I—A Noiseless Flash
At
exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945,
Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above
Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of
the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant
office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged
to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital,
overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs.
Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen,
watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path
of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German
priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on
the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit
magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young
member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross
Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood
specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi
Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door
of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to
unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of
the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A
hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six
were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many
others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or
volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one
streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that
in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he
ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
The
Reverend Mr. Tanimoto got up at five o’clock that morning. He was alone
in the parsonage, because for some time his wife had been commuting
with their year-old baby to spend nights with a friend in Ushida, a
suburb to the north. Of all the important cities of Japan, only two,
Kyoto and Hiroshima, had not been visited in strength by B-san,
or Mr. B, as the Japanese, with a mixture of respect and unhappy
familiarity, called the B-29; and Mr. Tanimoto, like all his neighbors
and friends, was almost sick with anxiety. He had heard uncomfortably
detailed accounts of mass raids on Kure, Iwakuni, Tokuyama, and other
nearby towns; he was sure Hiroshima’s turn would come soon. He had slept
badly the night before, because there had been several air-raid
warnings. Hiroshima had been getting such warnings almost every night
for weeks, for at that time the B-29s were using Lake Biwa, northeast of
Hiroshima, as a rendez-vous point, and no matter what city the
Americans planned to hit, the Super-fortresses streamed in over the
coast near Hiroshima. The frequency of the warnings and the continued
abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens
jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving
something special for the city.
Mr. Tanimoto cooked his own breakfast. He felt awfully tired. The effort of moving the piano the day before, a sleepless night, weeks of worry and unbalanced diet, the cares of his parish—all combined to make him feel hardly adequate to the new day’s work. There was another thing, too: Mr. Tanimoto had studied theology at Emory College, in Atlanta, Georgia; he had graduated in 1940; he spoke excellent English; he dressed in American clothes; he had corresponded with many American friends right up to the time the war began; and among a people obsessed with a fear of being spied upon—perhaps almost obsessed himself—he found himself growing increasingly uneasy. The police had questioned him several times, and just a few days before, he had heard that an influential acquaintance, a Mr. Tanaka, a retired officer of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line, an anti-Christian, a man famous in Hiroshima for his showy philanthropies and notorious for his personal tyrannies, had been telling people that Tanimoto should not be trusted. In compensation, to show himself publicly a good Japanese, Mr. Tanimoto had taken on the chairmanship of his local tonarigumi, or Neighborhood Association, and to his other duties and concerns this position had added the business of organizing air-raid defense for about twenty families.
Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that their burden was to be a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. The two men pulled and pushed the handcart through the city streets. Hiroshima was a fan-shaped city, lying mostly on the six islands formed by the seven estuarial rivers that branch out from the Ota River; its main commercial and residential districts, covering ahout four square miles in the center of the city, contained three-quarters of its population, which had been reduced by several evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000. Factories and other residential districts, or suburbs, lay compactly around the edges of the city. To the south were the docks, an airport, and the island-studded Inland Sea. A rim of mountains runs around the other three sides of the delta. Mr. Tanimoto and Mr. Matsuo took their way through the shopping center, already full of people, and across two of the rivers to the sloping streets of Koi, and up them to the outskirts and foothills. As they started up a valley away from the tight-ranked houses, the all-clear sounded. (The Japanese radar operators, detecting only three planes, supposed that they comprised a reconnaissance.) Pushing the handcart up to the rayon man’s house was tiring, and the men, after they had maneuvered their load into the driveway and to the front steps, paused to rest awhile. They stood with a wing of the house between them and the city. Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof. Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions. Opposite the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden. There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant.
Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there. Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden. He bellied up very hard against one of them. As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened. He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him. He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb. But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu, the man with whom Mr. Tanimoto’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were living, saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion; he was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)
When he dared, Mr. Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man’s house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—toward the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.
Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.
At
nearly midnight, the night before the bomb was dropped, an announcer on
the city’s radio station said that about two hundred B-29s were
approaching southern Honshu and advised the population of Hiroshima to
evacuate to their designated “safe areas.” Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the
tailor’s widow, who lived in the section called Nobori-cho and who had
long had a habit of doing as she was told, got her three children—a
ten-year-old boy, Toshio, an eight-year-old girl, Yaeko, and a
five-year-old girl, Myeko—out of bed and dressed them and walked with
them to the military area known as the East Parade Ground, on the
northeast edge of the city. There she unrolled some mats and the
children lay down on them. They slept until about two, when they were
awakened by the roar of the planes going over Hiroshima.
