The Delta of Hiroshima

In the following morning, I woke from a bad sleep.  The wounded around me emitted pitiful cries and violent moans, and my chaotic memory of the preceding day’s events came right back.

On the horizon spread out outside the window the ever-bright-and-youthful sun rose, suggesting a scorching day ahead.  The transparent sky seen through glass windows, the blinding sun light wide-spread on the sea of floor mats, and noise of utensils found the wounded moaning and writhing in agony.

All burns swelled up after 24 hours, and scorched skins looked frizzy, dangling like seaweeds from wounds, exposing bloated, pinky, inelastic and flabby muscles.  These patients panted with stormy breath, and their swollen, curled up lips cried out in unusual moans.  Their oxen-like howling, over intermittent groans, reverberated in the angle-framed high ceiling of the barrack.

While in everybody’s eye it was apparent that all wounds had come from a Big Bang, nobody could ever imagine what on earth had horribly scorched this multitude of people.

On the night when enemy bombers flew over Kure with engine noise like a distant thunder, and crushed the naval port, turning its sky to aurora color all Hiroshima residents clearly saw that the next air-raid would annihilate them. However, for forty odd days Hiroshima was left untouched.

  They attacked many other cities lining up the Inland Sea, destroying the neighboring cities along the Inland Sea and Shikoku Island.  Every time the enemy planes flew over the city, Hiroshima citizens were acutely tense — and relieved.  This eventually wore down Hiroshima residents’ nerves.  There were people of good-nature, born in a peaceful and mild climate who reasoned without doubts that beautiful cities like Kyoto, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were intentionally left out from destruction. Some others thought that, since many Japanese Americans were from Hiroshima Prefecture, they wouldn’t attack Hiroshima.  There was, however, an uneasy feeling among the citizens that the enemy would surely deal a truly catastrophic blow on the city eventually.  There emerged a reasonable-sounding theory that the enemy would take advantage of the upstream dam to flood the city made up with several delta areas.  As if to endorse the theory, each citizen was given a life-jacket made of bamboo early in July.

The life-jacket was made of six bamboo tubes cut at joints and linked by hemp rope, with the brand “Supplied by Akatsuki Corps (*the army watercraft corps).  This left the entire Hiroshima citizens in dark apprehension.

When the life jackets were distributed, I hid one for Mother in bed.  However, when an acquaintance of mine visited me, she happened to blurt out about it, showing off the jacket in question beside my mother’s bedside.  Said she jokingly, “We would hold our regular block meeting afloat in the sea.”  Angry at the upper stratum who left us uneasy with this cheap toy, I blurted out, “I do hope this jacket could insure that ONLY we human-beings would pop up alive on water surface and keep us afloat…”  This sharp remark shocked my mother, bedridden and in stupor, leaving her eyes glaring and paralyzed fingers trembling.

On July 12, in the dead of night in pelting rain there was an unexpected, eerie siren warning us of an on-coming enemy plane attack, when Mother suffered from a second stroke which the physician had warned as fatal.  She moaned once — perhaps picturing herself victimized by flooding water — and lost consciousness.

Until “air-raid over” siren was sounded around 4 in the morning, I held speechless Mother in my bosom amid pelting rain and the low roar of enemy bombers.  From Mother’s nostrils spurted blood coming from her ruptured brain’s blood vessels.  The warm blood, staining her cheeks, dripped on my arms.  She never regained her consciousness and died.

—–

Twenty-odd days passed since that night, and we were to be tormented, not with water, but by blood-boiling fire.

At the beginning of March, I left Tokyo for my home in Hiroshima.  I was standing on the Tokyo Railway Station’s platform among a lot of refugees in the early morning, looking over the downtown sky still bright due to the bombardment of the previous night.  At Shizuoka, we alighted from the train and kept ourselves low amid a vegetable field to avert enemy airplanes until they went away.  At Narumi we were ordered to get off the train once again.  I then trotted away through Atsuta and Nagoya, covering my face with a muffler ducking flame and smoke; in Osaka I spent a night in an underground tunnel in Umeda.  All the way back to Hiroshima (*app. 680 km) my travel was troubled by air-raids everywhere.  All this time I witnessed a lot of wounded people and demolished cities and towns.  Compared to these experiences of mine, the mighty destruction I saw yesterday — and the fearsome combustion I came to know today were entirely beyond my wild imagination.

