III—Details Are Being Investigated
Early
in the evening of the day the bomb exploded, a Japanese naval launch
moved slowly up and down the seven rivers of Hiroshima. It stopped here
and there to make an announcement—alongside the crowded sandspits, on
which hundreds of wounded lay; at the bridges, on which others were
crowded; and eventually, as twilight fell, opposite Asano Park. A young
officer stood up in the launch and shouted through a megaphone, “Be
patient! A naval hospital ship is coming to take care of you!” The sight
of the shipshape launch against the background of the havoc across the
river; the unruffled young man in his neat uniform; above all, the
promise of medical help—the first word of possible succor anyone had
heard in nearly twelve awful hours—cheered the people in the park
tremendously. Mrs. Nakamura settled her family for the night with the
assurance that a doctor would come and stop their retching. Mr. Tanimoto
resumed ferrying the wounded across the river. Father Kleinsorge lay
down and said the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary to himself, and fell
right asleep; but no sooner had he dropped off than Mrs. Murata, the
conscientious mission housekeeper, shook him and said, “Father
Kleinsorge! Did you remember to repeat your evening prayers?” He
answered rather grumpily, “Of course,” and he tried to go back to sleep
but could not. This, apparently, was just what Mrs. Murata wanted. She
began to chat with the exhausted priest. One of the questions she raised
was when he thought the priests from the Novitiate, for whom he had
sent a messenger in midafternoon, would arrive to evacuate Father
Superior LaSalle and Father Schiffer.
The
messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent—the theological student who had
been living at the mission house—had arrived at the Novitiate, in the
hills about three miles out, at half past four. The sixteen priests
there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they had worried
about their colleagues in the city but had not known how or where to
look for them. Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and
boards, and the student led half a dozen of them back into the
devastated area. They worked their way along the Ota above the city;
twice the heat of the fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge,
they encountered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced march
away from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters in the center of the
town. All were grotesquely burned, and they supported themselves with
staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses, hanging their
heads, stood on the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park, it
was after dark, and progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle
of fallen trees of all sizes that had been knocked down by the whirlwind
that afternoon. At last—not long after Mrs. Murata asked her
question—they reached their friends, and gave them wine and strong tea.
About half an hour later, Mr. Tanimoto came back and excitedly asked the remaining priests to help him rescue two children he had seen standing up to their shoulders in the river. A group went out and picked them up—two young girls who had lost their family and were both badly burned. The priests stretched them on the ground next to Father Kleinsorge and then embarked Father LaSalle. Father Cieslik thought he could make it out to the Novitiate on foot, so he went aboard with the others. Father Kleinsorge was too feeble; he decided to wait in the park until the next day. He asked the men to come back with a handcart, so that they could take Mrs. Nakamura and her sick children to the Novitiate.
Mr. Tanimoto shoved off again. As the boatload of priests moved slowly upstream, they heard weak cries for help. A woman’s voice stood out especially: “There are people here about to be drowned! Help us! The water is rising!” The sounds came from one of the sandspits, and those in the punt could see, in the reflected light of the still-burning fires, a number of wounded people lying at the edge of the river, already partly covered by the flooding tide. Mr. Tanimoto wanted to help them, but the priests were afraid that Father Schiffer would die if they didn’t hurry, and they urged their ferryman along. He dropped them where he had put Father Schiffer down and then started back alone toward the sandspit.
The night was
hot, and it seemed even hotter because of the fires against the sky, but
the younger of the two girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had rescued
complained to Father Kleinsorge that she was cold. He covered her with
his jacket. She and her older sister had been in the salt water of the
river for a couple of hours before being rescued. The younger one had
huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water must have been
excruciatingly painful to her. She began to shiver heavily, and again
said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone
nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again,
“I am so cold,” and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.
Mr.
Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the
boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and
he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down
and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge,
glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down
for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man,
lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat.
Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the
great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first,
then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the
evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was
now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On
the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out
and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep
consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” It took him
three trips to get them all across the river. When he had finished, he
decided he had to have a rest, and he went back to the park.
As
Mr. Tanimoto stepped up the dark bank, he tripped over someone, and
someone else said angrily, “Look out! That’s my hand.” Mr. Tanimoto,
ashamed of hurting wounded people, embarrassed at being able to walk
upright, suddenly thought of the naval hospital ship, which had not come
(it never did), and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous
rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why didn’t they
come to help these people?
