Hiroshima in the Morning (8 page)

And on the mornings when there is no garbage collection, what will I think when I open my eyes? Of course, I’ll
be doing my research, but still I imagine a morning when I might not have to get up at all. This wasn’t possible in the hotels—too much transience—and before that? In all my thirty-seven years, as a daughter, a wife, and a mother, I’ve never had the luxury of waking with my eyes closed and thinking, without any recrimination or guilt, without any other person’s needs to consider:

ON THE RIVER at low tide, in the rain, there is a small sampan swinging on a pole. The pole is about twenty-five feet long and bamboo, considerably longer than the boat or the man who leans his shoulder against it. He is standing, in a rain jacket and hat and a white towel tucked under the hat to protect his neck, in a soft warm rain on the wide, muddy river—he is leaning on water that sighs when the rain hits it but otherwise does not move. The boat and the man are equally still. They are worn, and veiled by rain and clothes and tarps and towels.

There is a black dog sitting in the bow of the boat.

Behind them, there’s a bridge, weighed down with morning traffic. Miniature cars for the narrow street—minivans half the size I’m used to, narrow but high, like a single serving
loaf of Wonder bread. They are lined up, stopped and yet revving with the energy of the day that’s just beginning. They are going somewhere. You can feel it. The cars link the twin flanks of boxy, concrete apartment buildings that zigzag down each river bank. It’s an uninspired landscape, if not downright ugly, and very much in opposition to the stereotype of Japanese “good taste” I keep hearing about; the stereotype that wrapping is everything and no one cares what’s inside. And it would be easy to condemn them if you didn’t know that every single structure in this area had been shattered and burned in 1945. Windows becoming scatter bombs, beams becoming guillotines, beds becoming funeral pyres. The remnants covered in ash, buried shortly by a new layer. This time of bodies. Flayed, ruptured bodies . . . bodies that survived for hours—powered mostly by shock and by habit—before falling wherever they stood.

Women, babies. People once.

And in the shallow river that they might have been heading for, the river that was once so full of people desperate for a deadly drink of water that you could walk across their bloated bodies to avoid the fevered bridge ties, there is now a man and a dog in a sampan.

Fishing for clams.

H
OW SIMPLE TO ERASE. It starts with a small, stubborn no, and Japan could be its birthplace: here, they have perfected the barely perceptible smile, the sliding maybe I’ve become so familiar with. If I’m making inroads now, if I’m gaining trust, I am still offered exactly what the person in front of me wants to give. Buckets for washing myself; a memory of grasshoppers. In Japan, you can refuse a sweet and still be presented with it, and with the great expectation of your satisfaction.

I have been invited to the headquarters of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, where there is tea in the chairman’s office and windows that slide open to look out on a few well-placed shrubs. This is the organization that Aunt Molly worked for, which launched my journey. It’s housed on the top of Hijiyama, the only hill in the delta that is downtown Hiroshima, the hill that’s most famous for being the only shelter from the blast of the bomb. Now, it is home to the organization that began as the first wave
of American medical researchers, home to their grey, tin, bisected cylinders—Twinkie barracks—which were erected in 1951 overlooking a sprawling, multilevel cemetery filled with war dead. The placement of these facilities, their purpose, their very existence, can cast a quiet cloud over the faces of the people I am interviewing. Now I hesitate to say that my aunt worked there, and hasten to add that, when Molly applied, she had no idea what they were doing.

Which was: measuring the power of their unknown weapon in the bodies of the wounded. Providing no treatment, withholding the results of the tests. Classifying research and disavowing any “significant” lingering effects or genetic mutations from the radiation.

I can’t think of this place without the anger, the accusations, that accompanied my introduction to it. The ABCC were the people who tried to take your baby’s body, who sent their car for you if you didn’t report on your own to the doctor’s office and gave you nothing in return. Their betrayal was not only in the fact that they had no intention of healing, but in the expectation that they were the doctors, and if there was no refuge in them, there was no refuge at all.

Except that, these are no longer the people. In 1975, the ABCC ceased to exist. It was replaced by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, or RERF, which differs from its predecessor in that it more specifically sets out its identical mission—research, not medical treatment—and is directed jointly by the US and Japanese governments, which was claimed to have been the case all along. Same facilities, same staff when the progress of time is accounted
for. These people are interested in my aunt, though none of them have ever heard of her. I tell them that Aunt Molly worked for one year as a file clerk or maybe in the statistics department in 1946 or 1947, when there were only twelve or fifteen people on the staff. I tell them the name of Molly’s boss, and that she was bussed in from the nearby town of Kure. But somehow Aunt Molly neglected to tell
me
, until long after my visit, that she was known by her maiden name when she worked there, and that her first name was mispronounced as “Marie.”

The name change will forever obscure my attempts to find her there.

Still, the ABCC staff—I think of them this way because I’ve never heard anyone off the hill refer to the RERF—are very nice. I’m escorted there by an energetic, mountain-climbing man who used to work for the Commission in the 1950s. The librarian turns out to be the very warm and helpful daughter of one of the women who escorted the Hiroshima Maidens, the disfigured girls my aunt first told me about, to the US for surgery. I am a writer on a grant from the two governments that fund this place, so I’m greeted by the chief of the director’s office, by a representative from the general affairs section; I’m invited for a brief tea with the chairman himself. There is a private showing of a video presentation on the RERF and its research. Their entire organization, it seems, is open to me.

There is, among the staff, a slight reticence in talking about the past. They’re excited about the research they’ve just begun on the effects of radiation on the children of the
hibakusha
, and also about the results of their more recent studies that show much higher rates of cancer in people who were exposed to the atomic bomb, as well as low-to-medium levels of exacerbation of many other kinds of illnesses. If the ABCC declared, in its first ten years, that there were no such effects, well, they are not the ABCC. Let us talk instead about Electron Spin Resonancing, and how RERF scientists are using it to measure doses of radiation and correlate chromosome aberration frequency in lymphocytes. The RERF contradicts the ABCC wholesale, without ever admitting that it is a contradiction. The mistakes, the manipulation, the evil if there was an evil, are simply gone.

