Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World by John W. Dower

Author:John W. Dower [W. Dower, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1595586180
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2012-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

These matters bear spelling out a bit, for as the cyclical nature of American memory suggests, they are easily forgotten. Of course, the images of nuclear hell that Dr. Hachiya depicts may in the end remain most indelibly etched in many readers’ minds. In this regard his chronicle is typical of other hibakusha, or survivor, accounts, where the same haunting images of nuclear destruction appear. The stunning flash (pika) of the bomb, followed by a colossal blast (don) that shattered buildings kilometers away. Nakedness or seminakedness, from the blast stripping clothing away. Eerie silence. People walking in lines with their hands outstretched and skin peeling off—like automatons, dream-walkers, scarecrows, a line of ants. Corpses “frozen by death while in the full action of flight.” A dead man on a bicycle. A burned and blinded horse. Youngsters huddled together awaiting death. Mothers with dead children. Infants with dying mothers. Corpses without faces. Water everywhere—in firefighting cisterns, swimming pools, the rivers that fed the city—clogged with dead bodies. Fires like the infernos of hell. A man holding his eyeball in his hand. Survivors in crowded ruined buildings, lying in vomit, urine, and feces. Everywhere flies and maggots.

This is the familiar iconography of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, although at this early date Dr. Hachiya, largely cut off from the outside world, was simply recording what he saw or others told him. Some of his descriptions are unusually vivid. A visitor comments about how roasted corpses become smaller. Burned people smell like drying squid or look like boiled octopuses. The odor of bodies being cremated is likened to that of burning sardines. In perhaps the most haunting of all the diary’s images, as Dr. Hachiya makes his daily rounds we frequently encounter a nameless beautiful girl—she is always identified simply as “the beautiful girl”—who has been severely burned everywhere except her face. In early entries, she lies in a puddle of old blood and pus, soiled with urine and excrement. As time passes, she is able to smile when the doctor visits. By the end of the diary she can stand and go to the toilet by herself. What became of her? We will never know.

Because he is a physician, Dr. Hachiya quickly moves, and the reader with him, to the next level of the nuclear trauma: the emergence of inexplicable symptoms and unanticipated deaths. Patients who seemed to be improving suddenly worsen and die. People who appeared to have escaped harm entirely are stricken: they become speckled with subcutaneous bleeding, their hair falls out, and they have bloody diarrhea, vomit blood, pass blood from their genitals and rectum. Autopsies reveal massive internal hemorrhages that are erratic but seem to affect every organ. Belated acquisition of a microscope shows alarmingly low white blood cell counts, as well as the destruction of platelets in the blood. Could this have something to do with the bomb changing atmospheric pressure? Could it be a poison gas? In the course of these weeks Dr. Hachiya

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