Hiroshima Maidens by Barker Rodney

Author:Barker, Rodney [Barker, Rodney]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

From the beginning the Hiroshima Maidens Project had enjoyed a lucky streak. So many times when things could have fallen through, an incidental act of grace — usually in the form of a gesture of human helpfulness from an unexpected source — had saved the day. Though she did not consider herself a religious person, Helen Yokoyama could not help feeling at times that something greater than humanism or the power of positive thinking kept the project on course.

That said, she thought it would be foolish to count on it to always be there, and the return of the first group of Maidens started her thinking about the situation that awaited the remaining fourteen girls. In a few months the good life would come to an end for them; they would be going back to problems and, in some cases, poverty, and she did not think they had any idea of the difficulties that lay ahead. She had become especially anxious when most of the operations were completed and the girls were thinking only of enjoying themselves. They were showered with garden parties and dinner invitations; and when they were not being entertained they would take the train into New York and, with a giddy sense of freedom, wander the streets, sometimes disappearing for whole days at a time.

Helen Yokoyama’s earlier fears about the difficulties facing the girls in America were now reversed. She was afraid they were becoming slightly spoiled, and that when they returned to their own nests they would be restless, dissatisfied, and unable to settle down. Just as she had previously done everything in her power to prepare them for the social and psychological adjustment to America, she now labored to prepare the girls for the return to postwar Japan. There was no book to go by for this sort of thing, but in the belief that conversations with great people would take their minds off the creature comforts and social liberties they were growing accustomed to and remind them of the elevated spiritual qualities they had been exposed to, she tried to arrange a series of meetings with esteemed individuals of international stature. A request for a conference with President Eisenhower was politely refused by his aides without an explanation, and an effort to get together with Helen Keller, who had overcome the triple handicap of blindness, deafness, and dumbness, and who had visited Hiroshima twice, failed because she was in Europe at the time. The girls did share an afternoon with Pearl Buck at an office in the United Nations building, but the most profitable meeting was the time spent with the renowned Zen Buddhist philosopher Daisetz Suzuki, who was lecturing at Columbia University. He cast life-after-America as a Zen problem. “Remember the beauty of not having,” was the essence of his message. At the end, when he asked if there were any questions, one girl piped up, “Yes. Soon we are leaving for Japan and the moment we arrive there will be reporters and photographers.

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