What was it?  The question nestled in my confused brain couldn’t be solved for a long time.

The meal time at the barrack came.  Soldiers in breeches began distributing breakfast to us patients.  They used their bare hands to distribute rice-balls — tight-packed in a triangle shape, sorghum-mixed — from big wooden barrels.  Though I had no appetite, there seems no guarantee for the next meal.  One patient, perhaps unsure of the next meal coming, was pushing his meal forcibly into his unwilling mouth.  If he had slowly munched the “onigiri” rice-ball, his body would have thrown it up because of its horrible taste.  I tried a bit of my blackened rice-ball; but surrounded by the stench of death emitted by air, rice-ball and everything else around, I feared that the food, if forcibly stuffed into my mouth, would surely trigger a throw-up of my gut.

My fingers, smeared with sweat, dust and grease, touched the rice-ball and came out clean only where they touched it.

Seen among nearly a hundred wounded victims, soldiers were busily moving about with tin bedpans in hand.  In whatever sorry condition one may be in, his/her sound parts of body function as long as alive. As my body, too, faced this biological torment: excretion, I decided to go outside to discharge.  I supported my body’s whole weight by my right elbow and both knees to crawl out through narrow passages between the patients’ heads.

When I moved my body even a bit, the left chest and right humerus emitted stinging pains. What a change from my agile body movements of yesterday, when I could run like a hare to get away from the wild flame threatening my life!

A soldier, who was helping a patient to drink water, turned to me abruptly, and said, “I can help you with toilet.”  I shook my head in denial, but the soldier stood up and walked up to me.  I again shook my head hard.  He kept standing for some time, looking down at me on all four like an insect, and then said, “If so, go out and keep right until you come to a big pine tree where a toilet is, ma’am.”

To go out of the ward, I had to descend six steps down to the ground level.  Probably a side of a mountain flattened out, the wide-open yard of the field first-aid station was fresh, reddish-brown soil which dazzled my eyes

Soldiers were busily crisscrossing the front yard to and back from barracks, but no one paid any attention to me who was barely standing, clutching feebly at a wall panel board of my barrack. Toward the toilet, I staggered one step at a time and stood still, and again staggered another step and sighed, looking at the lavatory under a far-off big pine tree.

Confident that I would somehow deal with my excretion properly, I staggered back to my ward at a snail’s pace, looking around restlessly.  It appeared in my eyes that there were a lot of buildings encircling the empty center ground, each one full of casualties perhaps — going through the similar painful sights like mine.

On the northern side along the seashore, there was one structure with a big smoke stack like a cookhouse.  On the mountain side, a two-storied building, painted in light blue, had a porte-cochere which defied the shabbiness of the building.  By the building entrance was a big water tank, beside which was a high stack of something, covered with a rain-stained gray sheet, from which protruded human limbs — perhaps of the casualties who had died on the previous night.

A low hill in the back of the area had a long ridge, connecting itself to a silver-gray mountain range behind it in haze.  The place where I stood didn’t seem like an island.  I accosted a soldier who happened to pass by where I was.  He stopped his busy gait and said, much in the army manner of repeating orders, “Yes, this is where the Saka railway station is on the Kure line, ma’am.” (*On the JR West-Japan line, southeast of Hiroshima) He soon hurried away.

This meant that, despite long hours of the sea travel, the place was, after all, a stone throw (about 6 kilometers) from Hiroshima city.

—

When I came back, after a long struggle to and from the toilet, to my barrack filled with noise, soldiers with medical bags were beginning to treat the injured.  Young soldiers, who didn’t appear to be field medics, and noncoms were in several groups.

While I couldn’t guess soldiers’ ranks by their lapel insignia, the man who came to us was called “Sergeant.”  This non-com, well-built but sullen, was about 25-26 years old.