The siren jarred her awake at about seven. She arose, dressed quickly, and hurried to the house of Mr. Nakamoto, the head of her Neighborhood Association, and asked him what she should do. He said that she should remain at home unless an urgent warning—a series of intermittent blasts of the siren—was sounded. She returned home, lit the stove in the kitchen, set some rice to cook, and sat down to read that morning’s Hiroshima Chugoku. To her relief, the all-clear sounded at eight o’clock. She heard the children stirring, so she went and gave each of them a handful of peanuts and told them to stay on their bedrolls, because they were tired from the night’s walk. She had hoped that they would go back to sleep, but the man in the house directly to the south began to make a terrible hullabaloo of hammering, wedging, ripping, and splitting. The prefectural government, convinced, as everyone in Hiroshima was, that the city would be attacked soon, had begun to press with threats and warnings for the completion of wide fire lanes, which, it was hoped, might act in conjunction with the rivers to localize any fires started by an incendiary raid; and the neighbor was reluctantly sacrificing his home to the city’s safety. Just the day before, the prefecture had ordered all able-bodied girls from the secondary schools to spend a few days helping to clear these lanes, and they started work soon after the all-clear sounded.
Mrs. Nakamura went back to the kitchen, looked at the rice, and began watching the man next door. At first, she was annoyed with him for making so much noise, but then she was moved almost to tears by pity. Her emotion was specifically directed toward her neighbor, tearing down his home, board by board, at a time when there was so much unavoidable destruction, but undoubtedly she also felt a generalized, community pity, to say nothing of self-pity. She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” She learned later that he had died on February 15th, the day Singapore fell, and that he had been a corporal. Isawa had been a not particularly prosperous tailor, and his only capital was a Sankoku sewing machine After his death, when his allotments stopped coming, Mrs. Nakamura got out the machine and began to take in piecework herself, and since then had supported the children, but poorly, by sewing.
As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.
Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.
In the days right
before the bombing, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, being prosperous, hedonistic,
and, at the time, not too busy, had been allowing himself the luxury of
sleeping until nine or nine-thirty, but fortunately he had to get up
early the morning the bomb was dropped to see a house guest off on a
train. He rose at six, and half an hour later walked with his friend to
the station, not far away, across two of the rivers. He was back home by
seven, just as the siren sounded its sustained warning. He ate
breakfast and then, because the morning was already hot, undressed down
to his underwear and went out on the porch to read the paper. This
porch—in fact, the whole building—was curiously constructed. Dr. Fujii
was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution, a private,
single-doctor hospital. This building, perched beside and over the water
of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge of the same name, contained
thirty rooms for thirty patients and their kinfolk—for, according to
Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or
more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him,
bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial
sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed.
Dr. Fujii had no beds—only straw mats—for his patients. He did, however,
have all sorts of modern equipment: an X-ray machine, diathermy
apparatus, and a fine tiled laboratory. The structure rested two-thirds
on the land, one-third on piles over the tidal waters of the Kyo. This
overhang, the part of the building where Dr. Fujii lived, was
queer-looking, but it was cool in summer and from the porch, which faced
away from the center of the city, the prospect of the river, with
pleasure boats drifting up and down it, was always refreshing. Dr. Fujii
had occasionally had anxious moments when the Ota and its mouth
branches rose to flood, but the piling was apparently firm enough and
the house had always held.
Dr.
Fujii had been relatively idle for about a month because in July, as
the number of untouched cities in Japan dwindled and as Hiroshima seemed
more and more inevitably a target, he began turning patients away, on
the ground that in case of a fire raid he would not be able to evacuate
them. Now he had only two patients left—a woman from Yano, injured in
the shoulder, and a young man of twenty-five recovering from burns he
had suffered when the steel factory near Hiroshima in which he worked
had been hit.Dr. Fujii had six nurses to tend his patients. His wife and children were safe; his wife and one son were living outside Osaka, and another son and two daughters were in the country on Kyushu. A niece was living with him, and a maid and a manservant. He had little to do and did not mind, for he had saved some money. At fifty, he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was pleased to pass the evenings drinking whiskey with friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversation. Before the war, he had affected brands imported from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory.
Dr. Fujii sat down cross-legged in his underwear on the spotless matting of the porch, put on his glasses, and started reading the Osaka Asahi. He liked to read the Osaka news because his wife was there. He saw the flash. To him—faced away from the center and looking at his paper—it seemed a brilliant yellow. Startled, he began to rise to his feet. In that moment (he was 1,550 yards from the center), the hospital leaned behind his rising and, with a terrible ripping noise, toppled into the river. The Doctor, still in the act of getting to his feet, was thrown forward and around and over; he was buffeted and gripped; he lost track of everything, because things were so speeded up; he felt the water.
