'No more Hiroshimas' by Lydia Syson

Thirty years ago a new university friend invited me to come and spend Christmas with her family in Hiroshima.  Until I met her, Hiroshima was a word on a banner - an idea, a symbol of something so huge and terrifying and unimaginable that in my nineteen-year-old mind I think it was still a wasteland.  How could the city possibly have been rebuilt? Hiroshima was the cherry tree in Tavistock Square – a ‘never again’ reminder of the worst inhumanity I could conceive and most importantly, a memorial to its victims.  A Cold War child in a left-wing North London household, I had spent my youth marching for CND, passing round petitions, and organising film shows and discussions at school. ‘Enola Gay’ was on the radio and nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds and in our dreams, but we tended to think about dying, not surviving.

Tavistock Square, London
My grandmother, Moira Gaster, helped organise the planting of this tree in 1967
from the seeds of a Hiroshima cherry tree.
The memorial benches opposite are for both my peace activist grandparents.

‘Hiroshima’ seemed untranslatable into bricks and mortar…or as it turned out, concrete and cabbages. In the mid-1980s decorative brassicas were very much in fashion in the window boxes of one of the most modern city I’d ever visited. On my arrival, after a long and memorable Aeroflot flight via Moscow and a journey on a bullet-train, the first thing that struck me was my poor choice of footwear: I’d had no idea I’d have to remove it so often. My winter shoes - slightly Edwardian lace-up boots - took forever to get on and off, and I was shamed by the holes in the heels of nearly every pair of black tights I owned. In those days all the minutiae of everyday Japanese life were thrillingly unfamiliar – the very hot, deep bath, refilled once a week; heated tables and loo seats; wearable duvets; bento boxes, pachinko parlours and meals from slot machines. Meanwhile, although the knowledge of what had happened in Hiroshima hung over me, the city itself at first seemed bland and unexceptional. It was almost disconcerting.

Until my friend took me to the Peace Memorial Park, the open space which had once been the heart of Hiroshima.  Commemorations will be taking place there today as they do every year on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare, remembering more than 80,000 people killed on the day of the attack, and 140,000-150,000 more who died from radiation poisoning in the years that followed. I saw the skeleton dome of one of the only buildings left standing, still preserved as a ruin. I learned of Sadako and her paper cranes. And I was overwhelmed in the museum, which was smaller then than it is today and offered less context to the whole ghastly war, its ending, and its aftermath. All these years later, it’s hard to write about what I saw and felt there. It seemed, and still seems, unspeakable.

The Genbaku Dome - also known as the 'A' dome -
amidst the devastation in October 1945. Photograph by Shigeo Hayashi

Yet somehow - remarkably - Kathleen Burkinshaw, author of The Last Cherry Blossom, published this week in the US by Sky Pony Press, has managed to put into words the experience of growing up in Hiroshima during the Second World War.

From her mother’s memories, and her own careful research, Kathleen has created an original and compelling novel about a twelve-year-old girl trying to make sense of the gaps between newspaper reports, government propaganda and what she gradually discovers for herself: neighbours going to fight who never come home, the pressures of ritual suicide, what it really means to serve your country.   Meanwhile, as her own household changes, with new marriages for both her aunt and her father, Yuriko also finds disturbing holes in her own family narrative. She is forced to rethink her identity at every level.

Kathleen's mother, Toshiko Ishikawa (1932-2015),
with her Papa, Hisao Ishikawa (1883-1945)
 in her most treasured photograph.

It’s a completely absorbing world. All the details of family relationships, school friendships, everyday life, customs, stories, and ideas about honour and shame are woven in beautifully. When pika don hits – the literal translation is ‘flash boom’ – we understand exactly what it has destroyed. Burkinshaw handles the moment and its aftermath with great sensitivity. The Last Cherry Blossom takes its title from a favourite saying of Yuriko’s Papa, and also evokes the spirit of endurance in Hiroshima, manifested in the blooming of cherry trees in Spring 1946 in soil where scientists had predicted nothing would grow for years. There are some books you read as a child which open your eyes, get under your skin, and stay with you forever. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had that effect on me. I think The Last Cherry Blossom will prove an enduring novel. I also believe that its young readers will grow up asking more questions about where we are now in terms of nuclear warfare, whether we have learned anything from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and asking themselves how they feel about that.

