Hiroshima

In 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In this podcast, Emmy describes her journey to the city of Hiroshima in 1986 and the impact this visit had on her.  Interwoven in her personal story, are depictions of Keiji Nakazawa's experience, a renowned Manga artist, and a Hiroshima bomb survivor.   

"So long as one atomic bomb exists, Hiroshima will remain an issue."
~Keiji Nakazawa

This podcast was published on August 6, 2020, 75 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Photo: Olin Cox

"This is brilliant. Riveting and poignant and spiritual and so so so COMPLEX! Your voice! I'm bawling one minute, horrified the next, on the edge of my seat the next!" JLG, Atlanta, GA 

"It is a fitting and staggering tribute that bears Witness, reminding us to Never Forget, and to ensure:  Never Again. " TLS, Cleveland, OH

"You have a way of creating a palpable atmosphere.  And I like the structure.  Your audience sees both your external and internal worlds.  And it has a quality of transparent truth.  We travel along with you and listen in as you experience and process the world." SV, Vancouver, BC

"You have such a gift. Fascinating, moving, educational, transformative..." KH, Atlanta, GA

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Transcript

Hiroshima

By Emmy Graham

In 1986 in mid-August, towards the end of a long hot day of hitchhiking, I finally got a ride that brought me all the way to Hiroshima, Japan.  I was 23 years old and lived in Tokyo and was returning from a 2-week trip to Korea. That morning I had been in the port city of Shimonoseki, the last city on the south western part of Honshu Island having taken the night ferry from Pusan, Korea. As we entered Hiroshima, I asked the family that had given me the ride, to drop me off near the International Youth hostel.  It was very late and they thought the hostel would be closed, so they took me to their home and told me I could spend the night there.  As I was learning, this was often the norm in Japan.  After eating a very simple, cold Japanese meal: rice with cold spinach salad and tofu, soybeans and cold Japanese tea they then they showed me to my room, and I slept on a most comfortable, thick futon on a traditional tatami mat floor, in what appeared to be the living room, or perhaps the best bedroom in the house. This was my introduction to Hiroshima.

For the past six months I had been living in Tokyo where I taught English in several second rate English language schools. I was taking a small vacation from my teaching schedule to visit Korea and tour a little around Japan before moving to Hokkaido, the north island. In the 1980s Japan was very expensive and since I was on a shoe-string budget, the easiest and cheapest way to travel as a Caucasian visitor, was to hitch hike. One of my experienced American friends had explained that the best place to get a ride was a truck stop.  Typically, truck drivers had long routes and many of them kindly gave us foreigners or gaijin, rides.  Indeed, at the start of my journey at a truck stop just outside of Tokyo, a truck driver, a man named Seiji, probably in his early 60s, and his younger assistant, Koji, a man in his early 30s, gave me a ride after only about a 30 minute wait.  I learned that many truck drivers traveled in pairs like that, an older man who did the driving, and a younger man.  It was a good ride for they took me beyond the city of Nagoya, halfway across the island of Honshu and half-way to my destination. 

My Japanese was poor, but I could carry on a simple conversation for about 20 minutes after which point I had pretty much run out of vocabulary and could say nothing new. I sat between the two of them and slowly, over the course of the day, we got to know each other. The older man, Seiji, was boisterous and jovial. The younger man, Koji, was quiet and polite. At one point Seiji asked me if I had any favorite Japanese foods. I gladly listed off every delicious dish I could think of for this was an easy conversation. He laughed and smacked his steering wheel in amazement that a gaijin, or foreigner such as me, would like such dishes. I knew hitchhiking in Japan was safe but I was shocked when towards the end of our long 7 hour journey, as we approached his home town, Seiji asked me to stay the night at his house. I didn’t know how to respond and when I turned to Koji he seemed to be in agreement that it was a good idea. When Seiji pulled the rig over at a truck stop a few hours from home, he told me he was going to call his wife to let her know.  I was relieved to know there was a wife and then I knew all would be well. 

When we arrived at Seiji’s home, I was greeted by his very friendly wife and his young son. They were an older couple and he was their only child, whom they obviously cherished. They welcomed me like a guest of honor. I was led to a very comfortable bedroom where I could put my things, and wash up before dinner.  At dinner we sat on the tatami mat floor around a low table where Koji and his young wife were also assembled along with Seiji’s family.  Seated next to me was another man I hadn’t met yet.  He introduced himself to me in perfect English.  He was a neighbor he explained, who had spent many years in Australia.  I realized this considerate family had invited him for my comfort for I could now speak freely and we all had a translator. 

But then, the biggest shock of all came.  When Seiji’s wife produced the evening meal, I saw with a mixture of surprise and embarrassment and slight guilt, that she had prepared every dish I had mentioned during my conversation with Seiji in the truck. She had prepared all of my favorite dishes. It was one of the most delicious meals I’d had in Japan and I was so touched.