Dr. Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realized that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers in a V across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks—held upright, so that he could not move, with his head miraculously above water and his torso and legs in it. The remains of his hospital were all around him in a mad assortment of splintered lumber and materials for the relief of pain. His left shoulder hurt terribly. His glasses were gone.
Father Wilhelm
Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus, was, on the morning of the
explosion, in rather frail condition. The Japanese wartime diet had not
sustained him, and he felt the strain of being a foreigner in an
increasingly xenophobic Japan; even a German, since the defeat of the
Fatherland, was unpopular. Father Kleinsorge had, at thirty-eight, the
look of a boy growing too fast—thin in the face, with a prominent Adam’s
apple, a hollow chest, dangling hands, big feet. He walked clumsily,
leaning forward a little. He was tired all the time. To make matters
worse, he had suffered for two days, along with Father Cieslik, a
fellow-priest, from a rather painful and urgent diarrhea, which they
blamed on the beans and black ration bread they were obiged to eat. Two
other priests then living in the mission compound, which was in the
Nobori-cho section—Father Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer—had
happily escaped this affliction.
After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and talked a while, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear. They went then to various parts of the building. Father Schiffer retired to his room to do some writing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit.
After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.
Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the house. The next things he was conscious of were that he was wandering around in the mission’s vegetable garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes; that the day had turned dark; and that Murata-san, the housekeeper, was nearby, crying over and over, “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai! Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!”
On
the train on the way into Hiroshima from the country, where he lived
with his mother, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon,
thought over an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night before. His
mother’s home was in Mukaihara, thirty miles from the city, and it took
him two hours by train and tram to reach the hospital. He had slept
uneasily all night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual, and,
feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated whether to go to the
hospital at all; his sense of duty finally forced him to go, and he had
started out on an earlier train than he took most mornings. The dream
had particularly frightened him because it was so closely associated, on
the surface at least, with a disturbing actuality. He was only
twenty-five years old and had just completed his training at the Eastern
Medical University, in Tsingtao, China. He was something of an idealist
and was much distressed by the inadequacy of medical facilities in the
country town where his mother lived. Quite on his own, and without a
permit, he had begun visiting a few sick people out there in the
evenings, after his eight hours at the hospital and four hours’
commuting. He had recently learned that the penalty for practicing
without a permit was severe; a fellow-doctor whom he had asked about it
had given him a serious scolding. Nevertheless, he had continued to
practice. In his dream, he had been at the bedside of a country patient
when the police and the doctor he had consulted burst into the room,
seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him up cruelly. On the train,
he just about decided to give up the work in Mukaihara, since he felt it
would be impossible to get a permit, because the authorities would hold
that it would conflict with his duties at the Red Cross Hospital.
Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man’s office and found him terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible confusion: heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead. (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.
Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time.
Miss Toshiko
Sasaki, the East Asia Tin Works clerk, who is not related to Dr. Sasaki,
got up at three o’clock in the morning on the day the bomb fell. There
was extra housework to do. Her eleven-month-old brother, Akio, had come
down the day before with a serious stomach upset; her mother had taken
him to the Tamura Pediatric Hospital and was staying there with him.
Miss Sasaki, who was about twenty, had to cook breakfast for her father,
a brother, a sister, and herself, and—since the hospital, because of
the war, was unable to provide food—to prepare a whole day’s meals for
her mother and the baby, in time for her father, who worked in a factory
making rubber earplugs for artillery crews, to take the food by on his
way to the plant. When she had finished and had cleaned and put away the
cooking things, it was nearly seven. The family lived in Koi, and she
had a forty-five-minute trip to the tin works, in the section of town
called Kannon-machi. She was in charge of the personnel records in the
factory. She left Koi at seven, and as soon as she reached the plant,
she went with some of the other girls from the personnel department to
the factory auditorium. A prominent local Navy man, a former employee,
had committed suicide the day before by throwing himself under a train—a
death considered honorable enough to warrant a memorial service, which
was to be held at the tin works at ten o’clock that morning. In the
large hall, Miss Sasaki and the others made suitable preparations for
the meeting. This work took about twenty minutes. Miss Sasaki went back
to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the
windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of
tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library, which
the personnel department had organized. She settled herself at her desk,
put some things in a drawer, and shifted papers. She thought that
before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees,
discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment
with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the
windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by
fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600
yards from the center).
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