This
is the story as I heard it. I’m sure I
made mistakes, and maybe she did as well, but the outlines are here.
She was alone in the house when it
happened. Her three older sisters were
married and moved away, her eldest brother in the army, her next brother sent
to a monastery in the country where, it was hoped, there might be more
food. She and her fellow middle school students
spent most days in the city center, using hand tools to tear down houses,
playing tug-of-war with ropes tied to cedar pillars. Everyone wondered why the city had been
spared from bombing so far; was it going to be the US occupation headquarters? Still, against the possibility that an
incendiary airstrike might still be forthcoming, the children worked every day
to create firebreaks among the wooden houses and workshops.
The usual routines on that clear, muggy August
morning had been interrupted by an air raid alert. Allied B-29s had been spotted on radar
headed for southern Japan, but due to their small number it was judged a reconnaissance
flight and no action was taken. By the
time the all-clear sounded and her parents had gone off to work, it was just
her, hanging laundry by the old mountainside house, between the slow delta
rivers. She came back inside and passed
through the living room, glancing out the big picture window. It was 8:15.
She was twelve years old.
 |
| Hiroshima in the 1930's. Sadae's house was on the middle of three lobes that stick out into the sea, bottom left. The epicenter was near the fork in the middle river, less than 5 km away; the right lobe points to the spot. |
The light was clear and beautiful when it
came. Then incredible force, like a blow,
violently shoving her away. The hand she
pressed to her mouth came away red. Her
hair was a mush of blood and glass. She
sat down, or fell down, and lost consciousness.
The bomb detonated almost directly over the
hospital where her mother worked. Like
more than 90% of the doctors and nurses in the city, she probably died within
the day, jumping into one of the many rivers and drowning, still burning, still
desperate with thirst. Her father was
outside the “red zone” of total destruction, but raced toward the hot ash flats
of city center to find his wife. Everything
was blackened, smoking, fire-orange.
There was a reason Hiroshima had been spared so far in the war – it was
a petri dish to test the destructive power of the bomb, a test site left deliberately
intact so that the full extent of the damage could be gauged.
When she awoke her father was there, naked,
face like coal, already sick. He begged
for water, but the little girl had been told that any bombing victim given
water would die within the day. She lied to
him, saying that the water supply had been shut off, and went into the garden
to pick him some ripe tomatoes instead.
Standing up with her pockets full of fruit, she peered through the haze
and saw a garden full of ghosts, staggering figures with tattered draperies hanging
from their arms and hands. Later she
realized that they had been refugees from the inner city. The draperies were skin, slipping off their
arms, peeling down to hang from their fingertips.
The wide rivers filled with corpses and
not-yet-corpses, their sloughing fingers unable to climb the stone
embankments. There was no one to help
her father; the few remaining hospitals were only treating soldiers. She tried to ease his burning with homemade
poultices of mashed cucumber and potato.
Whenever she tried to change his bandages, black crispy skin peeled away
in slimy red strips. He was burned far
below the skin, cooked, dying. He was
gone within a few days, still calling for his wife. Much later the family received a box that was
supposed to contain some of her ashes and hair.
They said her body had floated out to sea and been hauled up into a
fishing boat, cremated with many others.
So many others, who could say whose body, whose ashes, whose hair. The rivers and canals were filled for months
with bodies. Eventually the horror, or
maybe humanity, faded, and children poked them with sticks, laughing. The 70,000 people, mostly civilians, who died
on the day of the bombing had been followed by many more. Later there would be black rain, radiation
sickness, cancer. The total death toll
by 1950 was around 200,000.
Her older brother and sisters still lived
and cared for her. She faced hunger, sickness,
hopelessness, and discrimination as an atomic bomb survivor. Who would choose a wife who might always be
sick, who might never bear healthy children?
Who would employ such a liability?
She married another survivor; he died of radiation sickness only five
years after their wedding. Her niece
still lives in the house with the big picture window.
Her name is Sadae Kasaoka. Today she is a cheerful old lady, seemingly healthful,
with a gentle face and the same polyester clothes as my grandmother, probably
any grandmother anywhere. She carries no anger
now, and acknowledges the many atrocities that Japan committed in the war. She just asks, tell my story. She just asks, never again.
She
showed pictures of old Hiroshima. The
new city is pleasant, its modern architecture juxtaposed against many parks and
rivers, but I wonder if she ever dreams of the cozy wooden bustle of her erased
city, flags and fireworks and summer yukata.
I couldn’t ask. She showed
pictures painted by other survivors: a red man with a skeletal face, rivers
choked with bodies, a potato field turned into a vast crematorium. There was a visual aid she had made herself,
a black piece of construction paper with a strip cut out. When she pulled it back, the paper underneath was blood
red. Like this, she said. My father’s skin, peeling away in strips from
cooked flesh. The smell. The maggots.
There were two young girls in the room that day, five years old and
three, and I hoped they were too young to understand, but I believe they’ll
remember. I will.
Heard on 3/31/13.