Kathleen with her mother in 2013 (above)
and with her daughter Sara in Hiroshima (below)

www.lydiasyson.com

Liberation from Weihsien Camp, by Janie Hampton

In August, Clare Mulley wrote in History Girls about the atom bombs dropped on Japan which killed over 150,000 people. A terrible event: but by bringing the war to a final end, millions of lives were saved. Many of these were Allied soldier prisoners-of-war but some were children, imprisoned without their parents in China. This is their story.

Eric Lidell & Brownie   

When the war began, Europeans living in China were not unduly worried. During Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the international compounds were ignored. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, all enemy civilians became prisoners of war, including 150 children of British and American missionaries who attended Chefoo boarding school on the north east coast. 

In 1943, after 18 months internment in Shantung Province, they and their teachers were moved south to Weihsien ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’. Inside a high wall was a small compound with a collection of huts and kitchens, and 45 Japanese guards. The 1,450 prisoners included Trappist monks, White Russian prostitutes, British businessmen and Cuban jazz players. There was no sanitation or running water and little to eat. The freezing winters brought chilblains and pneumonia, while the scorching summers led to dysentery and typhoid. Eric Lidell, the missionary and Olympic gold medal winner featured in ‘Chariots of Fire’, died of cancer there in February 1945; and only a few months later the Girl Guide captain Louise Lawless died of typhoid.

The camp had thriving Boy Scout, Girl Guide and Brownie Packs and while the children were kept busy with school, games and errands, by August 1945, three months after peace in Europe, the adults knew the situation was grave. The Brown Owl Evelyn Davey from Liverpool, weighed just 98lb and her periods had stopped.  ‘We just got used to being thin and hungry,’ she told me in 2006. She and a missionary called Eugene had been courting for a year but wondered if they would survive another winter. ‘We read Winnie the Pooh to each other.’

Eugene & Evelyn with their Brownies & Cubs, Weishien, China

The rumours of imminent peace meant even greater danger: without Japanese guards, the starving Chinese surrounding the camp would steal what little food they still had, or Communist guerrillas might kidnap the children as hostages. If defeated, the guards had been ordered to kill all prisoners, regardless of age.

On the morning of Friday, 17 August, the men were carting sewage, Boy Scouts were carrying water in buckets, women were cooking bones and rotten vegetables for soup and the Brownies were singing in church.

Brownie Log Book 1944

Mary Taylor aged 12 was lying in her dormitory, suffering from diarrhoea. ‘I heard the drone of an airplane.’ Through the window she saw a B-24 circling overhead. ‘Beyond the treetops, its silver belly opened, and seven parachutes drifted into the fields beyond the Camp. Oh, glorious cure for diarrhoea!

 ‘Grown men ripped off their shirts and waved them at the sky. Prisoners ran in circles, wept, cursed, hugged and danced as the plane circled back. The Americans had come!’  Cheering, weeping, disbelieving, dressed in rags and emaciated by hunger, the prisoners surged through the gates. The guards quietly retreated to their barracks.

‘These gorgeous liberators were sun-bronzed American gods with meat on their bones,’ wrote Mary. The seven US paratroopers had been warned they were unlikely to return alive from ‘The Flying Angel’. Instead they were hoisted onto shoulders and carried back to the camp in triumph, where they were greeted by the Salvation Army brass band playing a victory medley of national anthems which they had been practising in secret for four years.

Commandant Tsukugawa, known to the children as King Kong, surrendered but the US Major Stanley Staiger handed back his sword and ordered him to defend the camp against Communists and looters.

 The prisoners were told the Japanese had surrendered and they would be evacuated but meanwhile supplies would be dropped by air.  The Weishien Girl Guides sat up all night making giant letters out of the parachutes to read ‘OK TO LAND’. The next day B-29s dropped canisters of clothing, food, Lucky Strike cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum. ‘Unbelievable riches and our joy knew no bounds! Our ordeal was over,’ Margaret Vindon, then 18, told me. She and her brother had been on their own for six years.

After a crate of Del Monte peaches crashed through the kitchen roof, the children were told to run for cover whenever they sighted bombers. ‘They were not about to have us survive the war and then be killed by a shower of Spam,’ said Mary Taylor.

The Americans were determined to cheer everyone up with music. But weakened by undernourishment and exhausted by suspense, the internees were horrified when ‘O What A Beautiful Morning’ premiered in 1943, played over the camp loudspeakers at dawn. This was not their idea of liberation. ‘We hadn’t missed western pop music, because we had never heard it before,’ said Margaret Vindon.

In all this excitement school continued for the Chefoo children. The headmaster decided that the 16 year-olds should take their School Certificate before the evacuation, using old examination papers. Once back in Britain, he explained the unusual circumstances to the Oxford board; they all passed and most were admitted into universities.

