Hiroshima (19 page)

Mom's
Gondolier's Song

Our house stood in the way of urban planning for the building of Peace City, so city hall ordered us to vacate.
[1]
For a substitute piece of land we were instructed to go to the site of a burned-out factory beside Yoshijima Prison. Mom went to city hall to complain that this was too raw a deal and to negotiate, but they refused flatly and got angry: “Your plea won't work in Japan. Go tell it to the Americans!” Mom grew angry: “That high-handedness at city hall really got my goat!”

We were stripped naked by the atom bomb. We wandered about the ruins. At last we found a place of refuge and, working hard, erected a hut. Now even that was stolen from us. We trembled with anger and vexation. The machinations of the authorities were no different from the old days. They used the sweet-sounding term “peace” to inflict pain on residents who'd been hit by the atomic bomb and were suffering grievously. I thought, “‘Peace City' construction—what nonsense!”

Accounts of the reconstruction of Hiroshima after the bomb tell of how the mayor and other officials were helpful, distributing relief supplies to bomb victims and encouraging townspeople, but when I read them, I'm astonished. We have no memory of receiving a single shirt or one sweet potato from the city. On the contrary, we heard rumors: that officials were getting rich by selling relief supplies on the black market, that lots of sharp operators had increased their holdings by transferring to their own names the property of families that had been wiped out. There was much talk that couldn't be glossed over.

The only relief we received from the city was the rice balls the Army trucked in after the bombing. We managed to survive entirely on our own. And even our home, the all-important site for that survival, was stolen by the city. Swallowing our tears, we dismantled it.

Uncle H. told us that the Yoshijima land we got in exchange had no running water, was overgrown with weeds, and was utterly unlivable, so we were uneasy as we set out for Yoshijima. We erected the hut on a lot that, just as he'd said, was cold and desolate, and moved in. The public water source was thirty yards off, and each family sent someone with a bucket to collect the trickling water and carry it back. While the weather was hot, that was okay, but when you were exposed to cold wind, it was really tough to wait long hours for your turn to draw water. Akira had graduated from junior high school and gone to work at a shop on Hond
o
¯
ri. Filling up the water bottles and doing all the cooking fell to me, alone at home.

The Eba Junior High I entered was a school in name only; it had no building. We were taught in a borrowed corner of the commercial high school. The schoolyard, too, was sectioned off, and we were forbidden to use the other section. We exercised in a tiny strip of land almost glued to the two-story wooden structure. And I was welcomed once more by a hateful bunch. I was in the same class as the baddies who at Eba Primary School had called me “outsider” and had bullied me unmercifully. I smiled bitterly: “Eba really does have bad karma.” However, when I showed that I had backbone—“Don't try to bully me any more!”—they grew scared and didn't come after me.

The parts of junior high new to me were English, homeroom, and the clubs. I joined the art club, of course, but it was a club without materials, so we simply went somewhere and sketched. In science class there was only one microscope, and the entire class lined up and each of us got to peer into it for about three seconds. If you stayed and tried to look any longer, the others got upset. A pitiful education!

What I did gain at Eba Junior High was a library with a larger collection of books than I'd had in grade school. When break time came, I frequented the library. I immersed myself in world classics, one after the other.
The Man in the Iron Mask
,
The Count of Monte Cristo
,
Don Quixote
, Frances Hodgson Burnett's
Little Lord Fauntleroy
and
Little Princess
, and the rest I read with total absorption.
Les Miserables
stirred me particularly. It was a translation of the original, not something translated for use in the lower grades, so it was a thick book that repaid reading. I empathized with the life lived by the main character, Jean Valjean; it's a work I'll never forget. Receiving these new stimuli, I applied myself even more than before to drawing manga.

With Akira too working, we had things a bit easier, and meat and fish began to appear on our table. Mother's
Gondolier's Song
—“Life is short”—grew sweeter, even sweeter.

I loved playing sandlot baseball with classmates, but at a certain time, I had to go home; I envied my classmates who could play till the sun went down. I had to prepare the meals for a family that came home with empty stomachs.

At the time, the only way to buy rice was on the black market. You'd enter the greengrocer's by the back door, keep your voice low, and ask, “Please, I'd like ten pounds of rice.” You'd be invited into the storeroom in back, rice would be piled into a one-quart measure, leveled off with the swipe of a stick, and it would be dumped into the bag you held open. That's how you bought it, but you had to look sharp going and coming, and it left you feeling like a thief. I really hated it. But when supper was over, the whole family sat around, and each reported, with laughter or anger, what had happened that day, and we were filled with a contentment that transcended the suffering of the atomic bomb. I loved seeing Mom smile.

One day, a middle-aged man appeared who looked like a door-to-door salesman. Mom went out to deal with him, and I listened to their conversation. He pressed her, “What became of the baby born the day of the bomb?” Mom replied, “She died within the first half year.” His shoulders sagged, and he said almost with a groan, “I've been searching for your baby for six years. . . . I searched with a fine-toothed comb all over Hiroshima Prefecture, narrowed the target area and searched the city. Now I finally find her, and she's dead.” He went away much disappointed.

At the time Mom wondered why he had searched six years for the dead Tomoko. We figured out later that a baby born immediately after the dropping of the bomb was a valuable “specimen.” The ABCC had hired full-time Japanese staff to carry on the search. It was about then that voices of bomb victim discontent began to be raised, saying that what the ABCC did was merely take viscera from corpses, collecting specimens: “Vultures searching for the corpses of bomb victims! Hyenas swarming over corpses!”

In 1951 the ABCC completed its research facility, a barracks-like Quonset hut atop Hijiyama in Hiroshima. Surveying Hiroshima from on high, it tracked down bomb victims and carried out follow-up studies, data on the effects of the bomb on the human body. Neither Mom nor I understood what it meant. Uneasy, we watched the dejected middle-aged man leave.