Dr.
Fujii lay in dreadful pain throughout the night on the floor of his
family’s roofless house on the edge of the city. By the light of a
lantern, he had examined himself and found: left clavicle fractured;
multiple abrasions and lacerations of face and body, including deep cuts
on the chin, back, and legs; extensive contusions on chest and trunk; a
couple of ribs possibly fractured. Had he not been so badly hurt, he
might have been at Asano Park, assisting the wounded.
By
nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red
Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully
up and down the stinking corridors with wads of bandage and bottles of
mercurochrome, still wearing the glasses he had taken from the wounded
nurse, binding up the worst cuts as he came to them. Other doctors were
putting compresses of saline solution on the worst burns. That was all
they could do. After dark, they worked by the light of the city’s fires
and by candles the ten remaining nurses held for them. Dr. Sasaki had
not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so
terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any
questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings
and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were
everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to
carry away the corpses. Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits
and rice balls, but the charnel-house smell was so strong that few were
hungry. By three o’clock the next morning, after nineteen straight
hours of his gruesome work, Dr. Sasaki was incapable of dressing another
wound. He and some other survivors of the hospital staff got straw mats
and went outdoors—thousands of patients and hundreds of dead were in
the yard and on the driveway—and hurried around behind the hospital and
lay down in hiding to snatch some sleep. But within an hour wounded
people had found them; a complaining circle formed around them:
“Doctors! Help us! How can you sleep?” Dr. Sasaki got up again and went
back to work. Early in the day, he thought for the first time of his
mother at their country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from town. He
usually went home every night. He was afraid she would think he was
dead.
Near the spot upriver to
which Mr. Tanimoto had transported the priests, there sat a large case
of rice cakes which a rescue party had evidently brought for the wounded
lying thereabouts but hadn’t distributed. Before evacuating the wounded
priests, the others passed the cakes around and helped themselves. A
few minutes later, a band of soldiers came up, and an officer, hearing
the priests speaking a foreign language, drew his sword and hysterically
asked who they were. One of the priests calmed him down and explained
that they were Germans—allies. The officer apologized and said that
there were reports going around that American parachutists had landed.
The wooden litter must have been terribly painful for Father LaSalle, in whose back scores of tiny particles of window glass were embedded. Near the edge of town, the group had to walk around an automobile burned and squatting on the narrow road, and the bearers on one side, unable to see their way in the darkness, fell into a deep ditch. Father LaSalle was thrown onto the ground and the litter broke in two. One priest went ahead to get a handcart from the Novitiate, but he soon found one beside an empty house and wheeled it back. The priests lifted Father LaSalle into the cart and pushed him over the bumpy road the rest of the way. The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor before he entered the religious order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received.
Thousands
of people had nobody to help them. Miss Sasaki was one of them.
Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the
tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose
burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that
night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither
did she converse with her sleepless companions.
In
the park, Mrs. Murata kept Father Kleinsorge awake all night by talking
to him. None of the Nakamura family were able to sleep, either; the
children, in spite of being very sick, were interested in everything
that happened. They were delighted when one of the city’s gas-storage
tanks went up in a tremendous burst of flame. Toshio, the boy, shouted
to the others to look at the reflection in the river. Mr. Tanimoto,
after his long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed uneasily.
When he awoke, in the first light of dawn, he looked across the river
and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp bodies high enough on
the sandspit the night before. The tide had risen above where he had
put them; they had not had the strength to move; they must have drowned.
He saw a number of bodies floating in the river.
Early
that day, August 7th, the Japanese radio broadcast for the first time a
succinct announcement that very few, if any, of the people most
concerned with its content, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to
hear: “Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack
by a few B-29s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The
details are being investigated.” Nor is it probable that any of the
survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an
extraordinary announcement by the President of the United States, which
identified the new bomb as atomic: “That bomb had more power than twenty
thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast
power of the British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used
in the history of warfare.” Those victims who were able to worry at all
about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more
primitive, childish terms—gasoline sprinkled from an airplane, maybe, or
some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of
parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were
too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the
objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which
(as the voices on the short wave shouted) no country except the United
States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two
billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly
have developed.