The next day, after a most comfortable sleep, the men went on to work and the two women took me to Nara, an ancient place known for its Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and beautiful gardens. We spent the morning enjoying the sites and after lunch, they drove me to a rest stop and didn’t leave until they found someone who would take me all the way to Shimonoseki, about an 8 hour drive, where I could get my ferry to Korea.  When we parted, I cried.  I was so humbled by their generosity, care and concern for me. 

This was my experience of Japan in the 1980s.  So when the young family drove me to their home in Hiroshima and invited me to stay, while I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t entirely surprised, but was nonetheless, extremely grateful.  And that they clearly had given me the most comfortable bed in the house, would soon become a recurring theme. It was very hard to accept this generosity.  I did not feel worthy and would have been extremely thankful just for the ride, or just for a chance to sleep on their back porch for the night, for I traveled with my sleeping bag. But clearly Japanese hospitality dictated that I, a perfect stranger, was to be treated as an honorable guest.

Not all of my rides were as pleasant.  The young man who drove me 8 hours to Shimonoseki never said a word to me except when we arrived at our destination at 11o’clock at night and he suggested we get a room together in a hotel.  I declined.  I couldn’t afford my own hotel room, and I didn’t even know if there was a youth hostel but most likely it would have been closed at that time anyway. So I headed to the train station and sat on a bench in the depot for a while. When the train station closed at 1am, I wandered outside looking for a safe place to hang out, hoping to find an all night karaoke bar. The entire town was dark and quiet and I couldn’t find anything that was open. However, a very inebriated middle-aged man found me and followed me around speaking to me in such a thick Shimonoseki accent that he was very hard to understand.  I did not feel completely safe as I wandered the streets of Shimonoseki and from time to time a car of young men would slow down and they would all look at me.  “Warui” my companion said to me.  “Bad. Bad people.” Eventually, I found, unbelievably, three men on scaffolding, painting a bank. The entire area was lit up with work lights and they looked clean and respectable.  I sat on a bench in front of the bank watching the painters with my inebriated companion. Unfortunately, to my disappointment, they ended their work at 3am, turned off their lights and headed home.  I was left alone again and tried to sleep on the bench, my companion sleeping on another one. At dawn he wandered off and I was relieved to have him go and for the sun to rise, for I knew that soon the city would awaken. The ferry to Korea left at 5pm so I spent that day in Shimonoseki.

On my first morning in Hiroshima, I made my way to the central part of the city where I checked into the international youth hostel, deposited my bag, and headed out onto the streets to start my day.  I had wanted to come to Hiroshima. I needed to see this city, where at 8:15am, on August 6th, 1945, the first Atomic Bomb was dropped by the United States. I had no idea what to expect, and I was very aware of my identity as an American as I made my way down the city streets, 41 years later almost to the day. 

The city was bustling with activity and like most Japanese cities, was very clean and well-functioning.  It had all the normal sorts of things one would expect to see in a city: tree-lined streets, museums, department stores, schools, playgrounds with happy children, fish and vegetable markets bustling with people, trains, taxis, colorful displays. A distinctive feature of Hiroshima was a number of beautiful rivers throughout the city. One would never know the atomic bomb had exploded here. 

I went straight to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum located in the Hiroshima Peace Park in the central part of the city.  My only real comprehension of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was the pictures of the giant mushroom cloud seen from the sky after the bomb had exploded. This was often the picture we saw in text books when learning about this event in school often followed by a casual statement about the entire city and its inhabitants being destroyed in a matter of seconds. The museum had a different perspective. What I learned there was astonishing. Shocking. I was not prepared for what I saw.

Hiroshima means “broad island” in Japanese and the city consists of inlets and islands for it is divided by six different channels of the Ota River which all lead to Hiroshima Bay. In 1945, the population of Hiroshima was 400,000.  Today, the population is close to 2 million. As a port city, there were military bases there in 1945 and it was a key shipping center for military supplies. The city center is set back a few miles from Hiroshima Bay. While many cities in Japan were bombed by the Americans throughout WWII, Hiroshima remained untouched. 

When the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, it exploded 2000 feet above the city.  Rays of heat that were 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit hit the city in an instant. Within one second, everything within 500 meters of ground zero was killed or destroyed instantly. It is estimated that 80,000 people died instantly. Many people outside this zone, were severely burned and most either died instantly or died within minutes, hours, days or weeks.  Houses and buildings collapsed from either the initial blast or from the 140 mile per hour winds that followed the blast, and many people were trapped under heavy beams or debris.  Those who survived called it the “Flash-Boom” for it was unlike any other bomb: first there was a bright flash followed by a loud boom. Fires immediately broke out and quickly spread across the city and many trapped people burned to death as the fires destroyed most of the remaining buildings that were still standing. Tens of thousands more people died over the weeks and months from radiation exposure, and it is estimated that 90,000 to 166,000 people in total died from the bomb.  

