Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (25 page)

To turn a chronicle of nuclear horror into an affirmation of life in this manner is no small accomplishment, and the triumph of Dr. Hachiya's
Hiroshima Diary
lies in his ability to do this so naturally—without preaching, usually without philosophizing, just by being himself and setting down his daily thoughts and activities. That his thoughts and feelings are entirely accessible to non-Japanese, despite numerous small references to things peculiar to
everyday Japanese culture, is the ultimate measure of his triumph. Somehow, in August 1945, when the rhetoric of war hate and race hate was at fever pitch and the most devastating weapon in history had just shattered his life, this modest and conspicuously patriotic physician managed to express himself almost entirely in the language of a common humanity.

These matters bear spelling out a bit, for as the cyclical nature of American memory suggests, they are easily forgotten. Of course, the images of nuclear hell that Dr. Hachiya depicts may in the end remain most indelibly etched in many readers' minds. In this regard his chronicle is typical of other
hibakusha
, or survivor, accounts, where the same haunting images of nuclear destruction appear. The stunning flash (
pika
) of the bomb, followed by a colossal blast (
don
) that shattered buildings kilometers away. Nakedness or seminakedness, from the blast stripping clothing away. Eerie silence. People walking in lines with their hands outstretched and skin peeling off—like automatons, dream-walkers, scarecrows, a line of ants. Corpses “frozen by death while in the full action of flight.” A dead man on a bicycle. A burned and blinded horse. Youngsters huddled together awaiting death. Mothers with dead children. Infants with dying mothers. Corpses without faces. Water everywhere—in firefighting cisterns, swimming pools, the rivers that fed the city—clogged with dead bodies. Fires like the infernos of hell. A man holding his eyeball in his hand. Survivors in crowded ruined buildings, lying in vomit, urine, and feces. Everywhere flies and maggots.

This is the familiar iconography of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, although at this early date Dr. Hachiya, largely cut off from the outside world, was simply recording what he saw or others told him. Some of his descriptions are unusually vivid. A visitor comments about how roasted corpses become smaller. Burned people smell like drying squid or look like boiled octopuses. The odor of bodies being cremated is likened to that of
burning sardines. In perhaps the most haunting of all the diary's images, as Dr. Hachiya makes his daily rounds we frequently encounter a nameless beautiful girl—she is always identified simply as “the beautiful girl”—who has been severely burned everywhere except her face. In early entries, she lies in a puddle of old blood and pus, soiled with urine and excrement. As time passes, she is able to smile when the doctor visits. By the end of the diary she can stand and go to the toilet by herself. What became of her? We will never know.

Because he is a physician, Dr. Hachiya quickly moves, and the reader with him, to the next level of the nuclear trauma: the emergence of inexplicable symptoms and unanticipated deaths. Patients who seemed to be improving suddenly worsen and die. People who appeared to have escaped harm entirely are stricken: they become speckled with subcutaneous bleeding, their hair falls out, and they have bloody diarrhea, vomit blood, pass blood from their genitals and rectum. Autopsies reveal massive internal hemorrhages that are erratic but seem to affect every organ. Belated acquisition of a microscope shows alarmingly low white blood cell counts, as well as the destruction of platelets in the blood. Could this have something to do with the bomb changing atmospheric pressure? Could it be a poison gas? In the course of these weeks Dr. Hachiya himself helps identify the mysterious scourge as radiation sickness and determines that all of the patients dying in this manner were within one kilometer of the bomb's hypocenter.

The intellectual satisfaction of understanding these deaths is part of Dr. Hachiya's own coming alive again, and he does not disguise the pleasure he takes in helping clarify this dreadful riddle. As early as August 9 he records the delight he feels in finding that his scientific curiosity is returning. Scientific understanding does not eliminate the horror, he indicates throughout, but it can mitigate the terror of the unknown and help dampen irrational fears—help dispel, for example, the rumor that Hiroshima would be uninhabitable for seventy-five years. Those dying of radiation sickness, he takes pains to explain publicly, were exposed to the
pika
. (What the
diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.)