I Make a Small Resolution

I continued to immerse myself wholly in drawing manga. I drew manga after manga. Not satisfied, I tore them up. I tackled new themes and failed again. I sent work I'd finally completed off to publishers to be critiqued. In drawing manga, I gained specialized knowledge. When I first drew manga, I used a fountain pen and blue ink, but when I sent manga to publishers, they couldn't make photoengraving plates from the blue ink. So they suggested I draw with black or India ink, and I realized, “Aha, drawing manga does have its limitations.” Looking into printing processes, I learned that the end product differs according to how it is printed: lithography, relief printing, movable type, offset. The paper, too—when I knew how to use it properly, I saw that the results varied with the paper: Kent paper, imitation Japanese vellum, drawing paper. To draw even one manga took specialized knowledge
.
As with any occupation, there was a bottomless well of knowledge, countless details to master.

The same held true of manga magazines, too. There were many of them, and they filled the store shelves:
Adventure King
,
Manga King
,
Boy's Graphic
,
Fun Book
,
Boys
,
Boys' Club
.
[2]
The day they hit the newsstands each month was a great day. When a sketch I had drawn and sent in appeared among the “readers' contributions,” I was delighted, all the more avid to send in more. The magazine I was particularly eager to send manga to was
Boys' Manga
. It had an unusual square format, and it served as gateway for new manga artists. I rejoiced when I saw my own name in small type in the “Honorable Mention” section and continued to draw virtually daily: “I'll soon show them!” I resolved to be a manga artist: “I
can
make a go of it!”

Meanwhile, K
o
¯
ji had begun to drink and carouse. Angry that he hadn't been able to follow the path he wanted to because of us, he found fault with Mom and Akira and me. I understood his bitterness, but his carousing caused problems. I think this, too, was an evil for which the atomic bomb was responsible.

I moved up to ninth grade, and a two-story wooden building we could dub our alma mater was completed. Each of us picked up his own desk and chair from the building we'd been squatters in, lined up, and moved to the new building—and were amazed at the site on which it stood. It was the very site where the bodies of countless bomb victims had been burned, where the bones had been piled high, the site that American bulldozers had leveled. I sensed a strange irony, karma, in the fact that my alma mater stood atop buried bodies. Each day after morning ceremonies, all of us pupils lined up abreast, and on signal, squatted down and picked up the rocks lying in the playground, pulled up the weeds, and worked to tidy the desolate schoolyard.

At school I submitted test papers with only my name on them, and they came back with a large zero in red ink. I spread them out in front of everyone and smiled boastfully. I didn't care about my grades. As for club activities, the biggest news was that a tape recorder had been donated to the Radio Club. I graduated not having learned what I'd studied.

Of the class, only a minority was able to proceed to high school; more than half got jobs to help their families out. I too had wanted to go on to high school, but seeing Mom working each day until late at night and knowing all too well the family's economics, by virtue of being in charge of the kitchen, I couldn't say, “Let me go on to high school!” Perhaps because she understood the situation, Mom said, “You're the youngest, the last child, so we can let you go on to high school, beyond the compulsory ninth grade.” But I decided to go to work. I wanted to earn money to lighten Mom's burden a bit.

If I had to get a job, there must be jobs that would lead to manga, so I chose sign painting. A job with a sign painter would teach me design fundamentals, and I'd understand the relationships among colors and study lettering and draw pictures. All were essential foundations for manga. At the time it was very hard to find a job; I went to a sign painter, pleaded desperately to be taken on, and got a job at 4,000 yen a month. At the time 4,000 yen a month was the best a middle-school grad could get.
[3]

Graduation day arrived. There was no auditorium, so we hung up red-and-white curtains beside the building, and the ceremony ended with the cold wind whipping. Afterward, some teachers were called out by the baddies, and a melee began. Students had been beaten by teachers for carousing with a two-quart bottle of sake in the middle of the playground during school, and many of them were out for revenge. Among them were some who lived in the same house with prostitutes and came to school from the red-light district. As if it were a matter of course, they took revenge on the teachers who'd hit them. School violence didn't start yesterday. Still, the teachers back then didn't take their revenge on the pupils by, for example, calling the cops.

I haven't a single pleasant memory of junior high. On the contrary, my memories are all bitter ones. Heading for school, I'd wrap some salt in paper and stick it in my pocket, steal tomatoes and cukes from the fields on the way to school, add salt, and eat them, easing my hunger. I'd be seen by the owners of the field and chased off. Or school excursions, the loneliest times: I couldn't pay the fee, so I was one of those who didn't go. I'd spend those days touring the Itsukaichi shipyard and waiting for the class to return from their trip to Osaka and Kobe.
[4]
It was really tough to watch the group of classmates returning happily, reveling in the memories of their trip. Poverty was truly pathetic. After the graduation ceremony, I headed home happily: “Now I'm going to make a ton of money!”

At Last, I Begin Work!

My sign-painting life began in March 1954, the day after graduation. The boss of the company was a short-tempered man, a fiery former soldier. With his low boots, he treated those in my cohort like soccer balls. I read him very quickly and didn't get kicked. Any number of times I saw members of our cohort hiding behind signs and crying bitterly after getting beaten. I observed the artisan world closely. This artisan world became fodder for me, and later I turned it into
Guzuroku, Act!
and
The Guzuroku March
.
[5]
The artisan world was an old one; it employed corporal punishment to make you realize what work was. “The craftsman knows his trade,” and if your technique is good, you'll get recognition, not complaints. I learned the sign arts for all I was worth, at several times normal speed, giving the other craftsmen no opening to criticize me. The boss evaluated my work and said, “Guys with an aptitude for painting get ahead.”