrounds next door, a great number of Japanese remained alarmed by the continued testing of nuclear weapons by the American and
Soviet superpowers, extending now to hydrogen bombs. When fallout from a U.S. thermonuclear test on the Bikini atoll irradiated the crew of a Japanese fishing boat misnamed
Lucky Dragon
5 on March 1, 1954, the public was primed to respond with intense emotion to this concrete presentiment of a second cycle of nuclear victimization (one fisherman eventually died from exposure to these “ashes of death”).

A campaign to ban all nuclear weapons, initiated by Japanese housewives in May 1954, for example, soon collected an astonishing 30 million signatures.
³⁰
This same turbulent period also saw the birth, in November 1954, of Godzilla, Japan's enduring contribution to the cinematic world of mutant science-fiction monsters spawned by a nuclear explosion. In serious cinema, the director Kurosawa Akira followed his triumphant
Seven Samurai
, a 1954 production, with an almost incoherent 1955 film entitled
Record of a Living Being
, in which fear of atomic extinction drives an elderly man insane.

This was the milieu in which, in 1955, a memorial peace museum and peace park were opened in Hiroshima and the first national coalition against atomic and hydrogen bombs was established. The latter development gave temporary coherence to the antinuclear movement—and simultaneously delivered the movement into the hand of fractious political professionals and ideologues.
³¹
As a consequence, in the decades that followed, popular remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be characterized as having gone through cycles of renewal—or, put differently, through cycles of rehumanization, in which individuals or grass-roots movements reacted against the ritualization and gross politicization of remembrance. While the professional peace advocates warred over whether socialist nuclear weapons were as objectionable as capitalist ones, and while the organizers of formal antinuclear observances negotiated the seating on the speakers' platforms, certain writers, artists, and projects succeeded in casting new perspectives on the human costs of the bombs.

Beginning in 1963, for example, the gifted young writer
Ō
e Kenzabur
ō
began to use reports about the annual peace observances
in Hiroshima as a vehicle for criticizing “the strong odor of politics” that hovered over the peace park, and rediscovering “the true Hiroshima” in the ordinary citizens who still lived with and died from the legacies of the bomb.
³²
Ibuse Masuji's
Black Rain
, a masterful fictional reconstruction of death from radiation sickness based on the diary of a Hiroshima survivor plus interviews with some fifty
hibakusha
, was serialized in 1965–66 and enjoyed perennial strong sales in book form thereafter. Ibuse himself had been born in Hiroshima prefecture in 1898, and his evocation of the rhythms and rituals of ordinary life restored the human dimension of the horror of nuclear destruction with immense dignity.
³³

In the early 1970s, Nakazawa Keiji, a cartoonist for children's publications who had been a seven-year-old in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, achieved improbable success with a graphic serial built on his family's own experiences as victims and survivors. Nakazawa's
Hadashi no Gen
(Barefoot Gen) was serialized in a boy's magazine with a circulation of over 2 million and ran to some one thousand pages before the series was terminated—surviving thereafter as both an animated film and a multivolume collection.
³⁴
In a very different form of popular graphics, Japanese public television solicited visual representations by
hibakusha
in the 1970s and received several thousand drawings and paintings of scenes that had remained burned in the memories of the survivors. These intensely personal images became the basis of television broadcasts, traveling exhibitions, and publications.
³⁵

As time passed, popular perceptions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were transformed in ways both predictable and unpredictable. Through painstaking demographic reconstructions—an immense task, since entire families and neighborhoods and all their records had been obliterated—higher estimates of nuclear fatalities became generally accepted. And with the passing of years, the “late effect” medical consequences of the bombs became apparent in higher incidences among survivors of leukemia, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, stomach cancer, malignant lymphoma, salivary gland tumors, hematological disorders, and cataracts.