Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (40 page)

TEN

P
ARTING THE
A
TOMS

I
HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED THAT
my family in Nagasaki had been very lucky to be out of town the day the atom bomb was dropped. My mother’s aunt and cousins had evacuated to the countryside. My great-uncle had been out fishing. That’s what I had been told.

One morning in early spring a few years ago, I was sitting with my mother’s cousin, Ry
nosuke, and drinking coffee in his living room. Very casually, he started to talk about the bomb. He told me that his father—my great-uncle—had actually been conscripted into the military and had not been home in three years on the day of the bombing. Ry
nosuke’s father was physically weak, and thus he was in the last group of men scheduled to be sent to the front; had the war not ended when it did, my great-uncle would surely have been killed.

Ry
nosuke was nine at the time of the bombing. He was standing outside the family home, mesmerized by a strange plane flying too low and far too slowly. “The Japanese say
pika don
!” he exclaimed ruefully, referring to the onomatopoeia the Japanese reserve for nuclear explosions. “Well, I saw the damned
pika don
. I went into our house, but it was falling apart, so I ran back out into the nearby shelter with the rest of my family.” When they emerged hours later,
the city was on fire. After about a week, their next-door neighbors were dead. He could not understand why his family had survived and others so close to them had died.

I realized then that I hadn’t been told the truth about my family’s experiences, in part because no one wanted to make me, the American, feel bad. Nor did they want to hurt my mother, who had married an American. But I suspected there were also more complicated social reasons for the revised version of the truth we’d been told. In Japan, it is one thing to have been located in the vicinity of the explosion. It is another thing entirely to have been showered by radiation. The latter can make you a social pariah.

Ry
nosuke is a handsome and successful man. He has never traveled overseas, but he loves American jazz, Impressionist paintings, and Somerset Maugham. When I was twelve, I listened to Stevie Wonder songs and transcribed the lyrics so Ry
nosuke could sing along. In his retirement, he paints beautiful watercolors and contributes to his town’s historical preservation society. He has been kind to me since childhood, though I’ve seen his personality change as he has aged. The bombing continues to haunt his life. He told me that he used to protest the U.S. occupation and all forms of nuclear power in Japan, but that time has made him more pessimistic. The government that drove Japan into World War II was irresponsible. The war liberated many Japanese from their inherited feudal position as serfs to the emperor. This is an attitude that more than one Japanese has expressed to me in private. But the fact that human beings continue to wage war against each other, while being fully aware of what the atom bomb can do to the innocent, made him highly skeptical of our worth as a species.

He spoke matter-of-factly, but there was an underlying urgency to his words, and I realized that for a long time he had wanted to unburden himself of his memories and his feelings about the war and about people. Behind him, his wife stared in shock; she
had never heard him talk about witnessing the nuclear bomb. My mother, who had been sitting with us, was also stunned.

I asked, “Is there anything transcendent you believe in? Isn’t there anything good that we have done?”

He said that his mother had become a Christian as a young woman and had turned fervently to her faith after the war, but Christianity did not suit him. He was not sure that any religion did. He paused. And then he said to me that there was a form of Buddhism that greatly intrigued him. It was older than Zen and certainly far older than Pure Land. Though it originated in China, it has all but disappeared there, but it has been preserved in Japan for over a millennia. Its teachings had been veiled in secrecy. Up until the twentieth century, nothing had been written down about this form of Buddhism, and to learn anything about it, one had to work directly under a master. In the West, scholars categorize this form of Buddhism as “esoteric,” a reference to its secret and somewhat mystical reputation. Its name was Shingon.

“I’ve heard it said that Shingon explained the Big Bang long before we knew about atoms,” Ry
nosuke said to me. He told me that I ought to consider going to Mount K
ya, the home of Shingon, to find someone to teach me the Shingon form of meditation, called
ajikan
.

M
OUNT
K
YA, OR
K
yasan, is not really a mountain, but a basin in the middle of a constellation of eight different peaks that is said to resemble a lotus flower. Founded in 819
AD
, K
yasan developed from a small and remote complex to become a Buddhist mecca akin to Lhasa. At its peak, K
yasan housed about a thousand sub-temples and numerous shops, becoming a sort of Buddhist Disneyland where samurai and aristocrats could relax and gain inspiration, while serious clergy trained to become priests. Fires and revolutions
reduced K
yasan to nearly 120 temples, and while women were not permitted to climb K
yasan until 1872, today everyone is welcome.