Mr. Tanimoto
was still angry at doctors. He decided that he would personally bring
one to Asano Park—by the scruff of the neck, if necessary. He crossed
the river, went past the Shinto shrine where he had met his wife for a
brief moment the day before, and walked to the East Parade Ground. Since
this had long before been designated as an evacuation area, he thought
he would find an aid station there. He did find one, operated by an Army
medical unit, but he also saw that its doctors were hopelessly
overburdened, with thousands of patients sprawled among corpses across
the field in front of it. Nevertheless, he went up to one of the Army
doctors and said, as reproachfully as he could, “Why have you not come
to Asano Park? You are badly needed there.”
“This is my station.”
“But there are many dying on the riverbank over there.”
“The first duty,” the doctor said, “is to take care of the slightly wounded.”
“Why—when there are many who are heavily wounded on the riverbank?”
The doctor moved to another patient. “In an emergency like this,” he said, as if he were reciting from a manual, “the first task is to help as many as possible—to save as many lives as possible. There is no hope for the heavily wounded. They will die. We can’t bother with them.”
“That may be right from a medical standpoint—” Mr. Tanimoto began, but then he looked out across the field, where the many dead lay close and intimate with those who were still living, and he turned away without finishing his sentence, angry now with himself. He didn’t know what to do; he had promised some of the dying people in the park that he would bring them medical aid. They might die feeling cheated. He saw a ration stand at one side of the field, and he went to it and begged some rice cakes and biscuits, and he took them back, in lieu of doctors, to the people in the park.
The
morning, again, was hot. Father Kleinsorge went to fetch water for the
wounded in a bottle and a teapot he had borrowed. He had heard that it
was possible to get fresh tap water outside Asano Park. Going through
the rock gardens, he had to climb over and crawl under the trunks of
fallen pine trees; he found he was weak. There were many dead in the
gardens. At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a naked, living woman who
seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over. Near
the entrance to the park, an Army doctor was working, but the only
medicine he had was iodine, which he painted over cuts, bruises, slimy
burns, everything—and by now everything that he painted had pus on it.
Outside the gate of the park, Father Kleinsorge found a faucet that
still worked—part of the plumbing of a vanished house—and he filled his
vessels and returned. When he had given the wounded the water, he made a
second trip. This time, the woman by the bridge was dead. On his way
back with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and
as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from
the underbrush, “Have you anything to drink?” He saw a uniform. Thinking
there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had
penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were
all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly
burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes
had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when
the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel. ) Their
mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear
to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge
got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw,
and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, “I can’t
see anything.” Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could,
“There’s a doctor at the entrance to the park. He’s busy now, but he’ll
come soon and fix your eyes, I hope.”
Father Kleinsorge filled the containers a third time and went back to the riverbank. There, amid the dead and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly torn. Father Kleinsorge joshed her. “My, but you’re a dandy!” he said. She laughed.
He felt tired and lay down. He began to talk with two engaging children whose acquaintance he had made the afternoon before. He learned that their name was Kataoka; the girl was thirteen, the boy five. The girl had been just about to set out for a barbershop when the bomb fell. As the family started for Asano Park, their mother decided to turn back for some food and extra clothing; they became separated from her in the crowd of fleeing people, and they had not seen her since. Occasionally they stopped suddenly in their perfectly cheerful playing and began to cry for their mother.
It was difficult for all the children in the park to sustain the sense of tragedy. Toshio Nakamura got quite excited when he saw his friend Seichi Sato riding up the river in a boat with his family, and he ran to the bank and waved and shouted, “Sato! Sato!”
The boy turned his head and shouted, “Who’s that?”
“Nakamura.”
“Hello, Toshio!”
“Are you all safe?”
“Yes. What about you?”
“Yes, we’re all right. My sisters are vomiting, but I’m fine.”
Father Kleinsorge began to be thirsty in the dreadful heat, and he did not feel strong enough to go for water again. A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman handing something out. Soon she came to him and said in a kindly voice, “These are tea leaves. Chew them, young man, and you won’t feel thirsty.” The woman’s gentleness made Father Kleinsorge suddenly want to cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his Japanese friends. This stranger’s gesture made him a little hysterical.