The museum showed video footage of survivors telling their stories.  In my ignorance, I never realized there were survivors. I never learned of the perspective from the ground point of view, from that of the Japanese inhabitants, but only knew of the mushroom cloud site as viewed from the air, taken by American military personnel from aircraft after the bomb was dropped. I never knew how much people had suffered.  According to the survivors’ stories, after the explosion, those who could walk or crawl, made their way to one of several rivers in the city hoping to get some relief from their burns.  People were crying out for water. The rivers soon became stuffed with corpses, as most who made it, died once they got there.   

Today, the museum has been updated, expanded, and renovated since its opening in 1955.  But in 1986, I remember a large room with enormous photos of a 360 degree panoramic view of the city after the explosion.  There was nothing as far as the eye could see. Roughly 60,000 buildings had collapsed or burned and 90% of the city was destroyed. There were no trees standing.  Large city fires had burned 4.4 square miles of the city. What remained was a vast apocalyptic wasteland as far as one could see. I stared at the images in horror, my mouth agape. These images imprinted on my brain like a dark stain.

There is one remaining building still standing after the bomb hit Hiroshima that was intentionally left as a testament to the suffering. This is the Genbaku Dome, also known as the Atomic Bomb Dome, near the Peace Park. It stands at the city center, close to the bomb epicenter and is now a symbol of the city. It was a grand building at one point, with a beautiful copper dome and it stands near the banks of the Motoyasu River. The copper dome melted within the first second of the explosion, and what remains today is the steel infrastructure.  

Keiji Nakazawa, the manga artist, was 6 years old in 1945. He lived in Hiroshima with his parents, 2 older brothers, an older sister and 1 younger brother.  In those days, children attended school in the summer in Japan, and at 8:15am on August 6, 1945, he had just entered his school yard where he stood close to a concrete wall, talking to a classmate’s mother, when the bomb hit. He was about a mile from the epicenter. The wall saved his life.  When he came to, he was covered in concrete pieces, and had a serious burn on the back of his neck, but was relatively unhurt.  He climbed out of the rubble and saw the burnt black corpse of the classmate’s mother thrown several yards from him. The sky was dark. Confused and scared, he made his way through the destroyed city, in search of his family, trying to make it back home. 

From his autobiography, “Hiroshima: the Autobiography of Barefoot Gen” Nakazawa gives the following description:

“The trolley street from Funairi Naka cho as far as Saiwai Cho was a human exhibition, inhuman forms utterly transformed.  Naked bodies moving sluggishly, burned by rays and trailing blackened bits of clothing like seaweed. Moving forward, glass splinters from the explosion sticking into all parts of their bodies, spurting blood. People whose eyeballs hung down their cheeks and trembled; they’d been blown out by the sudden pressure of the blast. People whose bellies had been ripped open, trailing a yard of intestines, crawling along on all fours.  Shrikes impale fish and frogs on dead tree branches, storing them to eat later; people, too, had been sent flying and hung from branches, impaled. I ran among these horrific humans, threading my way, crying out, searching for my family. …The terror I felt then sunk into my heart; I will have it with me as long as I live.”

People standing next to a window when the bomb hit, were bombarded with shards of glass all over, even through their eyes, and looked as he described it, like pin cushions. It wasn’t just burned clothes that trailed behind people, but their skin. Once burned, the skin quickly blistered  and then peeled off. Nakazawa continues:

“I wouldn’t have thought human skin would peel so easily.  The skin of the chest peeled off, from the shoulders down; the backs of the hands peeled; the skin of the arms peeled off, down to the five fingernails, and dangled. From the fingertips of both hands, yard-long skin hung and trembled.  The skin of the back peeled from both shoulders, stopped at the waist, and hung like a droopy loincloth. The skin of the legs peeled to the anklebone and dragged, a yard long, on the ground. People couldn’t help looking like apparitions. If they walked with arms down, the skin hanging off their fingertips dragged painfully on the ground so they raised their arms and held them at shoulder level, which was less painful. Even if they wanted to run, the skin of their legs was dragging along on the ground impeding their steps. Shuffling one step at a time, they proceeded, a procession of ghosts.”

Later, he found his mom on the sidewalk in front of a trolley stop.  She had been home during the blast but because of her location, managed to survive and was not hurt. However, she was 8 months pregnant and when the bomb hit, it sent her into labor.  In the midst of these horrific street scenes, she gave birth to a baby girl on the sidewalk.  The baby would live for four months and would eventually die of malnutrition. His father, sister and younger brother had also been home when the bomb hit, however they were pinned under heavy house beams and his mother was not able to rescue them.  The fires were swift in coming and they burned to death. His two other brothers had been away from Hiroshima at the time, and they survived. 