Even in these earliest grim days after the bomb was dropped, Dr. Hachiya emerges as remarkably frank. Within two days, he regretfully observes how quickly he and his colleagues had come to accept massive death and cease to respect its awfulness. In time, the smell of cremations outside the window does not even disturb people's appetites. In one of his most stunning entries, he dryly records (on August 11) how the rumor spread within his miserably crowded hospital that Japan possessed the same weapon that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and had retaliated against the west coast of the United States. The whole atmosphere in the ward changed, and those patients who were most severely hurt were happiest. People sang songs of victory. They were convinced the tide of the war had changed. In all the literature about the bombs there are few scenes more Dickensian than this.

To historians of these days and weeks, Dr. Hachiya's response to the emperor's surrender broadcast on August 15 also is of considerable interest. Like many of his countryfolk, he had expected to be urged to fight to the end and was stunned to hear that Japan had capitulated. The shock of surrender, he writes, was even greater than the shock of the atomic bombing. He was overwhelmed with despair. Here and frequently afterward, in language redolent of the emperor worship under which the Japanese were marshaled for war, he reiterates his veneration of the throne and deep concern about the emperor's personal well-being. If there is a second Dickensian vignette in the diary, it is surely the scene in which Dr. Hachiya admiringly records how acquaintances of his stumbled through the dead and dying to bring the emperor's sacred photograph from the hospital to a safer place.

Such a response to the surrender was commonplace but not ubiquitous in Japan at this time. Many other Japanese greeted the capitulation with tears of relief; some even celebrated. But
the obverse side of Dr. Hachiya's emperor worship was indeed widespread: namely, contempt for Japan's military leaders. With characteristic frankness, Dr. Hachiya acknowledges that hitherto he had been sympathetic toward the military. Now he despises them, for they had betrayed the emperor and deceived the people.

This was a widespread sentiment in Japan in the months and years following the defeat. While Emperor Hirohito by and large was exonerated from responsibility for war and defeat, his generals and admirals were widely condemned as having been ruthless, duplicitous, and stupid. With but one exception, Dr. Hachiya never openly expresses hatred in the diary. The exception is not, as might be expected, toward the Americans who dropped the atomic bombs, but rather toward General Hideki T
ō
j
ō
and the Imperial Army, whose arrogant and unbounded stupidity brought disgrace and disaster upon their country.

Obliquely, too, the diary conveys these same sentiments. When Dr. Hachiya writes about digging in the rubble left by the atomic bomb and finding wooden bullets and broken bamboo spears, he knows full well what an absurd juxtaposition he is recording. And when, early in September, he prepares a report on the bomb effects for a newspaper and declares that the Japanese “were defeated in a scientific war,” once again he is offering an observation that was widespread at the time and implicitly critical of Japan's irrational wartime leaders.

The ramifications of such attitudes were far-reaching. Although Dr. Hachiya and his little community were cut off from newspapers and radio for many weeks, their observations resonated strongly with what Japanese throughout the defeated country were saying. The angry exclamation that T
ō
j
ō
deserved to die for his transgressions, for example, was reified in the form of widespread popular indifference to the fate of Japanese leaders in the Tokyo war crimes trials in subsequent years. More generally, this immediate contempt for the folly of the military leadership that led Japan to disastrous defeat survived in the postwar political culture in the form of deep antimilitary and even pacifist sentiments.
On the other hand, unbeknownst to Dr. Hachiya, the profound respect for science that emerges in his diary also was being widely trumpeted throughout Japan in these very same days as a force to be developed in reconstructing a peaceful Japan.

The contempt for the military that emerges so strongly in
Hiroshima Diary
did not extend to the victorious Americans. This seems astonishing given the direct suffering all the figures who appear in the diary had experienced from the Hiroshima bombing. In fact, this too was a fairly common response to the defeat throughout Japan. Initially, there was widespread apprehension about how the conquerors would behave when they occupied the country. Soon, however, this gave way to awkward but remarkably amicable relations. In the cataclysmic moment of staggering defeat, the “evil” enemy for most Japanese became Japan's own military. Throughout Japan, even ordinary demobilized servicemen often were treated with contempt or plain derision.