Around noon, the priests arrived from the Novitiate with the handcart. They had been to the site of the mission house in the city and had retrieved some suitcases that had been stored in the air-raid shelter and had also picked up the remains of melted holy vessels in the ashes of the chapel. They now packed Father Kleinsorge’s papier-mâché suitcase and the things belonging to Mrs. Murata and the Nakamuras into the cart, put the two Nakamura girls aboard, and prepared to start out. Then one of the Jesuits who had a practical turn of mind remembered that they had been notified some time before that if they suffered property damage at the hands of the enemy, they could enter a claim for compensation with the prefectural police. The holy men discussed this matter there in the park, with the wounded as silent as the dead around them, and decided that Father Kleinsorge, as a former resident of the destroyed mission, was the one to enter the claim. So, as the others went off with the handcart, Father Kleinsorge said goodbye to the Kataoka children and trudged to a police station. Fresh, clean-uniformed policemen from another town were in charge, and a crowd of dirty and disarrayed citizens crowded around them, mostly asking after lost relatives. Father Kleinsorge filled out a claim form and started walking through the center of town on his way to Nagatsuka. It was then that he first realized the extent of the damage; he passed block after block of ruins, and even after all he had seen in the park, his breath was taken away. By the time he reached the Novitiate, he was sick with exhaustion. The last thing he did as he fell into bed was request that someone go back for the motherless Kataoka children.
Altogether
Miss Sasaki was left two days and two nights under the piece of
propped-up roofing with her crushed leg and her two unpleasant comrades.
Her only diversion was when men came to the factory air-raid shelters,
which she could see from under one corner of her shelter, and hauled
corpses up out of them with ropes. Her leg became discolored, swollen,
and putrid. All that time, she went without food and water. On the third
day, August 8th, some friends who supposed she was dead came to look
for her body and found her. They told her that her mother, father, and
baby brother, who at the time of the explosion were in the Tamura
Pediatric Hospital, where the baby was a patient, had all been given up
as certainly dead, since the hospital was totally destroyed. Her friends
then left her to think that piece of news over. Later, some men picked
her up by the arms and legs and carried her quite a distance to a truck.
For about an hour, the truck moved over a bumpy road, and Miss Sasaki,
who had become convinced that she was dulled to pain, discovered that
she was not. The men lifted her out at a relief station in the section
of Inokuchi, where two Army doctors looked at her. The moment one of
them touched her wound, she fainted. She came to in time to her them
discuss whether or not to cut off her leg; one said there was gas
gangrene in the lips of the wound and predicted she would die unless
they amputated, and the other said that was too bad, because they had no
equipment with which to do the job. She fainted again. When she
recovered consciousness, she was being carried somewhere on a stretcher.
She was put aboard a launch, which went to the nearby island of
Ninoshima, and she was taken to a military hospital there. Another
doctor examined her and said that she did not have gas gangrene, though
she did have a fairly ugly compound fracture. He said quite coldly that
he was sorry, but this was a hospital for operative surgical cases only,
and because she had no gangrene, she would have to return to Hiroshima
that night. But then the doctor took her temperature, and what he saw on
the thermometer made him decide to let her stay.
That
day, August 8th, Father Cieslik went into the city to look for Mr.
Fukai, the Japanese secretary of the diocese, who had ridden unwillingly
out of the flaming city on Father Kleinsorge’s back and then had run
back crazily into it. Father Cieslik started hunting in the neighborhood
of Sakai Bridge, where the Jesuits had last seen Mr. Fukai; he went to
the East Parade Ground, the evacuation area to which the secretary might
have gone, and looked for him among the wounded and dead there; he went
to the prefctural police and made inquiries. He could not find any
trace of the man. Back at the Novitiate that evening, the theological
student, who had been rooming with Mr. Fukai at the mission house, told
the priests that the secretary had remarked to him, during an air-raid
alarm one day not long before the bombing, “Japan is dying. If there is a
real air raid here in Hiroshima, I want to die with our country.” The
priests concluded that Mr. Fukai had run back to immolate himself in the
flames. They never saw him again.