The “medical treatment” actually consisted of merely applying mercurochrome to wounds and blackish ointment to burns.  These seemed to be the only “medical remedies” in their medical bag.  Red mercurochrome was rubbed — as though playfully– on my cheeks, wrists, neck bruises and elsewhere.

On the right side of where I lay were a young girl and her mother side by side. The mother who looked forty five or -six years old was short woman. She appeared to be seemingly free from major injury, but looked extremely weak. The daughter, 19 or 20 years old, had a fair-complexioned, pretty face.  She knitted her rich brows all the time and kept moaning from her tightly clenched teeth.

The sergeant who stooped in front of the daughter took one look at the plump white legs under the blanket, uncovered by a private in attendance, was shocked in stupor for a while at the sight.  Each of her legs, about 2 inches below the knees, had turned into a dough, as if hard-slapped on a table corner, in two unbelievably huge lumps slapped tight on the shin.  The shin bones, even in a rank-amateur’s eyes, seemed seriously damaged.  The whole legs under the knees were hideously swollen in dark purple color down to the ankles.

The daughter, with her eyes closed, uttered in a low husky voice, “My legs …” and gritted her teeth.  The sergeant remained in silence with a poker face at the sight, and then took out the mercurochrome bottle, the only remedy, and applied the reddish disinfectant to her wounds.

The mother got up, raked up the daughter’s hair plastered on the cheeks, and spoke in a low, feeble voice to no one in particular about the circumstances when she had drugged out her daughter from under the fallen house beams surrounded by flames in all directions.

The sergeant, who seemed in contemplation for something more to help her, dropped his eyes to the medicine bag beside him.  Suddenly, with his extremely disturbed look, he rose up in silence to take care of the next sufferer.

Most patients, moaning either subconsciously or rolling about all the time, were silent and still while they were taken care of by the pseudo field medics — even when probed by hand the hideous burns which began excreting yellowish pus, or when mercurochrome was poured into a wide-open wound.

They didn’t endure pains because of their hope for recovery by means of the treatment; to be accurate, their nerves for the afflicted parts of their bodies have been numbed by the greater pain running through their entire frames.  They numbly looked with laconic eyes, like of a frightened dog, at the moving hands of the pseudo medics, devoid of will to cry out — except only one five-year-old girl.

This girl, lying close to a window on the opposite side of where I lay, was an exception.  Every time her body was touched by a pseudo medic, her metallic, hysterical screams reverberated in the big ward over all other sounds.  The small body reacted wildly, resisting deadly pain with all her might.

It took many sturdy servicemen to keep her under control and longer time to give her routine treatment than to any other sufferer.  Under the forest of sturdy muscular arms a small head with black hair swung to and fro vigorously until her short, crescendo cry reverberated, reminiscent of a monkey about to be cruelly killed.  This child, it turned out, had been showered with glass sherds on her whole body.

This child’s tremulous sobs and touchy cries continued incessantly thereafter amid other sufferers’ moans and groans.  Her movement, even the slightest, tortured her body and soul because of thousands of glass fragments still remaining to be removed.

At any late, in the first twenty-four hours at the make-shift field hospital, all sufferers were somehow “medically treated.”

Burns have turned into something like hideously broiled fish meat well past blisters or sores. Burned skins have slid off; fire has dissolved oil and destroyed muscle tissues.  This made it utterly impossible to cover all afflicted parts with bandages or compresses, even if available at all.  Sufferers with such burns, therefore, could only lie down like a skinned hare coated with black ointment all over.

All patients eventually turned into clowns, painted all over with vermilion mercurochrome and black ointment.

Nobody believed that such “treatment” was substantially meaningful.  Still, they were all aware that, leaving behind the totally disintegrated Hiroshima, all aids for them are decidedly impossible.  Heaven forbids them to ever think of any better environment — with the frantic voices of their blood relatives coming from roaring flames still ringing in their ears and the sights of people fallen on the streets and turned into scorched corpses still in their eyes.