Black rain then swept down on northwest Hiroshima.  Those who were soaked in it, later died of radioactivity.  Nakazawa describes how the city was in flames all night and he and his mother had to keep out of its way.  By morning, the city was filled with the horrible stench of rotting corpses.  Japanese soldiers came and started taking dead bodies away, scooping them with big hooks, and loading them on trucks where they were taken to an open field to be burned. Many of these soldiers died suddenly from radioactive poisoning. The six main rivers were clogged with corpses. The soldiers had to hoist them out of the river bank for removal.  But they couldn’t get them all and many of the corpses sunk to the bottom of the river. Cremation fires continued day and night for 2 months after August 6. At the cremation site the bones were piled as high as 6 feet high in dozens of piles. In Japanese tradition, the bones of a family member are collected after cremation and stored in an urn in the home.  But no one could claim these bones. Nakazawa tells how some children played with the skulls, kicking them around like balls. Later, the US army came and bulldozed the bones, burying them out of site, to the horror of the Japanese, for it was better to leave them undisturbed. 

His own family went back to the charred remains of their family home and found the skulls and some bones of their father, brother and sister.  These they placed in a bucket for they had no urn, which they kept in their makeshift shack of a home which they had built. 

Nakazawa describes how he found corpses in what was called the ‘fire fighting water’, 3 foot by 3 foot concrete cisterns required in every building entryway during the war that were filled with water in order to put out potential fires that might be started if the city were bombed. These were the only things still standing, after the atomic bomb hit, and all the tanks held corpses. In last ditch efforts to save themselves from fire after the A bomb exploded, people had jumped into these tanks. Mothers held children, brothers held sisters – all had perished.  The city had become a burned out plain filled with the stench of corpses. 

After spending hours in the museum, I stepped outside to take some time for quiet reflection at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.  The sun was shining brightly and it was very hot and humid outside.  I walked over to the saddle-shaped memorial monument, through which I could clearly see a view of the nearby Atomic bomb dome.  The monument covered a cenotaph which held all the names of the people killed from the bomb. There was also a children’s monument and a peace bell that occasionally someone would ring. The park and the museum were constructed on the tip of an island, on either side of me were two rivers, I had crossed one of them that morning to get to the museum. I sat in the park for a long time, trying to process all that I had learned and feeling slightly sick to my stomach.  I was sitting on the ground that had been the exact epi center of the bomb and I was staring at the A Bomb Dome.  This had once been a busy downtown section in 1945.  Now, it was a peaceful park, with trees and grass, birdsong, benches and meaningful memorials. 

After some time, I left the park and meandered to another part of the city. It was a city of rivers and I could not look at the rivers in the same way again.  Now, I could only see the rivers crowded with corpses, burned people trying to get some relief, but not getting any. I watched the present-day people of Hiroshima going about their lives and couldn’t believe the city had rebuilt itself to the point where life looked completely ordinary here, completely normal. There were gardens, trees, birds, clean rivers, happy children.  There was food in abundance.  Eventually, I had to eat, so I bought some sushi from a market vendor and found another park where I sat in the shade of a tree and ate. 

Throughout his book, Nakazawa speaks of the unquenchable, gnawing hunger that was relentless in his childhood. He describes his life prior to the atomic bomb and it revolves around the constant lack of food his family and many others suffered from during the war.  They often went to the fields and captured locusts, took them home and roasted them on skewers as that was often the only food they had to eat for dinner.  Even rice was hard to find. 

After the bomb, it was of course much worse.  Without a father, his mother had to work any job she could get and she could not ever make enough money to support them. In the days following the bombing, Nakazawa burrowed around old vegetable patches from remaining farms on the city outskirts in search of melons and cucumbers. Eventually they were reunited with his two brothers and this helped somewhat for the older one could work as well. He and his brother fished for crawfish in the rivers.  The crawfish were big and fat and he was aware that it was because the crawfish were living on the decaying bodies at the bottom of the river.  He caught and ate the crawfish, groping among the bones. He was aware of this form of cannibalism, but they had no choice.  They were so hungry.  Nakazawa spent the rest of his childhood growing up in Hiroshima and the family never had enough money. Their lives were spent scrounging for food and for a place to live.  He describes an entire childhood of ceaseless hunger. 

It was hard for me to be in Hiroshima.  I was so disturbed by the events that took place there.  That night in the youth hostel, I decided to leave the city the next morning. 

I awoke early the next day and headed on my way.  I had identified the road that would eventually lead to the highway and hoped that somewhere on this busy main thoroughfare I could find a place to hitchhike.  I started walking.  It was already very hot even though it was early morning.  My next destination was Kyoto and since I had the whole day, I figured I would make it because it was about a four-hour drive by car. 