 

MY MOTHER DOES NOT COME to me until I leave the compound and walk to where I’m standing now, on the edge of the road, looking out at the terraced military cemetery of war dead. I feel her, and wait, taking in the jumble of stone beneath me, wondering whether no one is visiting because it’s too hot—which is the most often uttered comment I’ve heard so far in Japan—or because the families who would care for these graves perished in the bomb. I’m getting used to my mother’s presence and fully expect that she’s here to give me another puzzle. The last time she visited me, I was standing in front of the A-bomb Dome. There, she ‘showed’ me a white crane disappearing into the rubble. The bird took me back to my wedding, for which my mother’s entire family folded one thousand white origami cranes for good luck. My grandmother had not been happy with the color—white for death, white for modern young people
in Hawaii—and I was still working out what my mother meant for the crane to tell me, other than that I should call home. I’d called—mother’s orders after all—and it was a nice conversation. Brian was sleepy, he’d been out late to a concert the night before; he and the boys were going to a baseball game together later. These adventures had defused some of the testiness that had recently been creeping into our conversations. For the moment, all was calm.

I am also happier. I am settled in my apartment; I have a few friends, including Kimiko’s small group of peace activists who invited me to a party on the riverbank on August 6, the anniversary of the bombing. The activists are a diverse group, some very political, others very religious; some
hibakusha
themselves and others just folks with time on their hands. Ami will join us. I don’t know yet which category she fits into: she’s a single woman, an only child living with her parents, so she has plenty of time to organize interviews for me, to translate them, to show me a bit of Japan. My freedom, not only my lack of daily duties but also the odd conclusions I often draw from the left field of being American, intrigue her, and she’s begun taking me to see some of the traditional arts that are still practiced here, like Noh. She is watching for something in my reactions, an urgency, maybe, a sign that it matters; I can sense it but am trying not to shape my response accordingly. And if Brian is still not terribly interested in my activities, I choose not to dwell on that. At least he has pictures of my new apartment now to place me. Sometimes, I try to tell him about my interviews: the
hibakusha
’s insistence that they hold no grudge against
America for dropping the bomb and killing their families; their emphasis on their sacrifice and their duty, which is nothing less than to save the world. They have a strange idea of peace—they believe it exists
now
, that all we have to do is get rid of those nuclear weapons and there will never again be a war. It seems naïve—not because I’m against disarmament, but how do they disregard all the wars around the globe since the 1940s? I don’t dwell on this with Brian, though; he switches off so easily.

Today, overlooking the cemetery, my mother is quiet. I know that, if I turn to see her, she’ll disappear. It makes sense that I have no image to accompany my mother’s presence. I imagine her as a soul curling up in the softness of her body, inhabiting less and less of the outer layers. It’s a slow process: first the skin is not her own, then the fat. We know little about my mother’s dementia and less about how it will progress; until she dies, we can’t even be sure which one she has. The poet in me takes refuge in this, or perhaps it is the child, imagining that it’s not my mother who is confused and losing, but interaction that has become too much work.

There is then and now for my mother, just as for the ABCC.
Then
I often locate in my late teens, when my mother and I used to eat Ritz crackers with cream cheese and mango chutney after school and talk about my day. I had an endless stream of friends who wanted in on those chat sessions, who wanted the kind of advice and comfort their own mothers couldn’t give. My mother sparkled—so precise, so empathetic. So intelligent that no one could believe she hadn’t finished college.

Now
I am sworn to silence. There’s a ban in my family against anyone knowing—my father’s request, his worry that it will depress her if anyone says the wrong thing—and we honor it, even if it draws us inward as a family, as friends and colleagues see less and less of her so information doesn’t leak. If it’s lonely sometimes, it also means that I can forget, for stretches of time, that this is a death sentence. From far away, my mother is always healthy; the slips of mind, of memory, become an impossible dream. From far away, though, I can be lulled into turning toward my mother—for advice, a commingling that can no longer be had—until the small, stubborn “no” in my head reminds me that it’s less painful to forget what I had with my mother than it is be reminded of what I’ve lost.

Perhaps it is the dead spilling down the hill below me, but suddenly, I’m in tears.

I am surrounded by lies. Tea and plants, a name change—these should be the poorest camouflage. It is more than the ABCC: I have a sheaf of claims that the group’s mere existence is proof that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more than experiments on human rats to see what these two new and different weapons could do. I’ve read proof that Roosevelt knew the Nazis had given up on their nuclear research before the Manhattan Project began, and that Japan had exhausted its manpower and weaponry by 1945 and was no longer a threat to America. There is compelling evidence that Japan was trying to surrender gracefully; that the US bombed Japan to gain advantage over Russia in the terms of surrender. That the top-secret meetings
to select Japanese targets for the two A-bombs focused on a list of cities that were as untouched and self-contained as possible, so that the new weapons’ powers could be accurately measured.

These facts have not been hard to find, either. And if competing theories have also been published, the enthusiasm for measurement—in site selection, in photos and surveying teams, and in a team of scientists to record the effect on living bodies for the last fifty-five years—seems to clinch the proof. Even if these facts are spun, if they are layered and reassembled, still no lies can change what happened. The bomb was dropped, many people died. And in that moment, Hiroshima became indelible. This is what the Peace Museum should be saying. For all its smiles, the RERF should be ashamed. Here in Hiroshima, at ground zero, there should be a grand purpose in getting these truths out there. But not even the
hibakusha
will talk to me about these things.