After all, the fact that, through a quirk of fate, the wounded were transported to this safe site made them feel guilty toward the dead.  Guilt-stricken, they were all reconciled themselves to lying down, leaving things to eventual further development, whatever that may be.

To those who felt better the routine rice balls were given by hand three times a day.  To the seriously wounded they had begun to feed them with whitish rice gruel which looked like starch.  Our rice balls, on some days, came with a few slices of sour gourd pickles or else old radish pickles on them.

One day, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon fruit juice in bottles was distributed.  It happened, however, only once — never again.  Its sweet taste with pineapple scent passed through my throat and left after several brief seconds, comforting me in our pain-and-sorrow-ridden ward. The attending servicemen gently spoon-fed the fragrant juice into the parched mouths — split open and wouldn’t close until the last moment of death — of those whose faces had been mangled.

—

Every moment brought changes in the wounded for the worse.  The wall on the western side had a small interconnecting door.  Through the door left the wounded day and night, one at a time, on stretcher to the nether world: nobody came back.

Everybody realized this fact.  Wounded persons who, with vacant eyes, saw off the stretchers carried away, would be the next to be carried away unconscious.

The servicemen tried to keep us from witnessing others’ horrible death agony.  However, death tolls day and night, increasing day by day, couldn’t help them.

A youth in black trousers with blue gaiters on died, rolling on a sea of blankets.  A woman whose pink fingers — like a skinned frog — kept twitching breathed her last with words in Hiroshima dialect: “Papa, I feel sluggish.  Oh, help me!”  An old man simply stopped moving just like a toy of which the spring has been unwound, after vomiting something starchy.

Servicemen looked most busy when carrying out fatal cases one after another, leaving empty blankets.  However, the ward remained to appear full and noisy and didn’t seem to indicate less number of wounded people — a queer phenomenon.

By then milliards of flies have swarmed in as though they also have fled from Hiroshima together with us on boats.  They swarmed onto rice balls, cuts and bruises coated with salve, pus-covered open wounds and anything else.  Flies — healthy and free from wounds — jumped to all of us unhampered.

The night was strangely quiet without blaring air-raid siren.  I felt I had been accosted by someone in dream and woke up.  As always, moans in murmur and panting were heard, whereas the ward was quiet enough, with most of the wounded in quiet sleep.

Everyday here, without any appropriate medicine or diet, the only possible remedy was sleep which mercifully gave us repose.　At night fragrant wind with whitish mist, carrying salty air, flowed in through a window left to be closed, and waves in monotonous sound hitting the jetty under the window was heard.  At the entrance to the barrack two tired servicemen were asleep, leaning against each other and casting a clear shadow picture on the floor.  A nameless sea bird, with a sharp chirp, flew away, diagonally crossing a window.

All of a sudden, a man in a sleep said sharply, “Yes, it is potato! Sweet potato!”  His next word, “Our child is …” was lost in darkness.  I raised my head a little and looked around for the man. He was lying on the next row, four blankets away from me.  He was lying straight, face up and with his hands clasped on his chest.  His dirty shirt rose up and down as he breathed. Apparently without noticeably injured, he lay in eerie quietness.

The following morning, he was lying, cold and dead.  His body was carried away, leaving behind a rice cake full of fries over it and his portfolio.  Why did he so casually die away?  This made us quite uneasy about our fates and led us to a discussion within a small, friendly circle on the mysterious flames of another fateful day.

Servicemen talked about a new-type bomb dropped on us the other day.  They said that their naked torsos, several kilometers away from the bomb blast, felt the assaulting heat on their bare skins, as though falling right into a giant charcoal brazier. —-

A middle-school boy, whose entire back skin was scorched and inflamed, was carried on a stretcher into our barrack.  He was laid down on his stomach and kept on as such, motionless. His burn was extensive: from the nape of his neck down to the top of his trousers and, furthermore, the back sides of both arms up to the elbows.  His back showed exposed, skinless muscles just like a sliced half body of a fish, and he stayed immobile just like a pinned insect. Beside his head were two military-style combat caps, the one with a broken visor for him and a smaller one, maybe for his lost small brother.