The city was crowded and the road I took was already congested with commuter traffic and was lined with stores, apartment buildings and businesses.  There was no easy place for cars to pull over.  I made my way past the peace park again and walked for most of the morning when I finally found a small spot that I thought perhaps could work. I waited an hour or so when finally a car stopped and I explained as best as I could to the middle aged man driving that I needed to get to the highway to go to Kyoto.  He was nodding agreeably and motioned me to get in.  I was grateful.  He started driving around the city.  I contributed my usual polite chit chat, as much as I could when I noticed he took a road on the outskirts of the city and headed in the complete opposite direction from where I needed to go. I didn’t say anything for I figured he knew what he was doing. We drove all around the city and after 45 minutes he turned to me and said, “I say to you – Love me tender.”  I pretended I didn’t understand his meaning so he repeated himself.  Again, I ignored him and acted like I had no idea what he was talking about.  Now, I just wanted to get out of the car.  We were heading down a road where on the right side of me was a river, and suddenly on the left was the A bomb dome again.  The one I was trying desperately to get away from.  Just as suddenly, his mood changed and in an angry, hostile tone he pointed emphatically at the dome and shouted at me, “Look at this!  Look at this!!”  What happened next, I’m not sure.  He either pulled over, or I jumped out at the next red light.  Either way, he was mad at me and drove off in anger.  I found myself at the Aioi Bridge across the street from the A bomb dome. I was right back where I had started from.  

In his autobiography, Nakazawa describes the Aioi Bridge that crosses the Honkawa River, a central river running through Hiroshima. For weeks after the bomb hit, the Honkawa River was a mass of corpses from one bank to the other.  Eventually some of them sank to the bottom. As a young boy after the war, swimming around with friends in the summer, he would dive from the Aioi bridge, and see the skeletal remains of corpses lining the banks and the bottom. He and his friends also used the Atomic Bomb Dome building as a playground, climbing on the structure, hanging from the steel beams.  By 1950, when he climbed to the top of the dome and looked out across the city, all the previous burned out ruins were covered in makeshift huts.  Families, like his, had created primitive homes salvaging the remains of other buildings. Gradually, more stores came to be and by the time he was in Junior High, city urban planning forced his family to move away from their homemade shack near the dome to a less desirable area of the city near a burned out factory, where there were no utilities, no running water, and where they once again had to rebuild their life. With the exception of one time when the Japanese army handed out rice balls to survivors the day after the explosion, the A bomb survivors never received any aid in terms of money, food, health care or housing from either the Japanese government or the American government. They were completely on their own. 

Now I stood there looking over the Aioi Bridge, the epicenter, and it felt more urgent than ever for me to get out of Hiroshima. I was haunted by the images of burned survivors crawling down the streets and by the corpses crowding the rivers and I didn’t want to see it anymore. Once again I started walking down the main road that I thought would take me to the highway.  It was already mid afternoon, and traffic was constant.  The heat was relentless.  It all seemed hopeless, but I had to do something, so I walked.  The heat was so intense, and I was sweating so much and was very thirsty.  I entered a small grocery store where I bought a large 2 liter bottle of iced tea and another one of water, placed one in my pack and carried the other in my arms, taking swigs all afternoon while the sweat poured off me.  I continued walking and drank my liquids.  There was so much car congestion, and the streets were lined with shops, apartments, and businesses, that it was not possible to hitch hike.  I needed to get further away from the city.  Sometimes I hopped on a city bus, which would take me further out for about a mile, but inevitably the bus would turn off the main road, and I had to hop off the bus and keep walking.  The humidity was intense. I knew the unbearable summer heat of Tokyo well, but Hiroshima was even worse.  

Nakazama describes the intolerable heat of Hiroshima in August.  I knew exactly what he meant.  And how this added to the rotting corpses.  After the A bomb, the city quickly became bound in a sickening stench.

By late afternoon, I was despairing in my futility of getting out of Hiroshima.  What was I to do?  I sat for a moment on a guardrail to think, when quite suddenly, a cloud opened up, and we were being hammered with rain.  Absolute pouring rain.  People started running into buildings and the streets were flooding almost immediately.  Now what was I to do?  I crossed the street and started running hoping to find an awning or some store I could pop into.  After just a few hundred yards, I noticed an opening in the street where there was some sort of small Buddhist shrine off to the side of the road, surrounded by a small grove of bamboo.  Amazing!  A little green in all this urban landscape!  Maybe there would be a little shelter there.  I ran over and darted into the bamboo grove.  Instantly the rain stopped.

I was astounded. It hadn’t actually stopped raining, but the dense canopy of the bamboo forest kept me completely dry.  How fortunate!  I put down my pack and sat on the ground.  It was dark in here and the air was instantly cooler.  I was very protected in here and as far as I knew, unseen.  I was content and dry and waited out the rain, which went on for several hours. 

