Johnathan and I went to Nagasaki on Saturday as a pair of tourists. Our only goal for the day was to visit the Peace Park and, possibly, take a gondola-type ride up a mountain to view the whole city.
Japan, we found out, has a strange system of highway buses. To get there we had to change buses in what we thought was a small town. It turned out the bus just pulled off to the right-hand lane of the highway, opened its doors, and we jumped out. Then we walked down a flight of steps, under the hundreds of cars rushing over our heads, up another flight of stairs, and stood on the small sidewalk next to the southbound highway until our bus showed up. There was a mother and a little girl waiting when we got there, and within about 15 minutes a car stopped and dropped some people off, and another older lady with a rolling suitcase came up the stairwell. Our bus was late. When it finally arrived it opened its doors right where we were standing, and even though we weren’t the first people waiting, the bus driver gestured for us to get on. There was only room on the bus for about four people, and when I looked out the window as the bus pulled away the mother and her little girl were still waiting. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that maybe it wasn’t their bus, maybe they weren’t waiting to go to Nagasaki, but I don’t think that’s true. I’m hoping that if they had to wait thirty minutes–or an hour–for the next bus the mother got up the gumption to shove her way to the front of the “line”. Or maybe next time everyone else will be considerate enough to let them on first.
In Nagasaki we rode the tram up to the Nagasaki Peace Park. The Park is built on a plateau, neary adjacent 
to the park for the “hypocenter” (the actual spot over which the atomic bomb was detonated). We climbed the flights of stairs and at the top got sprayed with a fountain. It was a rather windy day, so the fountain’s water was misting all the people coming up the stairs. Next to the fountain was an engraved sign that explained the fountain’s purpose: thousands of bomb survivors died of thirst waiting for medical care. Most of the grass in the park had turned brown (maybe from the wicked winds), and hardly any trees had leaves, but it was a sunny day, and not very crowded, so we decided to walk around.
We took one picture of a statue raising a child to the sky. Behind the statue stood a barren cherry tree with just a few green buds. The statue’s dress was twisted and looked like it was blowing in the wind, in the same direction the wind was actually blowing.
We also saw a statue with four large wooden posts built into a box. In between each of the posts a baby with wings hung, all four of their heads in the center of the box. We got up close to see the plaque underneath, but it was written entirely in Japanese. I could make a lot of guesses about the symbolism, but I think it was actually pretty simple. I would hope the sign read something like: lots of kids died in the explosion. We hope they’re all in heaven now.
Past the fountain was a gigantic green statue of a Japanese man with one arm po
inting upward (in remembrance of the bomb), one stretched outward (I think in remembrance of the survivors?) one leg folded lotus-like (as a symbol of peace) and the other flexed (to show his action on behalf of mankind). Next to the statue were two huts with golden cranes on the top. Thousands of brightly colored chains of folded paper cranes filled the huts. They blew toward us, kind of like Hawaiian leis. We sat down and watched the statue for awhile. Groups of tourists–Japanese and otherwise–kept coming up and having their picture taken in front of it.
Then we made our way to the hypocenter park. It wasn’t nearly as elaborate. The center of the oval had a huge black monolith that stood straight up to the sky. That exact spot, about 100 meters in the air, the bomb detonated. In front of the monolight was what looked like a black coffin covered in bouquets of paper cranes. Here, though, there were a few actual flower bouquets as well. Around the black monolight the grass had been shaved and sculptured and studded with rocks to look like a small ampitheater, with stone steps leading down to the coffin.
Johnathan and I didn’t talk a lot at the hypocenter. We watched a pair of little girls chasing each other, using their parents as shields. As we were leaving he said I didn’t seem very effected by the site, that thousands of people had died (from the maps and figures we saw it looks like the death toll was roughly equivalent to the tsunami that hit southeast Asia in 2004) and I didn’t have much to say about it. I thought about that a lot for the rest of the day and the weekend, and the conclusion I’ve come to I don’t really like very much.
All the other memorial sites I’ve seen–Normandy beaches, the Oklahoma bombing, Ground Zero in New York–all made me think about my family and what would have happened if
someone had gotten on the wrong ship or been on a business trip somewhere we’d thought to be safe. And that made me sad. And it made me cry a few of those places because I thought the people who lost family members or friends were just like me. Maybe they lived across the country in Montana or Idaho, places we think to be safe, and still an uncle or a grandfather was killed during the D-Day invasion or by a freak bomb in Oklahoma. My family was in Normandy Christmas of 2004 looking up the grave of a great-uncle we’d never met and, kneeling by the white cross marking his grave we got a little choked up. And I’ve never even seen a picture of this Claude Thompson.
This time, though, what I saw was a mark of something pretty horrible, but that mark was what made it possible for my grandfathers to be alive, and lots of other peoples grandfathers and grandmothers. Yes, it was an icky terrible thing, but so was the thought that one of my grandfathers was in Okinawa near the end of the war, and would probably have been sent to invade mainland Japan. And would it have been better for 4 million more people to die to save the mostly women and children in the Nagasaki blast? Looking at all the bright paper cranes against the harshness of the black, sharp-cornered monolith, a little part of me felt like one of those little girls were were watching going “na-na-na-na-na” while her younger, slower sister tried to catch her. The thought made me feel sick to my stomach. So does the thought of people’s skin melting off like wax. And it should make me feel uncomfortable and disgusted because otherwise I wouldn’t be K. Peaquah Shaw when I looked in the mirror. I’d be a crazy American monster who wanted to see this done again. Which I really hope and pray and ask other people to hope and pray that we never are. Here’s my answer for why I didn’t get all choked up: it made my life possible. Please forgive me for feeling relieved.
I kept thinking about that mother and girl at the bus stop who just sat by and watched everyone else get on the bus out of there. Maybe that’s what it was like for the people of Nagasaki. There were only so many boats and so many thoughts of escape. The Japanese told the Okinawans that Americans were bruitish people worse than the Chinese, even, who would kill them or…worse. So thousands of Okinawans commited mass suicides when they saw American ships sailing into port. Whole towns walked up onto the cliffs over the ocean and jumped together. Parents pushed their children off into the sea. People stuck swords in their stomachs or chopped off their neighbor’s heads. Or they climbed down those cliffs and hid out in the caves the waves had carved. Months after the end of the war, when Americans got around to searching the islands, they found thousands of dead, bloated bodies bobbing around in these caves. Whole families decaying together trying to outwit the enemy. I guess even death was better than being an American prisoner.
If the Japanese told that much to the Okinawans, I can only imagine what they told the women and children of their own country. I don’t know if it’s me trying to make myself feel better or what, but I can imagine the women were told pretty dasdardly, nasty things about American soldiers and when they saw the end of the war coming, and knew there were hardly any men left in Nagasaki–their little sons and old, infirm grandfathers–maybe, just maybe, like the Okinawans, they didn’t get on that bus to an American prison camp because they thought even a horrible death was a better way to go.