When word of the impending arrival of occupation forces in Hiroshima reached Dr. Hachiya's hospital, the initial response was typical. Many local women, including even some patients, fled out of fear that they might be raped. Dr. Hachiya's personal response, however, was remarkably composed. “I felt we had nothing to worry about,” he recorded on September 13, “because westerners were a cultured people, not given to pilfering and marauding.” His initial encounter with an American officer soon after he made this comment was strained but was quickly followed by a conspicuously positive evaluation of the young Americans who came to his hospital. They were, in his estimation, warm, friendly, kind, and amusing. They were gentlemen. They impressed him “as citizens of a great country.”

This ability of antagonists on both sides of the atrocious Japanese-American war to move so abruptly from bitter hostility to cordial relationships has often been commented on and puzzled over. Dr. Hachiya's journal offers a subtle perspective on this turn from enmity to amity in which, once again, Japanese behavior is contrasted unfavorably to that of the victorious Anglo-Americans.
When one of his medical colleagues rushes to the hospital to urge him to evacuate the women because Americans were coming, for example, Dr. Hachiya jots down a telling aside. His colleague was so agitated, he observes, because of his awareness of how Japan's own soldiers had conducted themselves in China. Such initial fears about American rapacity by many Japanese, especially males, that is, in considerable part was a projection based on painful knowledge of how badly the Japanese themselves had behaved in alien and occupied lands. It is rare in Japanese writings from this time to see this submerged line of thinking exposed so incisively. And when the arriving Allied conquerors did in fact generally behave with restraint and even generosity toward the local population, the favorable impression of the visitors was strengthened.

Where the contemporary scene in defeated Japan is concerned, the diary offers vivid testimony to two particularly debilitating aspects of the postsurrender scene that similarly were not peculiar to Hiroshima or Nagasaki but rather persisted throughout the country. One was the condition widely known as
kyodatsu
, an overall state of demoralization and psychological prostration. The despair and confusion that Dr. Hachiya witnessed on his brief forays outside the hospital certainly reflected the staggering trauma of the nuclear devastation. They were, however, scenes repeated to greater or lesser degrees everywhere. Thus the “panorama” around Hiroshima station that Dr. Hachiya describes on September 15, exactly a month after the emperor's surrender broadcast, is a scene that could have been duplicated in countless other Japanese towns and cities: “tired war victims, demobilized soldiers, old people leaning against the burnt pillars, people walking aimlessly, heedless of all around them, and beggars.” These, Dr. Hachiya comments, “were the
real
conquerors!” His stunning image on the same day of a poor woman walking through the rubble wearing her wedding kimono and carrying a sack of sweet potatoes could stand as an emblematic symbol of the
kyodatsu
condition that shrouded the entire country in these days.

In this milieu of exhaustion and despair, venality and corruption flourished like rank weeds. On this matter too, the diary
is a valuable intimate source, for time and again as the days pass Dr. Hachiya records his mounting dismay at Japanese behavior in the wake of catastrophic defeat. Drunken ex-soldiers ride the trolley. Looting and burglary are widespread. Local officials are mostly inept and corrupt, and massive pillaging of military supplies is taking place. Inflation has made money almost meaningless. “People with evil faces and foul tongues” suddenly appear on the scene, profiting from others' misery. Disreputable men fondle uncouth girls. Greed rules the day. “Evil influences” are everywhere. The country appears to have fallen into “the clutches of the mean and unintelligent.” Hiroshima, the doctor notes when supplies are even stolen from his hospital, was “becoming a wicked town.”

This too was a widespread phenomenon in immediate postsurrender Japan, particularly in the weeks that elapsed between the surrender and the actual arrival of Allied occupation authorities and their belated consolidation of authority. Indeed, in the country at large during the eight weeks covered by
Hiroshima Diary
, military authorities as well as politicians and businessmen at both the national and local levels spent a major portion of their time destroying records and looting the massive storehouses of military matériel that had been stockpiled in anticipation of prolonged war and a last-ditch defense of the home islands. Like his striking vignettes of the
kyodatsu
condition of exhaustion and despair, Dr. Hachiya's terse observations of corruption and venality open a window not simply on the local scene in Hiroshima after the bomb, but—really unknown to him at the time—on Japan as a whole.