When the rain lifted, the commuter traffic was dying down as it must have been nearly 7pm.  I left my pack in the forest and walked to the back of the small shrine where I found a path through the woods leading up a small hill.  At the top of the hill was a narrow canal and on either side of the canal was a bicycle path. A few people were out jogging and biking and there in front of me was a public restroom.  I now had access to a toilet and a sink and it was very quiet on the bike path.  How fortuitous!  For I knew that I would be spending the night here.  All felt safe and clean and peaceful, for public bathrooms in Japan were usually safe and clean places. I made use of the restroom and cleaned myself up for the evening.  I went back to my bamboo forest and made a little home for myself, spreading out my sleeping bag and munching on a few snacks I had in my bag for dinner.  It started to rain again.  I looked up in wonder at the denseness of the bamboo, amazed that it could keep me so dry.  By nightfall, I got into my sleeping bag.  I was so ready to leave this city, but here I was, forced to put my head on the ground, a place where the bomb had hit, perhaps people had died right here where my head was.  Lying in the darkness, listening to the rain I thought, “Oh Hiroshima, why are you keeping me here?  What have you got to teach me?”

The next morning I awoke at dawn with the birds.  The rain had stopped. The road was silent as there was no traffic at this hour and I knew I had to make use of this time to get a ride while the traffic was so light.  I quickly rolled up my sleeping bag and packed up my things.  Stepping out through the forest I made my way to the sidewalk; the street was completely empty.  I waited about 3 minutes, when I heard a vehicle approaching.  Coming around the bend, I saw it was a small delivery truck. Immediately it stopped. The driver was a young man in his late 20s.  I told him I was on my way to Kyoto.  He told me to get in, that he could get me to the highway. I was so grateful as I slung my pack into the back of his truck and hopped in.  He was my deliverance. 

Along the way, he told me that he would have to make a few stops but that he could get me to a high way truck stop by noon.  That was fine with me. I was very content to be leaving the city. He was extremely handsome, and I was very self-conscious of his good looks. After about an hour and a half, and after I’d exhausted most of my vocabulary, we stopped at a company where he made a delivery. I sat in the cab and watched as a whole contingency of company personnel, were outside doing what appeared to be mandatory calisthenics led by an enthusiastic leader.  Uplifting exercise music was blasting and some of the participants were completely into it, doing jumping jacks or squat thrusts with gusto. Others just sort of stood there and half heartedly waved their arms around.  It made me laugh to watch them.  I thought it was a very good idea to take a break from work and do calisthenics.  The Japanese were always surprising me.   My driver returned and we continued on our way.  The next stop we made was at a truck stop where there was a large cafeteria and we got some breakfast.  I was very self conscious walking into the large dining hall filled with male truck drivers.  Most people looked up to gaze first at me and then at my handsome driver with surprise, but then they quickly resumed eating without another glance, as I suppose, many of these men were accustomed to the gaijin hitchhiker.   My driver paid for my meal and wouldn’t accept money from me. I was terribly embarrassed about this and very appreciative of the delicious hot Japanese food, for I was quite hungry: rice, tofu, miso soup, fish, seaweed – all the usual things for breakfast.  I enjoyed a standard Japanese breakfast very much and my companion ate with gusto, in typical Japanese style, head down over his rice bowl, shoveling food with his chopsticks, making satisfied slurping sounds.  It made me smile.  Every now and then he’d look up and smile at me and offer me some pickles or other small dish.  We left full and satisfied and completed a few more deliveries.  My driver was very gentle and sweet and I admit, I was growing quite fond of him.  By noon we arrived at another truck stop and he took me around to look at the license plates of the parked trucks because they showed the city of origin.  He pointed out the ones that said Kyoto and told me that these drivers might give me a ride. So, that gave me an idea that I could write these 2 Chinese characters that spelled Kyoto on a piece of cardboard and hold it up.  When we parted, he said my name several times and hugged me and wished me well.  That was very unusual.  I was a little shaken by the hug. And yes, sad to see him go. 

I sat in the parking lot and worked on my sign.  Sometimes truck drivers who walked past me on their way inside complimented me on my handwriting.  I’d never written a Chinese character before and I thought my effort wasn’t half bad.  I sat there with my sign for about an hour when finally a man heading inside the truck stop restaurant, said he’d give me a ride after he’d eaten something.  He took me all the way to Kyoto and dropped me at an exit explaining that I could get a ride into the city there, which was less than 5 miles away.  Within 5 minutes a car full of energetic young people picked me up and dropped me in the city center. It was about 6pm. I had made it.

Kyoto was beautiful, a city full of Buddhist temples and gardens, hiking trails that passed through gorgeous woods, over rivers, and past waterfalls and ponds with Shinto Shrines tucked here and there, all amidst a bustling but beautiful city.  I settled into a small tatami mat room in a very affordable Japanese style inn that a friend in Tokyo had suggested, with a Japanese bath for women on the lower floor.  The bath was much needed and that evening after finding a place to eat, I wandered around the beautiful gardens of a city park, complete with pagodas, Japanese foot bridges that arched over carp-laden ponds, and was lined with trees and flowers.  I was very weary and glad to be in such a beautiful place as I processed all that I had learned in Hiroshima. 