It took several weeks to evacuate all the internees by train and plane. The children the  faced the task of tracking down their parents.

The missionary Dr Hoyte spent months searching for his six children in China. He found them in Hong Kong where he told them that their mother had died of typhus. ‘I had been only six when I had last seen him,’ Elizabeth Hoyte remembered.  ‘Now I was in the strong arms of the half-familiar stranger, and we began the gentle probing business of getting to know each other again.’

The Taylor family - Kathleen, Jamie, Johnny and Mary - had also not seen their parents for over five years. They travelled into the interior of China by plane, train, mule cart and finally on foot. Chinese peasants blinked in amazement at the four foreign children struggling through the mud. ‘There, through a window, I could see them – Daddy and Mother. Caked with mud, we burst through the door into their arms – shouting, laughing, hugging – hysterical with joy,’ remembered Mary Taylor.

Beryl 11 & Kathleen 15 Strange, 1945.

When Kathleen and Beryl Strange, aged 15 and 11, arrived in Liverpool by ship at the end of December, they too had not seen their mother for five years. ‘The last time,she was wearing Chinese clothes, with her hair in a bun,’ Kathleen told me. ‘When my teacher said, “This is your mother,” I said “No it isn’t. She would never wear a brown hat like that.” ’

Estelle Cliff’s mother had moved from inland China to Durban, hoping to find her children there. ‘It was six years before we came,’ wrote Estelle. ‘It was a terrible wrench from our camp extended family, and we hardly knew our parents.’

After coping with internment, the children now had to endure separation from their friends and teachers. No-one thought of the emotional effect of taking children to a cold post-war Britain where they were strangers.  But they had learned not to make a fuss, and many of them did not mention their childhood for 50 years. ‘When you are a teenager,’ said Estelle Cliff, ‘all you want to be is “normal”.’

Evelyn & Eugene Heubener, 1947.

I do not condone the use of nuclear weapons. But without the atomic bombs AT Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Pacific War might have continued for two more years and these stories have ended very differently. Over 200,000 Allied prisoners of war, up to 800,000 U.S. soldiers, 2.3 million Japanese troops and 28 million civilians who believed they should die for their country, all lived to see peace.


We can only hope that, now the Japanese government has voted to re-arm, they have learned the lessons of 70 years ago.

Hiroshima: City of Peace, by Clare Mulley

Seventy years ago this month, on Monday 6 August 1945, the nuclear bomb known as ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, immediately killing an estimated 80,000 people. Three days later a second bomb, the equally appallingly nick-named ‘Fat Man’, was dropped on Nagasaki, killing between 60-70,000 people. On 15 August Japan surrendered, marking the end of the Second World War.

It has been argued that President Truman’s decision to drop the A-bombs on these two Japanese cities saved more lives than were lost by ending the war so much earlier than any alternative course of action. As usual the truth is more complex. Truman’s primary objectives were certainly American lives and the earliest possible end to the war, but other pertinent considerations included impressing the Soviets as the Cold War approached, the lasting need to respond to Pearl Harbour, and the pressure to justify the development costs of the atomic project. In this war, sides of very different motivations and experiences all committed atrocities and suffered from traumatising war crimes. I don't seek to suggest equivalence. Nevertheless, it is still difficult understand the detonation of two separate Atomic bombs on the same country within a few days.

Cherry blossom in Hiroshima, April 2015

I visited Japan for the first time this Easter. It was cherry blossom season and the flowers were spectacular, frothing white and pink against bright blue skies. I was traveling around by bullet train and bicycle, visiting shrines and temples, stroking deer, feeding carp, and watching robots hop and skip in Tokyo. I also spent a day in Hiroshima, a vibrant city rebuilt after its almost total destruction in 1945. Modern Hiroshima has its fair share of cherry trees, but the official flower of the city is the Oleander, as this was the first plant to bloom again after 1945.

I was shown around the city by a local guide called Keiko. We started at the Peace Park that had opened in 1955. Here Keiko pointed out the new ground level, resulting from the vast amount of imported earth brought in to cover contaminated land. We visited the Genbaku Dome, the skeletal remains of the most central building left standing by the bomb which has been preserved as a memorial, as well as the eternal flame, and the peace pagoda erected in 1966.