At
the Red Cross Hospital, Dr. Sasaki worked for three straight days with
only one hour’s sleep. On the second day, he began to sew up the worst
cuts, and right through the following night and all the next day he
stitched. Many of the wounds were festered. Fortunately, someone had
found intact a supply of narucopon, a Japanese sedative, and he
gave it to many who were in pain. Word went around among the staff that
there must have been something peculiar about the great bomb, because
on the second day the vice-chief of the hospital went down in the
basement to the vault where the X-ray plates were stored and found the
whole stock exposed as they lay. That day, a fresh doctor and ten nurses
came in from the city of Yamaguchi with extra bandages and antiseptics,
and the third day another physician and a dozen more nurses arrived
from Matsue—yet there were still only eight doctors for ten thousand
patients. In the afternoon of the third day, exhausted from his foul
tailoring, Dr.Sasaki became obsessed with the idea that his mother
thought he was dead. He got permission to go to Mukaihara. He walked out
to the first suburbs, beyond which the electric train service was still
functioning, and reached home late in the evening. His mother said she
had known he was all right all along; a wounded nurse had stopped by to
tell her. He went to bed and slept for seventeen hours.
Before
dawn on August 8th, someone entered the room at the Novitiate where
Father Kleinsorge was in bed, reached up to the hanging light bulb, and
switched it on. The sudden flood of light, pouring in on Father
Kleinsorge’s half sleep, brought him leaping out of bed, braced for a
new concussion. When he realized what had happened, he laughed
confusedly and went back to bed. He stayed there all day.
At two minutes
after eleven o’clock on the morning of August 9th, the second atomic
bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki. It was several days before the survivors
of Hiroshima knew they had company, because the Japanese radio and
newspapers were being extremely cautious on the subject of the strange
weapon.
On August 9th, Mr.
Tanimoto was still working in the park. He went to the suburb of Ushida,
where his wife was staying with friends, and got a tent which he had
stored there before the bombing. He now took it to the park and set it
up as a shelter for some of the wounded who could not move or be moved.
Whatever he did in the park, he felt he was being watched by the
twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, his former neighbor, whom he had seen
on the day the bomb exploded, with her dead baby daughter in her arms.
She kept the small corpse in her arms for four days, even though it
began smelling bad on the second day. Once, Mr. Tanimoto sat with her
for a while, and she told him that the bomb had buried her under their
house with the baby strapped to her back, and that when she had dug
herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth
full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the
infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and
seemed all right; then suddenly it had died. Mrs. Kamai also talked
about what a fine man her husband was, and again urged Mr. Tanimoto to
search for him. Since Mr. Tanimoto had been all through the city the
first day and had seen terribly burned soldiers from Kamai’s post, the
Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters, everywhere, he knew it would be
impossible to find Kamai, even if he were living, but of course he
didn’t tell her that. Every time she saw Mr. Tanimoto, she asked whether
he had found her husband. Once, he tried to suggest that perhaps it was
time to cremate the baby, but Mrs. Kamai only held it tighter. He began
to keep away from her, but whenever he looked at her, she was staring
at him and her eyes asked the same question. He tried to escape her
glance by keeping his back turned to her as much as possible.
The
Jesuits took about fifty refugees in to the exquisite chapel of the
Novitiate. The rector gave them what medical care he could—mostly just
the cleaning away of pus. Each of the Nakamuras was provided with a
blanket and a mosquito net. Mrs. Nakamura and her younger daughter had
no appetite and ate nothing; her son and other daughter ate, and lost,
each meal they were offered. On August 10th, a friend, Mrs. Osaki, came
to see them and told them that her son Hideo had been burned alive in
the factory where he worked. This Hideo had been a kind of hero to
Toshio, who had often gone to the plant to watch him run his machine.
That night, Toshio woke up screaming. He had dreamed that he had seen
Mrs. Osaki coming out of an opening in the ground with her family, and
then he saw Hideo at his machine, a big one with a revolving belt, and
he himself was standing beside Hideo, and for some reason this was
terrifying.