During the American occupation of Japan, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was established by the United States military to investigate the effects and damage of the bomb on objects and bodies.  Data were collected but it was illegal to inform the Japanese about the realities of the A bomb.  It was only in 1952 that the Japanese press even seriously reported about the actualities of the bomb, after the American occupation had ended. Consequently, the Japanese public and the bomb victims knew very little about the effects of radiation or the truths of what had happened in Hiroshima.  For many decades, bomb victims were discriminated against. People thought they could get radiation just by touching the same tea cup as a Hiroshima survivor. Nakazawa learned to keep quiet about his own personal history. In his autobiography, he describes how in the 1950s, busloads of American soldiers from nearby army bases came to the peace park daily for atomic tourism.  They would graffiti the A bomb dome writing “Remember Pearl Harbor” on its walls and leaving their empty beer bottles.  Atomic bomb orphans, kids who had lost their parents to the bomb and were living on the streets, sold skulls of victims to the soldiers, as mementos. Nakazawa didn’t blame the orphans.  He knew they were doing their best to survive.

Kyoto brought me relief and I hiked in the mountains and paid homage to the Shinto shrines nestled in rocks next to waterfalls. I lit incense outside the Buddhist temples to cleanse the spirit and leaving my shoes outside, sat on the clean floor in the coolness of the Buddhist temples, being sure to keep my feet pointed away from the Buddha, out of respect.  Sometimes the monks were present and chanting and that was the best.  It was dark and cool inside the spacious temples, and their chants with the occasional bells, and drumming, helped to clear my confusion, and stilled the numbing thoughts regarding the ugliness of life and the inhumane acts that we humans are capable of doing to one another. The temples soothed me.  The pristine gardens throughout the city and the intentional devotion to nature, all an effort to create harmony, were completely effective.  I felt calmed and appeased.  I stayed for many days in Kyoto, not wanting to leave.

In his autobiography, Nakazawa explains how his father had been against the war from the beginning.  His father had been part of a small acting troupe that performed protest plays. It was illegal to put down the Emperor or the Japanese government at that time.  One would be labeled unpatriotic and suffer many consequences.  During the war, his father had been arrested for making his views public.  

When I was in Korea, I visited Seoul, the capitol.  One day, I was approached on the street by 3 young men who were in college and wanted to practice their English with me.  I was delighted so we spent the rest of the afternoon in a coffee shop getting to know one another.  We ended up spending the next 2 days together and they showed me all around Seoul. I had told them that I lived in Japan and taught English there. By the second day, one of the fellows burst out in anger, “I hate the Japanese! I hate them!  They did so many awful things to the Koreans.” He didn’t want to hear about the Japanese.  It was true.  Japan had invaded Korea and life under Japanese occupation was very hard.  Many Koreans had been kidnapped and forced into labor in Japan.  I knew of these things.  Nakazawa’s father knew of these things and spoke very openly to his children about the horrors inflicted on the Korean people.  He told his children that Japan and the Emperor were wrong to invade these countries and occupy them. When I entered a shop in Korea that was run by older people, I could speak to them in Japanese and they understood me, for the older people had been forced to learn Japanese during the occupation. 

After my travels through Korea, I moved to Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan as I wanted to experience a different part of Japan. To get there, once again I hitchhiked, this time as far north as Sendai, where I then caught a ferry to Hokkaido. I got a ride with what appeared to be two Japanese businessmen, they were both wearing business suits and drove a very comfortable car. They took me right to the ferry depot and to my surprise told me to wait in the car while one of them jumped out and ran inside the terminal.  Perhaps he was making sure it was the right terminal, I thought.  When he came rushing back to the car, he was bearing a ferry ticket that he had purchased for me, explaining that the next ferry would leave in an hour. I was dumbfounded, embarrassed and most grateful as I was very low on cash at that point and had to find a job soon.  How to thank them?  I bowed awkwardly and thanked them in the most polite Japanese I knew and stunned, humbly walked off to board the boat. 

I have many stories of Japanese hospitality.  People who brought me to tears or to my knees by their genuine care and generosity. Sometimes these were people with whom I had established friendships, and sometimes, like the businessmen who bought my ferry ticket, or Seiji and his wife who treated me as a guest in their home, they were complete strangers. I have never forgotten any of them.  

