Choosing Life (eBook)

Chapter one:

Peace Park

Hiroshima, Japan (1987) — It is another hot August morning in Hiroshima. The ground at Peace Park is hard and dusty where I stand between the rivers in a spot where my father once stood. Nearby a twisted parasol tree gives little shade.

A tiny but sturdy Japanese woman in a pleated skirt, her graying hair in a bun, navigates rapidly on crutches and her one remaining leg to her special place beside the tree. She roosts neatly on a small folding chair with her good leg tucked neatly under it. A group of teenagers settles around her. In their school uniforms, the young boys resemble straight-backed soldiers and the young women seem like doe-eyed sailor girls. Even sitting, they tower over the drab little woman, but they all lean forward to hear her. Despite their youth and good health, her energy and presence dwarf them. Her gentle smile and mischievous eyes belie the many sorrows of her seventy-plus years.

Suzuko Numata has been coming here almost daily for a decade. She is doing kataribe, meaning bearing witness to what happened here by sharing her story of the atomic bombing. I am in Hiroshima for the first time and have come with a volunteer interpreter to hear her kataribe.

She begins with the story of her marriage preparations. Two families had been scurrying to arrange a wedding on short notice under the worst of circumstances. Food, money, supplies, everything was scarce in Hiroshima after so many years of war. Nevertheless, the young soldier’s letter promising a brief visit on August 8 drove them to pull together to enable him to marry his fiancée during his furlough. Numata-sensei then lived with her parents, two brothers, and a younger sister. She had seen her young man only twice before he went to war. Still, at twenty-one, she yearned for his return and dreamed of becoming a married lady.

At this point in her story, Numata-sensei holds up a fading photo once intended as an engagement present for her fiancé. He shipped out to China before she could give it to him. Her younger self gazes out of the photo unsmiling in a formal pose. Her hair is arranged in a traditional coif, and she wears a beautiful kimono meant for her wedding.

I was not expecting a love story. When I was invited to hear kataribe, I expected more of a lecture on the evils of those who drop nuclear weapons. I expected to squirm, knowing that only one country had ever used such weapons: mine.

Numata-sensei explains that she worked alongside her father and sister at the Hiroshima Telecommunications Bureau, a modern four-story concrete construction. She always felt especially secure working in such a strong steel-framed building. The night of August 5, she slept poorly, thinking of a new employee she had met that day. He had wangled a transfer away from Tokyo and fled instantly to his new post, desperate to get his pregnant wife and three children away from the constant fire-bombings. He arrived that morning without even ration tickets for his family. He offered her some of his little remaining money to find something for his children to eat, not an easy task in the strictly rationed city. Moved by pity, Numata-sensei ran home as fast as she could and scoured the family kitchen. Finding a shriveled old potato and a little rice, she wrapped them in a cloth and dashed back across the three bridges to her workplace. The grateful father wept and prayed a blessing on her for feeding his little ones that day. Numata-sensei would always remember this as the last time in her life that she ran on two good legs.

Her sleep was troubled not only by that memory and the anticipation of the coming wedding but also by repeated air raid alarms. Each of them turned out to signal only reconnaissance planes, though, and the morning dawned particularly beautiful, without a cloud in sight. Numata-sensei set out for work carrying her air raid hood and small first-aid kit, as she always did. She heard her best friend, Noriko-chan, calling to her. Usually, they loved to chat together about their upcoming marriages, but today Numata-sensei was in too much of a rush to stop and gossip, so she just waved. Later she would reflect on how casually their last chance to talk together was lost.

She was in the hall about to fill her bucket from the sink before cleaning the offices, when a beautiful light spread before her eyes. The flash was brilliant, with shades of orange, yellow, and red predominating, mixed with all the colors of the rainbow. Like the magnesium explosion of an old-fashioned camera flashbulb, the large, round ball of light came directly into her eyes. The next instant, the whole world went black.

When she reaches this part of her story, Numata-sensei closes her eyes and then suddenly opens them wide, throws her hands out, and blows out a big burst of air. The students lean back as if they feel a tiny blast pushing them.

I stand on the outside of the circle dipping my head to hear the translation. The miniature shock wave hits me too. I am big, blue-eyed, and clumsy. For a moment, it seems the circle has turned its back against my intrusion.

After pausing, Numata-sensei returns to her story. Her focus drifts to how she came to awareness in a dark room — not the hallway in which she had been standing before. The crushing weight of something heavy collapsed upon her. The sounds of calls and cries echoed from far off. She suddenly thought to scream for help. A man found her and dragged her out of the wreckage, hoisting her onto his back. She felt nothing; yet, her left ankle was severed through the bone and her foot dangled from mere shreds of skin. Blood poured down her rescuer’s back. They struggled through the doorway into the corridor. Strange-smelling smoke enveloped them as they staggered down four floors to emerge into the yard. Behind her, she saw large flames flickering out of all the windows like red curtains. All around was burning bright red, even the surrounding trees and the neighboring hospital. Had her rescuer come even a few seconds later, she tells us, she “would not have survived, but would instead have perished there in anguish and tears of hate.”

Her father had managed to rescue her sister and now ran amid the panicking crowd, half-crazed with fear, looking for Numata-sensei. “Where is my daughter? I can’t find my daughter!” he shouted over and over.

The heat in the yard soared as fires raged on all sides. The wounded stampeded in every direction looking for escape. When Numata-sensei’s father found her and pulled her onto a tatami mat, he was shocked by the sight of her barely attached foot. Ignoring the injuries of the others around him, he appealed for aid until someone helped him carry the mat with her limp body away from the flames to the spot where her sister waited. Glass shards stuck out from every side of her sister’s upper body. Her flesh looked black from the blood drying around the glass. Nevertheless, she bent over Numata-sensei’s legs crying, “Sister! Sister!”

Numata-sensei tilts her head and peers around the circle of young faces. She squeezes her eyes shut and begins reciting in a strange chant what she observed around her as she floated in and out of consciousness lying on the tatami mat:

What I saw there was truly a picture of Hell. People burned so that they no longer looked human. Man and woman could not be distinguished among the sufferers. They screamed in anguish, calling for water, for help, for their mothers…and dying, one after another. I have no words to describe that horrible scene, like something from another world . . . All of a sudden, the sky turned black and it began to rain. We had no place to hide, and lay as we were, letting the rain fall as it would. I remember the rain falling on the stump of my leg and the fact that, strangely enough, it did not hurt at all.

The eerie black rain that fell that day haunted every account I was to hear from survivors in Hiroshima. Nature itself seemed to run backwards as the sky became dark at midday. The rain made the world dirtier, not cleaner. It rode the westerly breeze, spreading radioactive ashes over a wide area. Rain fell on the wounded and the whole, the injured and their rescuers, but washed no one clean that day. I heard about it for the first time that day listening to Numata-sensei.

The mass of suffering people in the yard included doctors and nurses who fled the destruction of the adjoining hospital. They were in no condition to do much in the way of medical relief. Nevertheless, later in the evening, one doctor responded to Numata-sensei’s father’s pleas to help with her ankle. Without any drugs or medicine, he determined he could only amputate the remaining connections and wrap the stump in gauze to stop the bleeding. Only then did Numata-sensei understand that she had lost her left foot forever.

That night, rumors spread that another air attack was coming. Those who could still move jammed themselves into the entrance of the shell of the Telecommunications Bureau building, as if that might protect them. This time the expected attack never came.

People lived or died unattended. Wounds festered and filled with maggots. One day, Numata-sensei saw a pregnant woman holding hands with a man. Both were burned over their whole bodies, their faces grotesque and swollen. Suddenly, they both fell over. The woman...