[A-List] Coming of Age in Hiroshima

[Bill Totten]

by Jane Braxton Little

YES! Magazine (August 05 2010)

countercurrents.org (August 06 2010)


65 years later, what we can learn - and why we still can't forget.

	"Let us be alert - alert in a two-fold sense.
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)


I arrived in Hiroshima looking for a party. It was August 6 1966.

I was 23 and starved for American jokes, American English, American
company. For the last year I had been living with a Japanese family and
teaching English in Wakayama, where the only other American women were
an older teacher and a pair of middle-aged nuns. Hiroshima seemed the
elixir for my loneliness, a relief from the awkward mannerisms I had
assumed in an effort to fit in with my Japanese hosts. I knew the city
would be crawling with foreigners coming to observe the anniversary of
the event that had made Hiroshima an international household word.

I, too, wanted to pay my respects to the city we had blown to
smithereens. I was too young to remember the bomb but had grown up with
Quaker pacifists who could not forget it. Most of my parents' friends
were conscientious objectors who chose prison and government work camps
over fighting "the good war." As a high school student I had made my
own small anti-war statement by refusing to evacuate my suburban
Philadelphia classroom during air raid drills. At Wakayama University I
flaunted my pacifism by singing a Pete Seeger anti-nuclear tune in
Japanese. I thought I knew all about war and its horrors.

In Hiroshima I set out on my own, amazed by the glass and steel
high-rises that grace the broad avenues of the rebuilt downtown. Unlike
traditional Japanese streets - raucous with boys on bicycles delivering
udon noodles in porcelain bowls - Hiroshima was cosmopolitan. And it
was filled with foreigners. I gravitated toward the English speakers,
enjoying the escape from being the American professor, the anonymity of
being one of many young blondes. By the time the memorial celebration
got underway I was freelancing my fluent Japanese to American and
British TV crews covering the day as if it were an athletic event.

I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting
gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped,
seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a
black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden
chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been as
young as forty - still old enough to have survived August 6 1945 as an
adult. It may have been the other foreigners and their cameras that
emboldened me. Forsaking the respectful distance I generally accorded
my Japanese hosts, I moved within 35-millimeter range and clicked off a
shot. She noticed me, hissing her disgust. Embarrassed, I apologized.

Apparently stunned that I had understood her, she stared hard at me as
if trying to reclaim her privacy. I expected her to slip into the
deference I had come to expect for uttering even the clumsiest phrases
in Japanese. Instead, she took me on.

In the shadow of the bombed-out hulk of the six-story Atomic Dome - one
block from the Peace Museum that entombs the outlines of children's
bodies, radiated into the sidewalks where they happened to be walking to
school when the bomb hit at 8:15 am - there in the Hiroshima Memorial
Peace Park, I became this woman's token American aggressor. It was my
government, my president who unleashed the horror of the atom bomb on
Japan, she told me. It was my country, my people who turned her home
into an inferno roiling with flames that seared the living and the
unborn alike. We - I - had murdered her daughter, her only son, her
aged father and over 100,000 members of her national family. Her voice
swelled from tight-lipped anger into furious rage before it struck a
high-pitched frenzy, keening from word to word.

A small crowd gathered. Other mourners joined in. Soon the words of the
woman on folded knees were part of a chorus lamenting their untold
losses, grieving their fear of helplessly handing down contamination to
their children and their grandchildren's children.

I listened. This was a voice I had not heard from the generous families
who had invited me into their homes. I had not heard it from my
students, a cocky new generation bent on shucking the humilities of
their elders and the memories of a war that ended before they were
born. The Hiroshima mourners vented a national anguish and a pointed
blame I could not have imagined behind the stoic silence I'd become
accustomed to in Japan.

Finally spent of words, the woman in gray bowed deeply to her photograph
and flowers, gathered them up and walked off with a curt nod in my
direction. The crowd drifted into the sea of people milling around the
Peace Park. The TV crews had long since left. I stayed seated until my
bent legs revolted.

August 6 1945 forever changed the world. Hiroshima is witness to our
capacity and our willingness to destroy. I left the city humbled, my
pretentious pacifism eclipsed by survivors destined to see that blinding
flash replayed over and over again in horrific silence, a ghastly tape
without a soundtrack.

_____

Jane Braxton Little wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national,
nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical
actions. A freelance writer, Jane earned a Harvard Master of Arts degree
in Japanese cultural history. Her articles have been published in
numerous national magazines, including Scientific American, Audubon,
Nature Conservancy and YES! Magazine.

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking
these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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