Nakazawa was haunted by his memories of Hiroshima all his life. As a young boy, he wanted to be a manga artist and drew whenever he could. Manga is a type of graphic novel that is very popular in Japan. After completing 9th grade, he got a job painting signs and in his spare time, continued to draw manga. Around age 17, his first manga was accepted for publication. In 1961, at the age of 22, he moved to Tokyo to work as an assistant to a manga artist.  It was there that he realized he had to keep his past a secret, for people feared catching radiation if they went near a bomb victim. After the death of his mother a few years later, he could no longer contain his silence and wanted to be a voice for his family and what they had gone through.  He started drawing manga about the atomic bomb, but the subject matter was too intense and he couldn’t get it published.  After much perseverance, he found a publisher who respected his work and published his stories.  They received good reviews and as a result other manga artists started taking his work seriously.  He continued to publish stories about the atomic bomb and mail poured in. People all over Japan, of all ages, had no idea the bomb had caused so much destruction. It wasn’t taught at school.  Even children who grew up in Hiroshima didn’t know the real story.  He became known as the Atomic Bomb manga artist. 

In 1973, with the support of an editor who encouraged him to draw his autobiography, he gave birth to the Barefoot Gen manga series. It grew out of a deep desire to educate people and from his strong hatred of the atomic bomb. Starting with pre-war Japan, and with a protagonist who is a young barefoot boy named Gen, he told his story and the experiences of his family. It was a heavy subject matter, but it steadily gained fans.  It took 14 years to complete and became a 10 volume book.  Usually, manga are published to be read once and then tossed.  But Barefoot Gen has been published in a book.  It is raw, it is savage, it is haunting. The scenes are harsh as Nakazawa creates the atomic wasteland he witnessed as a child. He was compelled to draw the truth. 

In Japanese, Gen is the first part of the compound word, genso, which means chemical element. Nakazawa explains, “I named my main character Gen in the hope that he would become a root or source of strength for a new generation of mankind – one that can tread the charred soil of Hiroshima barefoot, feel the earth beneath its feet, and have the strength to say ‘no’ to nuclear weapons…I myself would like to live with Gen’s strength – that is my ideal, and I will continue pursuing it through my work.”

Some people criticized him saying his manga was too cruel, or too shocking for children.  His reply to these criticisms was, “I think it would be a very good thing if, seeing the cruelty of the atomic bomb, more and more children throughout Japan cry, ‘I’m terrified!’ ‘I don’t like this!’ ‘I don’t want to see it again!’ I hope that if the number of children who hate to see the words war and atomic bomb increases, they won’t repeat in their lifetimes the experiences we went through.”

Barefoot Gen became a documentary, an animation, a stage play, an opera, a 3-part live action film, and a television drama. There is an entire book published just on reader’s responses.  And it is internationally known translated into 22 languages in whole or in part.

In the introduction of his autobiography Nakazawa writes, “I get letters from lots of people. And when I give speeches – for example, in schools – I’m often asked, “Is Gen’s story true?” “Who served as a model for Gen?” Well, who do you think?” 

In 1995, I was in my 30s and living in the States again. On a short vacation to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian museums and other sites, I learned that the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was on display at the Air and Space Museum as part of the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII.  My heart was pounding for the notion of seeing this plane intimidated me, but I knew I had to see it.  One day, I headed over to the Air and Space museum, a place I hadn’t been to since I was in high school, and made my way through the crowds to find the plane.  And there it was. The cockpit and nose section and the fuselage that housed the bomb, was openly displayed, separated from the public by a red velvet rope barrier.  We were not allowed to touch, but we could gape. There was an odd and eerie silence as a bunch of us who had gathered, stood and looked. The words Enola Gay, the name of the mother of the pilot, Paul Tibbets, were printed on the nose.  In a small auditorium, we watched a documentary film where the 3 men who were on the plane, were interviewed first before they took off for their mission and then after their mission was completed.  It was depicted as the bomb that secured Japan’s surrender.  After watching the film, I went back to the display and I stared at this plane, that was so intimately connected to Hiroshima and to over hundreds of thousands of lives. In my mind, I simultaneously saw the pictures of devastation I’d seen in the museum that was wreaked on the city of Hiroshima. Staring at the plane, I felt nothing but a vast void. I knew somehow I had come full circle.  Yet, I had no answers. 

America built two types of atomic bomb, one uranium that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, and another plutonium, that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th. On August 15th, Japan surrendered. Nakazawa argues, and many agree with him, that it was an experiment. The United States he says, carried out a cruel experiment on living people.

In a note to the 2004 English translation of the Barefoot Gen series Nakazawa says, “Human beings are foolish. Thanks to bigotry, religious fanaticism, and the greed of those who traffic in war, the Earth is never at peace, and the specter of nuclear war is never far away. I hope that Gen’s story conveys to its readers the preciousness of peace and the courage we need to live strongly, yet peacefully. In Barefoot Gen, wheat appears as a symbol of that strength and courage. Wheat pushes its shoots up through winter frost, only to be trampled again and again. But the trampled wheat sends strong roots into the earth and grows straight and tall.  And one day, that wheat bears fruit.”

Keiji Nakazawa died in Hiroshima in 2012 at the age of 73.

This podcast was published on August 6, 2020, 75 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.