On August 10th,
Father Kleinsorge, having heard from someone that Dr. Fujii had been
injured and that he had eventually gone to the summer house of a friend
of his named Okuma, in the village of Fukawa, asked Father Cieslik if he
would go and see how Dr. Fujii was. Father Cieslik went to Mi-sasa
station, outside Hiroshima, rode for twenty minutes on an electric
train, and then walked for an hour and a half in a terribly hot sun to
Mr. Okuma’s house, which was beside the Ota River at the foot of a
mountain. He found Dr. Fujii sitting in a chair in a kimono, applying
compresses to his broken collarbone. The Doctor told Father Cieslik
about having lost his glasses and said that his eyes bothered him. He
showed the priest huge blue and green stripes where beams had bruised
him. He offered the Jesuit first a cigarette and then whiskey, though it
was only eleven in the morning. Father Cieslik thought it would please
Dr. Fujii if he took a little, so he said yes. A servant brought some
Suntory whiskey, and the Jesuit, the Doctor, and the host had a very
pleasant chat. Mr. Okuma had lived in Hawaii, and he told some things
ahout Americans. Dr. Fujii talked a bit about the disaster. He said that
Mr. Okuma and a nurse had gone into the ruins of his hospital and
brought back a small safe which he had moved into his air-raid shelter.
This contained some surgical instruments, and Dr. Fujii gave Father
Cieslik a few pairs of scissors and tweezers for the rector at the
Novitiate. Father Cieslik was bursting with some inside dope he had, but
he waited until the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the
bomb. Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was; he had the secret
on the best authority—that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped in
at the Novitiate. The bomb was not a bomb at all; it was a kind of fine
magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it
exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power
system. “That means,” said Dr. Fujii, perfectly satisfied, since after
all the information came from a newspaperman, “that it can only be
dropped on big cities and only in the daytime, when the tram lines and
so forth are in operation.”
After
five days of ministering to the wounded in the park, Mr. Tanimoto
returned, on August 11th, to his parsonage and dug around in the ruins.
He retrieved some diaries and church records that had been kept in books
and were only charred around the edges, as well as some cooking
utensils and pottery. While he was at work, a Miss Tanaka came and said
that her father had been asking for him. Mr. Tanimoto had reason to hate
her father, the retired shipping-company official who, though he made a
great show of his charity, was notoriously selfish and cruel, and who,
just a few days before the bombing, had said openly to several people
that Mr. Tanimoto was a spy for the Americans. Several times he had
derided Christianity and called it un-Japanese. At the moment of the
bombing, Mr. Tanaka had been walking in the street in front of the
city’s radio station. He received serious flash burns, but he was able
to walk home. He took refuge in his Neighborhood Association shelter and
from there tried hard to get medical aid. He expected all the doctors
of Hiroshima to come to him, because he was so rich and so famous for
giving his money away. When none of them came, he angrily set out to
look for them; leaning on his daughter’s arm, he walked from private
hospital to private hospital, but all were in ruins, and he went back
and lay down in the shelter again. Now he was very weak and knew he was
going to die. He was willing to be comforted by any religion.
Mr.
Tanimoto went to help him. He descended into the tomblike shelter and,
when his eyes were adjusted to the darkness, saw Mr. Tanaka, his face
and arms puffed up and covered with pus and blood, and his eyes swollen
shut. The old man smelled very bad, and he moaned constantly. He seemed
to recognize Mr. Tanimoto’s voice. Standing at the shelter stairway to
get light, Mr. Tanimoto read loudly from a Japanese-language pocket
Bible: “For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it
is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest the children of men
away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like
grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in
the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by Thine
anger and by Thy wrath are we troubled. Thou has set our iniquities
before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For all
our days are passed away in Thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that
is told. . . .”Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the psalm.
On
August 11 th, word came to the Ninoshima Military Hospital that a large
number of military casualties from the Chugoku Regional Army
Headquarters were to arrive on the island that day, and it was deemed
necessary to evacuate all civilian patients. Miss Sasaki, still running
an alarmingly high fever, was put on a large ship. She lay out on deck,
with a pillow under her leg. There were awnings over the deck, but the
vessel’s course put her in the sunlight. She felt as if she were under a
magnifying glass in the sun. Pus oozed out of her wound, and soon the
whole pillow was covered with it. She was taken ashore at Hatsukaichi, a
town several miles to the south west of Hiroshima, and put in the
Goddess of Mercy Primary School, which had been turned into a hospital.
She lay there for several days before a specialist on fractures came
from Kobe. By then her leg was red and swollen up to her hip. The doctor
decided he could not set the breaks. He made an incision and put in a
rubber pipe to drain off the putrescence.