He suddenly said, “I want to piss in the toilet,” and rose up staggering, although the attending serviceman talked to him hard not to.  This boy, 15 or 16 years old, wouldn’t listen to the plea, and kept saying, “I will go there myself.”  His young body, half-sound and half-damaged, stood up, his head straight with dangling arms, and began treading very slowly.  His trapezium on the skinless back convulsed with his every slow step.  The soldier suggested, “You’d better come here to do it,” and took him out to the barrack window facing the seashore.  The boy urinated toward the azure sea.  His pants’ bottom showed a patch of a different color, minutely sewed in by womanly hands.

The sergeant, who remained sullen and blunt all the time, had begun to visit the girl on my side from time to time.  He was in no particular atmosphere to visit a young girl, without showing any particular hesitation or reserve.

His visits were frequent; while every visit — squatting down by her bedside — lasted a few minutes, not more.  On some occasions I heard him speaking to her mother in a low voice, with a particularly strong Kyushu accent.  The daughter kept her eyes closed, with or without response, showing eyelashes’ shadow on her delicate face.

Then his frequent visits became colored with “presents” such as confectionery and tight-packed air-force meal packs issued to him.  Very few others took notice of it.

Although air-raid siren blared day and night, the wounded remained unmoved, listening to its gloomy sound with expressionless faces.  Most of them did not appear to think of the cause and effect between their bodily pains and the siren.  Soldiers, armed, took their battle stations. Their tense air would stride into the barrack, threatening the wounded.  Even in the daytime waxed window shades were drawn, and opaque light was seeping through cracks in the shades, whereby the wounded looked like being in a big cask of formalin.

The wounded accosted the attending soldiers all the time for any menial help, calling out, “Heitaisan”(Mr. Soldier).  For the injured pinned down immobile, the soldiers — agile like wind -were the only help to cling to.  Some wounded, driven by solitude in the face of approaching death and fear of its unknown sphere, accosted them even without actual purposes.  I wondered if they ever had any time to sleep, because they promptly rushed to our bedside day and night.

The soldiers’ movements were awkward and boorish, but they appeared well aware and felt sorry that there was no way other than to console those miserable wounded with their pairs of hands and soothing words.  It seemed that these young men, who had only been taught to fight and kill the enemy with rifle and bayonet, have come back to a natural born firm, pure instinct to help the weak.

I noticed a particularly strange voice, coming from somewhere under the window on the opposite row of blankets, prominently heard over the general din of noise.  The accosting call in an oddly strange, hoarse voice — neither “hei” nor “tai” (*soldier) as though coming from a jug full of water with a crack.  But the accent showed that someone was calling, “heitai-san”.  The eerie voice told neither age nor sex, although it had a slight somewhat feminine resonance.

This strange voice has begun to accost one particular soldier as “Kawabata-no-Heitaisan.”  The call became more frequent and louder day by day, attracting all other sufferers’ attention. 

The “Kawabata-san,” a young man apparently no more than 20 years old with a soft touch of juvenile, would instantly run up to the caller’s bedside with a “Yow!” no matter where he was and what he was in.

When he asked, “Water, Junko-chan?” (*Junko, her name with endearment “chan”) the source of the accosting voice, I was shocked.  So, the bull-frog voice was coming from a girl!  The throaty voice always complained something, and Kawabata-san” understood her like her mother and served her reverently as her servant, I thought.

It was not long until I came to know that the 14-year-old girl’s eye lids, nose and even eye balls had been hideously scorched and turned into running sores.  Her voice by and by turned nonhesitant, then outrageous, even suggesting sacred with mysterious affection.  Her crying calls for the soldier meant, I thought, her burning desire to retain memory of her fading life to carry it to the next world.

Perhaps approaching death, with derangement and delusions, deprived her of discretion and shame applicable to normal society life.  Loathsome fire, depriving her of light, had shifted to her mind, bringing forth boundless joy and faith far beyond physical pains, it seemed.  This miraculous phenomenon experienced by the 14-year-old frail body was the only relief for us — lying powerless in bed — hearing her endless crying calls all day.