Hiroshima Peace Pond in front of the Peace Flame
and Cenotaph in the Memorial Park

Keiko had married into a family from Hiroshima. Her husband’s mother was a young woman living less than two kilometers from the epicentre of the detonation in 1945. Of their large family only she, and a few others who were also away from home that August morning, survived. Keiko's husband was not born until a few years later but Keiko told me that, although rarely talking about it, he still carries the weight of these devastating events on his shoulders. 'As do all the city’s post-war generations', she added.

While other cities like Tokyo and Osaka had been severely bombed during the war, Hiroshima, where several Japanese armies were based, had not been targeted. Anticipating an eventual attack, that August the city authorities had mobilised school-children aged between eleven and fourteen to demolish certain houses to create fire-breaks, with the aim of limiting potential damage from firestorms. Many were helping with this work on the morning that the A-bomb fell, putting them close to the centre of the impact. Amongst other relics, such as melted road girders and roof tiles, the absolutely heart-wrenching Hiroshima Peace Museum displays possessions from some of these children including unopened lunch-boxes, scorched school books and several school blouses that had been beautifully hand-stitched by girls in classes just weeks earlier. In case these seem romantic, there are also some appalling human relics, kept by traumatised relatives who had nothing else. Thousands of other people left no evidence of their lives, abilities or personalities at all.

The museum also holds a display of many of the origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was just two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the A-bomb further out in the suburbs of Hiroshima. Having developed leukaemia some years later, Sasaki began folding paper cranes in the hope that when she had made a thousand she might be granted a wish, as in Japanese legend. Too weak to continue, Sasaki died in 1955.

Origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki in Hiroshima Peace Museum

Sadako Sasaki statue, holding a crane aloft

Such devastatingly personal effects and relics are deeply telling, but nothing can convey the enormity of the loss. Six thousand Hiroshima school-children were killed when the atomic bomb was dropped. Many more died later from their injuries. By the end of the year the death toll is estimated to have been between 90,000-166,000, possibly more than half of the city’s entire population. Cancer and other resulting conditions claimed many more lives, such as that of twelve year old Sasaki. Around 70% of Hiroshima’s buildings were also destroyed. Nagasaki suffered a similar level of destruction.

Hiroshima was proclaimed a City of Peace by the Japanese parliament in 1949. It has since hosted a series of conferences on peace, developed a dedicated Peace Institute within its university, and established the international ‘Mayors for Peace’ organization, calling for the abolition and elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2020. This may be an unrealistic goal but it serves as a guide to steer disarmament. When one thinks of mothers, their skin hanging off, running towards the suburbs of Hiroshima clutching their dead children to their chests, it seems impossible to conceive of ever using such a weapon again.

The American decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki resonates in other ways today as well. From a historian's perspective, earlier this year the USA took the decision to digitise the records generated by their Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, to make them readily available to researchers internationally. The ABCC was the US body established in 1947 to carry out a medical assessment of the effect of radiation on survivors from the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documents show that many of the US commission’s doctors were deeply affected by what they witnessed, although, as The Japan Times noted while I was visiting Hiroshima, many of the A-bomb survivors later criticised the commission for treating them like research guinea-pigs. Pity, without empathy or respect, is of little value. Preserved images in this collection include many taken to show the ‘atomic bomb radiation effects on the human body’, with some of the survivors photographed holding nameplates. Clearly issues around confidentiality and sensitivity must be paramount, and the full history behind the commission, as well as its findings, needs to be addressed.

Keiko nevertheless believes that the stories that stem from Hiroshima need to reach the widest possible audience. She told me that she feels deeply moved when showing visitors around her city and she hopes that, in this way, she can play a small part in helping to spread Hiroshima’s messages both of peace, and of the ‘evil of Atomic weapons’, around the world. I thought of Keiko as Hiroshima and Nagasaki fell silent for the seventieth anniversary this August, each city remembering the moment when tens of thousands of their citizens were killed. After doves were released and Buddhist bells tolled, vows were taken to redouble civic efforts to halt nuclear proliferation in a world where incidents, accidents, and the threat of nuclear terrorism is ever growing. Since then, countries including Japan and the USA, Britain, India, Australia, China and Russia have negotiated a controversial new deal to limit Iran's nuclear programme, while providing relief from previous sanctions and permitting the country to continue its atomic programme 'for peaceful purposes'.

As I left Hiroshima, Keiko gave me a white origami orizuru, or paper crane, which she had folded as we walked around the peace park. There are many important war anniversaries this year, but among them we must remember the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the message of peace with which Hiroshima has heroically chosen to reply to the world. Pity alone is not enough.

Copyright: Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com