At
the Novitiate, the motherless Kataoka children were inconsolable.
Father Cieslik worked hard to keep them distracted. He put riddles to
them. He asked, “What is the cleverest animal in the world?,” and after
the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the ape, the elephant, the horse,
he said, “No, it must be the hippopotamus,” because in Japanese that
animal is kaba, the reverse of baka, stupid. He told
Bible stories, beginning, in the order of things, with the Creation. He
showed them a scrapbook of snapshots taken in Europe. Nevertheless, they
cried most of the time for their mother.
About
a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached
Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when
atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this
word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan—the root characters of
which can be translated as “original child bomb.” No one understood the
idea or put any more credence in it than in the powdered magnesium and
such things. Newspapers were being brought in from other cities, but
they were still confining themselves to extremely general statements,
such as Domei’s assertion on August 12th: “There is nothing to do but
admit the tremendous power of this inhuman bomb.” Already, Japanese
physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher
electrometers; they understood the idea an too well.
On
August 12th, the Nakamuras, all of them still rather sick, went to the
nearby town of Kabe and moved in with Mrs. Nakamura’s sister-in-law. The
next day, Mrs. Nakamura, although she was too ill to walk much,
returned to Hiroshima alone, by electric car to the outskirts, by foot
from there. All week, at the Novitiate, she had worried about her
mother, brother, and older sister, who had lived in the part of town
caned Fukuro, and besides, she felt drawn by some fascination, just as
Father Kleinsorge had been. She discovered that her family were all
dead. She went back to Kabe so amazed and depressed by what she had seen
and learned in the city that she could not speak that evening.
A
comparative orderliness, at least, began to be established at the Red
Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki, back from his rest, undertook to classify
his patients (who were still scattered everywhere, even on the
stairways). The staff gradually swept up the debris. Best of all, the
nurses and attendants started to remove the corpses. Disposal of the
dead, by decent cremation and enshrinement, is a greater moral
responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living.
Relatives identified most of the first day’s dead in and around the
hospital. Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be
moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his
clothing. The corpse detail carried the bodies to a clearing outside,
placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some
of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the
envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and
respectfully, in stacks in the main office. In a few days, the envelopes
filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine.
In
Kabe, on the morning of August 15th, ten-year-old Toshio Nakamura heard
an airplane oyerhead. He ran outdoor and identified it with a
professional eye as a B29. “There goes Mr. B!” he shouted.
The question had a kind of symbolism. At almost that very moment, the dull, dispirited voice of Hirohito, the Emperor Tenno, was speaking for the first time in history over the radio: “After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. . . .”
Mrs. Nakamura had gone to the city again, to dig up some rice she had buried in her Neighborhood Association air-raid shelter. She got it and started back for Kabe. On the electric car, quite by chance, she ran into her younger sister, who had not been in Hiroshima the day of the bombing. “Have you heard the news?” her sister asked.
“What news?”
“The war is over.”
“Don’t say such a foolish thing, sister.”
“But I heard it over the radio myself.” And then, in a whisper, “It was the Emperor’s voice.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Nakamura said (she needed nothing more to make her give up thinking, in spite of the atomic bomb, that Japan still had a chance to win the war), “in that case . . .”
Some
time later, in a letter to an American, Mr. Tanimoto described the
events of that morning. “At the time of the Post-War, the marvelous
thing in our history happened. Our Emperor broadcasted his own voice
through radio directly to us, common people of Japan. Aug. 15th we were
told that some news of great importance could he heard & all of us
should hear it. So I went to Hiroshima railway station. There set a
loud-speaker in the ruins of the station. Many civilians, all of them
were in boundage, some being helped by shoulder of their daughters, some
sustaining their injured feet by sticks, they listened to the broadcast
and when they came to realize the fact that it was the Emperor, they
cried with full tears in their eyes, ‘What a wonderful blessing it is
that Tenno himself call on us and we can hear his own voice in person.
We are thoroughly satisfied in such a great sacrifice.’ When they came
to know the war was ended—that is, Japan was defeated, they, of course,
were deeply disappointed, but followed after their Emperor’s commandment
in calm spirit, making whole-hearted sacrifice for the everlasting
peace of the world—and Japan started her new way.”
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